Self-Reflection on My Own Management and Leadership Skills

The purpose of this section to reflect on my own management and leadership skills and how to develop and justify a plan to improve the level of management and leadership. With the ever increasingly competitive market, not least because of the consistent rise in people developing a wide range of skills to help, it has become imperative to distinguish yourself with soft skills that can demonstrate your value far beyond your academic track or technical skills (Majd et al., 2012). Employability skills are defined as skills that individuals develop that make them more employable to employers. (Bridgstock 2009). Management skills and leadership are considered one of the most important employability skills. Management is the “practice of organising, directing and developing people, technology and financial resources to provide products and services through organisational systems” (Bloisi et al. 2003). Leadership skills are the skills (specific, fundamental, and innate). that are required to lead a team of people. The skills I have chosen to reflect on are communication, motivation, emotional stability, and transparency skills as these were the specific skills that allowed me to stand out from my peers.

Communication in the workplace is a highly sought-after skill that can add value to your employer highlighting you as a capable candidate (Crosling and Ward, 2002). Boddy (2011, p. 485) defines communication as “the exchange of information through written or spoken words, symbols and actions to reach a common understanding.”

The model shows how messages are sent between two parties.

The sender of the message has control what is included in this message and how it is dispatched. The person receiving will then interpret the meaning of the message and translate it. The receiver will provide feedback for clarification to the sender. There are many types of communication including supportive communication, written communication, and verbal communication etc. This can make many people adopt different types of ego states. Parent ego state, adult ego state, child ego state. Parent and child having less advantages than an adult ego. All having their advantages in different situations. The adult ego is what I wish to be able to adopt in more situations so I can better communicate and argue less with my peers. having the adult ego and a child ego state in the same conversation will more likely cause arguments. It can also help communication skills. Mullins (2010, pp. 236-237) also confirms this by stating that: Given the incidence of stress in the workplace, analysis of communication may be one way of understanding such conflict. By focusing on the interactions occurring within the workplace, TA can aid the understanding of human behaviour. It can help to improve communication skills by assisting in interpreting a person’s ego state and which form of state is likely to produce the most appropriate response.

Motivation in a workplace is one of if not the most important skill. Motivation is important in managing people and their effort. If managers are not able to motivate a workforce effectively, this may lead to a reduction of met targets and a motivated workforce can exceed targets by a significant margin. I would say that I am motivated through intrinsic motivation. The art of good management is to recognize the fact that different people will have different needs and different things that motivate them. Intrinsic motivation put simply being motivated by the sense of challenge, feeling appreciated and being treated well. Extrinsic motivation is the tangible and external rewards such as salaries a bonus prospects of promotion. Motivation is not only important for the person, but the people around that person. Being able to motivate others show good leadership skills. In many occasions I have seen this to be useful, e.g. when the workload gets too much for me (especially in covid 19 times) my older brother always finds a way to motivate me to get back and finish my assigned tasks. In the future I wish to get motivated more easily and by more things. I also hope to be able to motivate the people around me to work more efficiently.

Emotional stability is an important skill to have as it plays into communication, motivation and many more skills. The more control you have over your emotions the more able you are to remain balanced and consistent during confronting challenges. Having weak control over your emotions can change a person emotionally and make them feel endangered or even their mood might be foul even under normal circumstances. It can also prove thinking difficult once in that foul mood. In previous tasks I have taken on, i come to understand that I rarely let things affect my mood in the first place further not allowing it to affect my efficiency. However everyone has their own breaking point and people have their mood by different things, e.g. when I was working on a presentation for Vodafone, i had a family member pass away and it made me sad, made me lose my focus and couldn’t think straight. This also made me lose my communications skills as I was in the mood to talk to anyone and was not motivated to do my what I was tasked to. In the future I plan to find new methods to be able to improve my mood and better my control of my emotions in situations where I cannot help feeling sad and lose focus.

