Now that you've had an opportunity to take a number of self-assessments, let's begin our discussion by looking at cognitive styles. This refers to how we gather information, how we analyze it. But I should emphasize that it is not necessarily driven by personality, but can be a learned behavior. We're going to look at three styles overall, some of which you are probably already familiar with. The knowing style, characteristic of dealing with facts, figures, details, analyzing data. These are all things that you're probably already very familiar with. And it wouldn't surprise me if the knowing style is your dominant style. However, as you grow as a leader, you may need to develop skills in the planning style which emphasizes agendas, fixed agendas, detailed plans, preparation for activities. This is going to be extremely important as you begin to supervise teams and groups. However, another style is the creating style, which is going to be extremely important as you begin to analyze problems for which there's no one set answer. Those situations where there's ambiguity, where you may need to think a little bit differently, and especially where you may need to draw on the input from other people. As you learn and grow as a leader, you'll want to adopt your style, your cognitive style to the particular situation. You may have to learn how to do that, and we'll spend some time later on in your leadership development plan talking about that. By now, you've started doing the self-assessments that we've assigned as part of this course. As we go through the entire course, you'll be taking a number of self-assessments. As we do that, I will try to correlate those to the specific leadership skills and competencies that are within the leadership framework. I'll also, at the same time, share my own results and give you some insights as to how I think those results correlate to my leadership experiences and to some of my success as a leader. As we look at each of the three cognitive styles, as you assess your own results, you'll find that they fall on a scale of about zero to ten. On this scale, typical values are about four. What you should notice is that there will be a dominant style that then would be a high score on any of these scales. What this represents is your inclination as to how you process and act on information, what your habitual approach or default approach might be to dealing with problems that you're solving. As I look at my own results, my results for all three of these categories were in the 9 to 10 range, significantly outside the standard deviation and well above the average. I feel that that's a reflection of some of the experiences that I've had as a leader. That cognitive style can change a bit over time. As I look at my own experience, that knowing side correlates most strongly with my experiences as an engineer. You get to be an engineer by knowing a lot of things. Having had that experience, I think has reflected in a fairly high score for knowing in my case. As far as the planning part, I had a fairly long military career and one of the highlights of that is doing a lot of planning. It's an essential element of rising to senior levels in the military, so I think that is reflected in the high score that I got in the planning area. I spent 34 years in the research and development area and as a result, I think that creativity one also got some attention during that time, and I was able to grow that cognitive style to adapt to the situation. So the takeaway lesson for me is that depending on the role that you're in, you have an opportunity to develop one of these styles, more or less, even though you might have an inclination to default to one or another.