SWOT Analysis in Personal and Professional Development
My professional and personal skills motivate me in organising exhibitions and conferences, which is a key strength of my career development. In general, I evaluate myself as being honest, sincere hard-worker who values perfection and efficiency. Not only I consider that these are significant strengths in my own life, but I observe that I communicate these traits to others, at times setting a bar, which is too high for anyone else to achieve. Besides, I possess a large number of skills, ranging from various types of designing and the technicalities of computer programming to event planning. These skills have helped me in a leadership position and various projects thus far in life. Regarding the four dimensions of leadership, I notice that I apply my relationship- oriented attitudes in building trust with my team members, ensuring that my tasks are achieved effectively and in a timely manner. One negative feature to my relationship-oriented approach is that I often accept extra workload to complete the bigger task in order to avoid conflict.
While learning about leadership from a book does not increase knowledge to a certain degree, I notice that I have an opportunity to become a better leader while learning on the job, subjecting myself to new situations, which test my limits and capabilities. This opportunity offers me a self-analysis, permitting me to polish my personality traits. Much more likely, Emotional Intelligence (EI) is my single weakness among leadership skills, which I have to work on. While I am able to control my own emotions and can measure the emotions of others, often I feel a great difficulty in keeping those personal feelings aside to best suit the environment. When I am upset, it is obvious to feel how others will interact with me and what will happen.
The biggest threat to my career growth is the latest developments in information and digital technology with the new processes being introduced every day. In order to compete in this era, it is necessary to learn and instil the latest developments of advanced technology in time, and to implement this knowledge in my career activity. This is a powerful lesson I have learned in order to improve my personal development plan from the conferences and events.
Implementation of a Personal Development Plan
My ambition is to become a successful manager in my life, but I have realised that I do not possess some vital skills, which are necessary for my career development. The book “Leadership on the Line” has helped me to a large extent with improving my skills for my PDP.
The philosophy of Getting Things Done helps me draw clearer, better plans for attaining my goals. I would like to share some of the significant characteristics of this philosophy that can benefit all, if they include the philosophy into their plans. After much research and reading, I have come to understand that there are several integral solutions of developing and executing PDP. Among them, the best, in my view, is how to get things done written by David Allen. I consider GTD (in short) is the best, because it provides the complete perspective, from organizing and planning to execution. Working on a joint project has given me an opportunity to learn from others in teamwork and how efficient leadership is crucial for teams. At the beginning of the project, I conducted the audit of skills by examining the areas where I needed improvement. The skill audit reflected a vital gap in team building, teamwork, communication skills, and problem-solving. I have decided to improve by becoming a class representative, because I realised that this would be a suitable platform where I would have the opportunity to improve myself in communication, written and oral skills. This way, I can learn how to lead people in teamwork and can also improve my problem-solving skills by listening to people and analysing the situation.
Resources and Activities
I thoroughly read different books and articles related to team building based on leadership qualities, motivation theories, time management, problem-solving, and effective communication. Mintzber’s “Management and Theory Concerning Life and Achievement of the Leaders and Jack Welch’s”Leadership Principle helped me understand different components of personal leadership styles and theories.”One-minute organiser plain and simple written byDonnaSmallin assisted me as well, showing another picture of a successful leader.
Active involvement in debates, group discussion, and presentations at the college level were the real test bench and opportunity, where I assessed my leadership qualities and applied knowledge gained during my course.All these activities have helped me build confidence, develop personality, motivate a team, delegate responsibilities, share power in teamwork, resolve problems and conflicts, evaluate performance, and lead people. I strongly believe that perfection in these activities is necessary for a successful leader.
Achievement against Aims and Objectives
I have created certain aims and objectives in my professional and personal development plan for the successful growth of my career. Aims and objectives consist of developing interpersonal skills and professional skills, necessary for successfully organizing events and conferences. They are as following:
- Development of strong listening skills;
- Patience and confidence in decision making;
- Ability to organise talented teamwork;
- Polite manners and use of appropriate language;
- Acquisition of all qualities of a successful leader;
- Learning of effective task delegation to subordinates;
- Enhancement of time management and delegation skills;
- Improvement of all key elements of problem-solving skills;
- In-depth studying of financial planning and budgeting.