Employees with transparency skills will have clear ideas and will be willing to try new things. Employees with undeveloped transparency skills will prefer procedure as they do not like to change and are very analytical. People with high transparency will be more outgoing and more social, 6meaning that they will be happy on more occasions and that they are more likely to be keen about life and practicality. I am quite transparent in this sense and I am very social. However, linking back to when emotions are too strong to hold back transparency could be bad as you could offend or ruin relationship with your colleagues.

Personal development planning allows individuals to take their learning into their own hands. Learning becomes a proactive as well as a reactive process, made to boost immediate development needs as well as longer-term ambitions. The purpose of personal development plan is make you choose where it is you want to go, and how you plan on getting there, in the essence of improving toy professional practice and helping you develop your career. It is an empowerment as it shows you know what you want to learn and get better at. In communication skills I realised that I need to adopt and have control over more egos rather than be stuck with just the adult ego as the other egos offer their own advantages. E.g. people who adopt child ego will tend to have less control over their emotions however also tend to be more creative and better thinkers. I am very confident in my communication skills to clearly to get my message across clearly and allows me to take in information attentively. My motivation skills could improve as I know pretty well how to keep my self and my peers motivated however sometimes the work gets too dull and even though I complete it I feel as I could’ve done better. In the case of motivating other, I will work on looking for what motivates different people and how to react accordingly to that. Motivation is a key skill and the more it progresses the more it can help an organisation. However, if motivation is handled incorrectly than it can wrongly affect someone. Emotional stability is a key skill. In my experience you can have good control over your emotions however never complete. For that reason, I am going to develop ways to reduce the negative emotions and increase the positive. Transparency is important and should be worked on and in the future, I hope to be more transparent and able to be more creative and less analytical.

2) Explain the following transferable skills using relevant theory and apply them to an organisation which you are familiar with or one you can research.

“Transferable skills, as the name suggests, are skills that can be transferred from one field to another. They’re often referred to as portable skills because you take them along with you from job to job”. (zety.com, 2020). Due to the flexibility of transferable skills, they are highly sought after regardless of the industry. I am going to explain 5 different types of transferable skills and will apply them to different organisations. Supportive Communication skills which are skills that support conversations like being more congruent, descriptive, validating and much more, further increasing the level and efficiency of communication in an organisation. I will discuss how better communication helped an organisation preform better by allowing messages to be spread more efficiently and how good communication skills leads to less misunderstandings. Motivational skills which are skills which will allow u to identify what motivates people and how much motivation is need. Motivational skills can be defined as actions or strategies that elicit a desired behaviour or response from a person. I will also discuss how motivational skills helps organisations work more efficiently by allowing organisations to exceed their targets by exceptional margins. Conflict management. I will talk about how conflict management has helped the organisation Al-Khal and how it allowed it to resolve most the conflict inside their restaurant and how that allowed there operations to run more smoothly and in hand increase output from employees. Empowerment is far more than mere encouragement. Empowerment means that the management must trust its employees to carry out tasks through their own decision-making processes. I will explain how empowerment can make employees can develop a sense of security, value in activity and much more, allowing greater productivity. Final I will talk about team effectiveness. I will explain how the GRPI model helps organisations improve employee engagement and foster accountability towards measurable individual and group goals.

The aim of ‘supportive communication skills’ is to help research team members to solve their own identified problem rather than solving it for them, thus giving them more ownership of the solution and making it more likely that they will implement it. The Research Team Leader becomes a facilitator rather than ‘fount of all knowledge’. Whetten and Cameron (2016, p. 218) consider eight attributes of supportive communication, which are as follows, congruent, descriptive, problem oriented, validating, specific, conjunctive, owned and support listening. With Al-Khal support communication was of the wat they progressed quickly in Benghazi Libya. They constantly encouraged all employees to be active listeners and to attend sessions monthly on how to improve communication skills. They were showed how to communicate openly and fairly with other be it a customer or a colleague. Clear communication will allow you to explain your ideas in a logical, organised, and effective manner. This also allowed people to feel more confident to speak up and allowed many more ideas to come forward. This also allowed instructions to be clear to all employees, as they were to be taught to actively listen. This in turn increased the whole store efficiency as the employees were able to communicate properly and work in hand better.

