Review the assessment tools for individual leadership development (link provided within the topics in this lesson). Based upon your knowledge of the leadership skills needed in the long-term care industry, select ONE assessment tool and complete your individual assessment. Score the tool and review the findings.
1. For your first post, identify the leadership assessment tool you chose, explain why you chose it, and discuss your results.
• Based upon the results, list your individual goals for professional development as a leader.
2. Respond to at least two of your classmates’ initial posts, providing feedback on their professional leadership goals and consideration of the assessment tools they selected to complete.
Student 1:
Hello Class,
For this discussion I selected the Effective Empowerment and Delegation quiz. My results were in line with the skills that I need for my chosen career, but not necessarily the best for a long term care setting. The test identified modeling the behavior that I want to see, providing information and resources, and delegating as my strengths. I think that these skills are very important both to long term care and my actual career. As a leader you always want to model best practices, in long term care that would mean interacting with residents and staff in a professional and warm manner. Making sure that your staff has all of the knowledge and resources to succeed is key to quality care.
Where the test identified that I needed work was in arousing positive emotions and creating confidence. As someone who is still fairly new to a corporate leadership position these are definitely things that I need to work on. I think that I am very good at recognizing small successes when someone is training, but slack off on regular reminders that they are doing a good job. In my current position, I am focusing on helping my team understand my thought processes for prioritizing work so that they can make good decisions even when I’m not there.
I can see how in a field that is much more emotionally charged like long term care, these frequent confidence boosters would be more important to staff morale.
Student 2:
Hi Class,
For the assessment tools for individual leadership development, I chose to take the Diagnosing Poor Performance and Enhancing Motivation assessment. I chose this assessment because it is normal for motivation to fluctuate and often decrease due to job dissatisfaction, stressful work environment, monotony, or feeling unappreciated and unnoticed. I believe that being able to see performance and having the tools to change an individual for the better is such an essential part of being a good leader.
The results of this assessment were broken down in to 7 categories where I was given a score for each category in that skill area.
- Diagnosing performance problems 8
- Establishing expectations and setting goals 9
- Facilitating performance (Enhancing ability) 12
- Liking performance to rewards and discipline 16
- Using salient internal and external incentives 19
- Distributing rewards equitably 10
- Providing timely and straightforward performance feedback 13
My highest score of 19 shows that my use of salient internal and external incentives is good while actually diagnosing performance problems is what I need to work on (and this why I chose this assessment). A score of 87 placed me in the third quartile.
Putting parameters in place in a great way to measure employee performance and to help me, help them as a leader. Miller (2017), suggests that to identify performance problems, you need a clear idea of what you consider good performance. You should have quantifiable, measurable metrics in place for each employee and for different departments or teams within your organization. Track how well the employees meet these metrics and note when they exceeded expectations or fell short of the expectations. I would also like to work on setting little goals to have something to celebrate when the goal is met. This will also help promote motivation and can help maximize employee contribution.