Reflections on my leadership development as a dyslexic

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Hi to all my blog readers. Thought I would do something a little different today and talk about my leadership journey. Such as it is lol. I while back I took a year long course in leadership which I passed with flying colors I might add. I had to do this for one assignment and got 95% mark for. Its a bit long I am afraid.

Question to all you dyslexics in leadership roles. Tell me about your journey.

Reflections on my leadership development

To be honest with you before taking this course I didn’t spend too much time at all analyzing my leadership qualities, strengths and weaknesses. I don’t think I even considered myself as a leader at all. I believe it may have been because I didn’t aspire to leadership. 

It just seems too grand an idea for me when I consider others in leadership roles I have admired in the past. However I could count leaders I would aspire to be on the fingers of on hand. I knew the kind of leader I didn’t want to be but I no real idea what kind of leader I could be or if I could ever be a leader.

I also believe it was an issue of confidence that I was just setting myself up to fail. As a result I struggled with motivating and communication the goals of my organisation to others as well as to myself at times.  Let alone others involved with my organization.

I wasn’t even self-managing myself effectively so how could I expect to lead others or expect others to buy into the company goals and objectives. This course has enabled myself to grab these issues by the scruff of the neck and develop my own leadership, motivation and communication skills which has been of benefit to myself, my organisation and all customers /users of the services we provide.

One piece of my leadership puzzle fell into place when we looked at emotional intelligence. I feel learning about emotional intelligence gave me a model for leadership and business that I could identify with and feel comfortable with.

Most of my own personal experiences with other leaders come from my career as a teacher in colleges. The main leadership roles in the senior management team were authoritarian.

Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People theory particularly struck a chord with me.

Review of Prevailing Leadership Style

INTRODUCTION

As I run a small social enterprise where I am the only paid employee I will be using my experiences as Co-ordinator / Team Leader / teacher for Dyslexia Support at the last college I was employed with.

Levels of motivation and commitment to the organisation values and goals

One of the main reasons I decided to embark on this leadership course was to develop my own leadership skills. In my previous career as a teacher within further education my experiences with senior management / leadership had all been quite negative.

When I was first employed as Co-ordinator for Dyslexia Support there was not a dedicated Dyslexia Support Department and I was the only dedicated dyslexia teacher nor any dedicated teaching or work space.

So to begin with I managed learning support staff who was not dyslexia specialists. I soon found there was a deep sense of dissatisfaction with the leadership / senior management team. From discussions with all of my colleagues within learning support I know they also felt the same sense of dis-satisfaction with the college principal and senior management team.  

The main leadership style was quite coercive and there was always a sense of crisis amongst staff. Goalman’s 6 Leadership Styles indicate this coercive style has a negative effect on the climate within the college. Dr Douglas McGreggor’s XY Theory indicates this authoritarian style has an adverse affect on levels of motivation amongst staff. Within learning support this lead to a high turnover of staff and low morale was prevalent within the team. There was very much us against them atmosphere between staff and management.

Yet learning support staff very motivated toward meeting the learning needs of students

This impacted of levels of motivation within my team towards the college’s values and goals.

But within my team the motivation to meet the needs of students was very high.with the college as a whole and it’s vision  

I did have some experience of leadership from my career within teaching and in project development. I had a lot of experience of taking a new idea, developing it and bringing it into fruition. 

However, when I decided to embark on the path of self-employment and starting my own social enterprise I was surprised by just how much I struggled with many aspects of leadership and self-management. This had an adverse affect on my own performance as a leader as well as the performance of the company.

Levels of Motivation and Commitment:

At the beginning of this course my goals were to:

1.     Become a more effective leader in terms of projecting my vision to others such as directors, prospective customers and others

2.    To develop better time management and goal setting skills

3.    To discover what it is to be a leader from working with others on the course

I believe I am now just as highly motivated in all areas of managing and leading my organisation as I am when working with the students at Heriot Watt University.

If you were to have asked me about my own levels of motivation and commitment 9 months ago my answers would have been quite negative. In almost all other areas I lacked direction, I couldn’t find focus and, to a large extent, was overwhelmed by the whole self-management and leadership aspects of running my organisation.  Almost other tasks such as networking, marketing and administration were an anathema. To all intense and purposes I had no motivation to do any of the tasks that I needed to do to enable my organisation to grow.

Now my answer to this would be very positive and this is mainly due to what I have learned from this course, learned from others on this course and learned from my business mentor.

I believe my own levels of motivation and commitment to my own organisation’s values and goals are high. I would hope this would be so because I was the person who set them.

A clear indication of this belief comes from the last meeting I had with my own business mentor. She said I was much more focussed on the goals of the organisation because I had set myself clear short, medium and long term goals. These goals enable me to set achievable targets and measure progress and achievement. 

The first thing this goal setting did was give me a clear direction. These goals enabled to develop a strategic plan and measure progress toward achieving these goals. This included all the doing all the mundane things that I hadn’t been doing before I started this course and began working with a business mentor.

This clarity of focus has enabled me to communicate my own vision much more confidently and effectively.