Motivation in a workplace is one of if not the most important skill. Motivation is important in managing people and their effort. If managers are not able to motivate a workforce effectively, this may lead to a reduction of met targets and a motivated workforce can exceed targets by a significant margin. “In 1959, Frederick Herzberg, a behavioural scientist proposed a two-factor theory or the motivator-hygiene theory. According to Herzberg, there are some job factors that result in satisfaction while there are other job factors that prevent dissatisfaction. According to Herzberg, the opposite of “Satisfaction” is “No satisfaction” and the opposite of “Dissatisfaction” is “No Dissatisfaction”.”. (Juneja”, 2015). re

In the company Al-Khal restaurant Policies I will have systems in place whereby motivation would be clearly implied into the business by clearly outlining what motivates different people and doing those things. This would allow the employees of Al-Khal to overcome more obstacles. This would allow the employees to be able to reach and exceed targets. This would also allow certain to feel a better quality of working as they are feeling praised for their work. This can also be done by introducing a system where the person who works the best would get rewards at the end of the month to incentivise the workers to reach their optimum efficiency levels.

According to Mullins (2010), role conflict is identified by inconsistent or inappropriate behaviour, and it can occur because of certain interconnected problems. Whetten and Cameron (2016, p. 436) consider that conflict can create a condition that may lead to the norms and values of the team being questioned. Rather than being stifled or resisted, however, effective teams encourage members to turn those challenges into constructive suggestions for improvement. It is important for team members to feel that they can legitimately express their personal uniqueness and idiosyncrasies, so long as they are not destructive to the overall team. Conflict management is how you react with those conflicts and how do you progress through it. Conflict management is what you can do to cause less conflicts and take more value out of a conflict should one pop up. In the company policies I will have systems in place whereby conflict management would be clearly outlined with specific process that enables employees and employer to know their due course of action, duration and a just outcome for everyone involved in any potential conflict within the organisation. This outcome is successfully achievable when implemented with efficiently in adherence to clear described company policies and regulations. Leadership skills, listening skills and following instructions and policies put in place are the key to success to manging conflict. Not only did This allowed Al-Khal to increase productivity levels by having less conflicts but by also allowing more value to come out of the conflicts.

Empowerment is more than motivation or encouragement. Its giving people freedom on their tasks and make them feel like they contributed more. In AL-Khal empowerment played a great part in helping the shop grow and increasing the total quality of the food as employees felt like they were contributing more. The Ikea effect which summarised shows that when people make something themselves, they are more satisfied with it and were happier with. The restaurant had a scheme where it would allow all the employees to attempt to design a new burger for their restaurant. This in hand made gave the restaurant many ideas and made employees work harder. This is quality of production went up. This was because they were shown that they were more than able. Empowerment comes from giving somebody the know-how the tools, the knowledge, the training and the support to be able to carry out the task or feel the purpose in the best way they can. As the classic goes “give a man a fish and you feed him for tonight, teach how to fish and you feed him for life.

“Team effectiveness (also referred to as group effectiveness) is the capacity a team has to accomplish the goals or objectives administered by authorized personnel or the organization”. (wikepedia, n.d.). The GRPI model was first introduced by Richard Beckhard in 1972 to aid with understanding teams. Following this, doctors Irwin Rubin, Mark Plovnick and Ronald Fry then developed and popularised one of the oldest team effectiveness model in 1977, and it has stuck around for good reason. GRPI is an acronym that comprises the four pillars of the model — goals, roles, processes and interpersonal relationships. (samewave.com, n.d.). GRPI stands for Goals, Roles, Process, and Interpersonal relationships. By Al-Khal making objectives and intentions regarding individual and team goals clear and communication about priorities and expectations stronger and more open, they allowed the whole team to learn and achieve more as communication between the team was improved and people knew what they had to do and how better. The team also assigned a team leader who sets clear goals and responsibilities which allowed the rest of the team to copy. This also helped with certain conflicts as the team leader encouraged for them to be solved properly. As a whole the team established problem saving and decision-making procedures which helped them over come problems and save more time as they already knew what decision needs to be taken. And at last the team leader made sure that effort was equal.