Acquiring these interpersonal skills will define the success of events and conferences, organised by me. Displaying admirable qualities of interpersonal skills in conference planning, I can successfully build confidence and enhance the relationship with co-workers. It can be noticed that the purpose of practicing these skills is always contributing and expediting towards achieving long-term goals in my career. These skills reflect the personality of an individual in his/her personal life.
Events, conferences, and seminars help me improve my personality, enhance productivity, and update knowledge in all spheres. Combination of professional and personal skills is beneficial to me at the time of planning an event. Under difficult circumstances, I always try to create effective communication in a teamwork in order to motivate participants to perform certain work, so that the team can achieve its objectives. A technique of effective interaction with participants will define use of communication skills. With effective communication skills, half of the job of hosting an event is complete. My proficiency in time management skills plays a crucial role for planning and organising a successful event. The success of the event depends upon accurate planning and occurrence of an event at the right time.
Task 4: Interpersonal and Transferrable Skills
The quality of unselfish leadership leads a manager to a successful career. Managers lead the team by forming trends from upper to lower ranks, demonstrating themselves as role models and guiding the spirit of their team. Their responsibilities involve accurate delegation of work, which demand effective time management for a speedy action. This problem commonly prevails in my working environment, affecting efficiency and growth of the organisation.
Recommendations How to Improve Problem-Solving Skills
Problem-Solving Skills. While working in a software company, I observed that there was a crucial need to enhance my problem-solving skills, because working in a group often created a task of problems that needed immediate solution. Problem-solving is a continuous process that has been structured in each sphere of life and work. One of the key challenges I have realised due to the teamwork is facing an imbalanced situation in problem-solving between actual and desired states. For effective functioning of groups, there must be a consented procedure for all members of problem-solving. All problems are different with unequal intensity; thus, while solving problems, their relative weight should be kept in mind.
During problem-solving, common sense and vision plays a pivotal role in deciding priorities and their practicability, which consumes maximum time and energy. Thus, it is possible to arrive at a favourable decision with the use of additional sense. There are several models of problem-solving, but all of them involve the basic steps: defining the problem, diagnosing and determining the root causes, finding alternate solutions, measuring the intensity of alternatives, agreeing on the optimal solution, and, finally, evaluating and implementing the solution.
In problem-solving, successful leaders, whether they are political, industrialists, or corporate executives, exhibit extraordinary skills with far-sighted vision and consider their future consequences. A key example demonstrates the problem-solving skill of India’s late Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi. She was successful in solving the crucial problem of India by creating Bangla Desh out of Pakistan, thus eliminating the threat of two-sided war on India from Pakistan.
Application of Effective Time Management Approaches in Various Situations
Winstanley defined Time-management is how to control the use of time and decide intelligently to obtain maximum productivity in given time.
In every organisation, time-management is a common problem. Often, several tasks have to be solved by managers at the same time; it becomes extremely difficult to define which of them are necessary to be executed first of all. Too often, employees eat up their valuable time and cannot accomplish their jobs on time because of the lack of job knowledge. In such cases, proper utilisation of time holds a significant importance while delegating work according to capabilities of subordinates. Thus, the manager will be able to concentrate on other critical issues of management. Further, prioritisation of work is essential in managing time, because proper time management in scheduling of tasks is effective and provides a lot of stress reliefs and sufficient time to implement priorities. The managers should realise that work productivity does not mean completing several tasks. They should possess wisdom in balancing these activities according to priority of tasks, while ensuring that they fulfil their responsibilities efficiently.
Leading a team is a crucial job for all managers. Often they need to complete bigger projects within the stipulated time and reach targets set by the management. The effectiveness and efficiency of the team reflects the ability of managers to manage time. Project management always emphasises on time management, as certain projects require fixed time for completion. The absence of efficient time management can lead to unpleasant consequences with higher penalties for the management in bigger projects.
