Journal #10 November 21, 2021
For this final journal, I completed two assessments based on the content from Chapter 11. The results from the ‘Strategic Leadership’ assessment proved I am leaning towards having strong strategic leadership potential compared with weak strategic leadership potential. As I continue my education and continue to persevere, I can gradually increase my strategic leadership abilities through applying the principles and theories from this content in my future professional and personal life (Lussier & Achua, 2016). As for the results from the ‘Personality, Leadership, and Change’ assessment, it was broken into two parts: strategic leadership and change leadership. As for the strategic leadership, it supported the idea that I like to plan out my future. And I do have plans for the next three to five years from now. I want to go back to school and retain my masters in Social work, so that I can eventually become a licensed clinical social worker. I do not like waiting for things to happen or having no plan because that brings up feelings of uncertainty for me and I want to be safe and assured with my future plans, at least as much as I can. As for the change leadership, personally I am not very fond of change. That’s typically when my anxiety gets very bad because I have trouble when I’m not aware of what is happening. So, I do resist change because it makes me uncomfortable, however if it does happen I tend to eventually be open to it after having to experience it for a while, but I don’t really influence others to try new things. Usually others try to influence me to try new things.
Strategic decisions are typically long term and complex. When leaders make strategic decisions, they have to balance the interests of numerous parties involved, an approach best suited for this is to try to include all the concerned parties in the decision-making process. Weighing all the choices of the people involved can increase morale and allows all parties to play a role in the decision, ultimately making them feel involved in the process and limits any pushback that may occur. In all, this is the best solution for leadership.
In an organization, there could be numerous reasons for the parties to resist change. For instance, the parties have low tolerance for change because they feel as though they cannot develop certain abilities needed, this can happen when change happens rather quickly. Another example is individuals lack the trust and understanding of what benefits change can bring about. Some specific tactics that resisters could employ to thwart change efforts could be: empower innovation and creativity and set challenging and achievable goals. These tactics can help to measure goal achievement and efforts overall as well as allow workers to be flexible and creative in the change process. As a future social worker, these tactics could be useful in terms of some of the core values. For instance, when applying service to our social work practice “our primary goal is to help those in need and address social problems,” (NASW, 2017). In order to do this in some cases we have to work to come up with innovative and creative ideas that are best suited to help out clients and we have to empower that within our clients as well. Another example could be applying competence to our practice, we have to constantly strive to increase our professional knowledge and skills (NASW, 2017). This comes with setting challenging and achievable professional goals for ourselves.
References
Lussier, R. N. & Achua, C. F. (2016). Leadership: Theory, Application, and Skill Development (6th ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage
NASW. (2017). National Association of Social Workers (NASW). Retrieved October 4, 2021, from https://www.socialworkers.org/About/Ethics/Code-of-Ethics/Code-of-Ethics