My Self Assessment

When it comes to my personal leadership style, I overall do a good job of switching between Daniel Goleman’s 6 Leadership Styles5 and I tend to use more of the “positive” leadership styles (Affiliative, coaching, etc.) and rarely use the “negative” styles (Coercive, Authoritative, etc.). When I was working full time in an animal shelter, I tried to lead by example, while also focusing on being empathetic to how emotionally and physically difficult the work was, putting staff needs ahead of my own, and encouraging staff to do things to develop professionally, such as applying for and working toward their RVT licensure. My CliftonStrengths Top 5 reflect my own view of my leadership style, as they were: Consistency, Developer, Restorative, Learner, and Focus. I feel this is also reflective in my IPIP-NEO Personality test results, where I scored high on agreeableness and conscientiousness.

I do however feel like when it comes to comparing what makes a “Leader” vs. a “Manager”, I have traits of both, but often more traits of a manager. I like order, predictability, organization, and problem solving. My score on the IPIP-NEO Personality test was low for Openness to Experience, which I think is reflected in my having difficulty with a lot of the “risk taking” that is required to be purely a “leader”, as opposed to a manager. I think I do a good job of creating visions and goals for the future and then creating the steps to act on those goals (I do this in my personal life as well), and of being able to align people behind those goals. I also like to be proactive, but in the sense that I like making protocols to plan for problems that may arise in the future, rather than being proactive about coming up with new ideas for how to do things.

Stress and time management are both areas that I need to work on to become a better leader. I’ve always considered myself to be good at managing stress. Even on the most chaotic day at work at my previous shelter job, when I was drowning in new intakes and critical medical cases, I never panicked, and never lashed out or was unkind to those around me. I focused on the positive to keep my motivation up and felt like I had strong social support from my coworkers. But, after going through this course, I realized that I was mostly using “Reactive” strategies to manage stress in the moment, and not any “Proactive” or “Enactive” strategies to help with long-term prevention of stress. I historically am a “people pleaser” and struggle with boundary setting, which I think is the biggest issue that caused me to struggle so much with stress and time management at my last shelter job. Neither my direct boss nor the Executive Director at my previous job worked to foster an environment that allowed for the 5 Freedoms of Welfare for Shelter Professionals2 especially the Freedom to Predict and Manage Workflow, the Freedom to Focus, and the Freedom to be Redundant. When it comes to time management, I used to spend so much time at work on things that the Eisenhower Matrix3 would describe as “Urgent- not important” in the form of regular interruptions to problem solve for others because we did not have protocols in place to allow them to solve those problems independently. I also was given too many “Urgent-Important” tasks, and spent most of my time putting out fires, leaving me with no time to be proactive about reducing stress.

In future jobs, I need to be proactive from the first day about setting boundaries. I also need to be better about taking steps to make sure that my job allows me to have the 5 Freedoms of Welfare for Shelter Professionals2, and to not be afraid to leave jobs where management actively works to prevent me from being able to do this.

When it comes to conflict resolution, I learned that I tend to use the Avoiding strategy more than I should, especially when it comes to interpersonal conflict. Venting about my old boss’s behavior was something that my entire department did on a regular basis, me included. Rachel Finney’s lecture8 really highlighted how much this type of venting contributes to workplace conflict and burnout. I need to work on declining to engage in this type of behavior in the future, and on being more confident and unafraid of talking directly to coworkers and bosses who behave the way my old boss did when I have interpersonal or work-related issues with them. I also need to be better at identifying when I am experiencing a workplace conflict, deciding which conflict approach would be best, and utilizing that conflict approach to try to get to a resolution.

When it comes to receiving feedback, I do a good job of staying calm, listening carefully, and not interrupting or getting defensive. But because of the way my old boss gave feedback I would still be very stressed when receiving it. When it comes to giving feedback, I need to work on improving my approach, as I know that I can come off as blunt and not collaborative when doing so. I really liked the 4 steps to giving good feedback in the video “The Secret to Giving Great Feedback”9, and the other tips from that section. In the future, when I need to give feedback, I plan on practicing giving feedback on my own before I approach the person I’m giving feedback to, and trying to formulate my feedback based on the 4 steps in that video.

On the decision-making self-assessment, I scored highest in Systematic, Intuitive, and Dependent, and lowest in Avoidant and Spontaneous, which lines up with how I viewed my own decision-making styles. I try to avoid having bias, but I was still surprised that on the few Implicit Bias Tests I took I scored as not having any bias. I think this may have had more to do with how the test was designed and how I approached the test than with me not actually having an unconscious bias. I still need to work consistently on removing bias, and I think utilizing the information and strategies in the HSUS “Pets for Life Sustainability Guide”7 will be very helpful for that, especially the sections on implicit racial bias in decision making. Most of the staff and managers at my previous shelter job were white, even though most of the population we served were not, and I can definitely see how our organization functioned and made decisions in a way that did not take the perspectives and experiences of people of color into account. I also need to be more conscious about using the 7 strategies for better group decision making4 when in charge of group decisions, as in the past I have been in many group decision-making situations where there was not a safe space to speak up, opinions were not collected independently, and groupthink became a large issue.