Managing Oneself Discussion

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From the course by Rice University

Self Awareness and the Effective Leader

93 ratings

Rice University

Self Awareness and the Effective Leader

93 ratings

Course 1 of 3 in the Specialization Leadership Development for Engineers

Part of being an effective leader is learning how to play to your strengths and overcome characteristics that don't lend to good leadership practices. During the course, you will examine your own strengths and learn ways to use them in a leadership role. Learn to manage stress and solve problems creatively. Throughout the course, you will also build a tool kit of useful techniques that you can begin using right away in your engineering career. This course is designed for engineers who are interested in and have the desire to advance into leadership and management roles. You don't need any leadership experience to do well in this course. We ask you to reflect on your personal experiences pretty often,, so some work experience will help you in that aspect, but we hope that most of what you learn here will be applicable to many areas of your life.

From the lesson

Self Awareness

An introduction to self-assessment tools that allow you to identify strengths and weaknesses and how they could impact your leadership style. This week's tool for your leadership toolkit is developing your statement of life purpose.

Observation and Objectives1:39

Hierarchy of Life Management5:40

Personality Assessments8:19

Core Self Evaluation2:16

Locus of Control5:30

Dispositional Influences1:16

Cognitive Styles4:16

Managing Oneself Discussion3:00

Meet the Instructors

David Van Kleeck
Professor in the Practice of Engineering Leadership
Rice Center for Engineering Leadership

As we approach the end of this module, I'd like to take some time to talk about

the Peter Drucker article that you were assigned to read.

This article is a nice summary of many of the lessons that we

addressed in this module.

As you reflect on this article, I'd like for you to think about.

Do you know the answer to the questions that he post?

Do you have a plan to deal with those answers?

Let's take these one at a time.

In his article, he talked about knowing your strengths.

Do you know what your strengths are?

Why is that important?

Drucker suggests that as you develop your plan for improving your leadership skills,

one of the things that you must not forget are your strengths.

There's a tendency in development plans to think about addressing weaknesses.

If you only do that, you'll miss the opportunity to leverage your strengths.

How do you perform?

Do you know?

How do you get feedback?

And how do you assess your own performance?

If you don't have tools for that, you'll need to develop them.

Are there any particular aspects,

if your performance that are hindering your effectiveness?

Do you know what they are?

How can you get those?

Who can you trust to tell you those things that are hindering your performance?

As you grow, you're going to want to develop those mentors that will

help you analyze your performance, and assess where those weaknesses may be.

Where can you contribute the best?

Where do you fit in?

Not all of us will fit in every particular role.

Understanding what environment, where you work most effectively will be critical

because those are the environments that you want to seek to leverage success.

Finding out where you belong, what work environment,

what people, what kinds of work that you want to do will be very critical.

Leveraging success is a key thing throughout the Drucker article.

What are your values?

What's important to you?

In the context of an engineer,

this may be, what is the corporate culture in which you work?

Understanding that culture and

understanding that your values are consistent with that culture,

will be extremely important to your attitude and how you choose to contribute.

How do you feel about developing the relationships in your world?

How do you take ownership for those and

act in proactive ways that will help grow more effective relationships?

And lastly, do you have a plan for the rest of your life?

Druker suggests that if all you have in your life is your engineering profession

and don't develop other interests, when the time comes to end that profession,

you will be at a loss for what to do with the remainder of your life.

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