As a leader, how your followers perceive you is incredibly important. Below, on a scale from 0.00 to 5.00, are the results of two surveys sent out to some my peers that I have worked with in the past. Based on the results of the following surveys I believe that my followers precieve me as a decent leader that is inclusive and adaptive (i).
| Empowering Leadership | Leading by example | Particapative Decsision-making | Informing | Coaching | Showing Concern/Interfacing with the team |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| My scores | 4.30 | 4.27 | 4.04 | 4.27 | 4.00 |
| Follower Average | 4.04 | 3.82 | 3.95 | 4.17 | 4.14 |
My results for the empowering leadership survey were not to different than the results I got from my followers. The biggest difference was in the Leading by example category, but this bias is statistically insignifgant. I think this shows that I have a fairly realistic understanding of how I lead and how others view my leadership. If there was a huge difference between my scores and my followers’ scores, that would probably mean I either overestimated or underestimated my leadership behaviors. Since the scores were close, it suggests that the way I see myself as a leader lines up pretty well with how my followers see me (1a).
Below, on a scale from 0 t o 20, are the results from the adaptive leadership scores I sent out to some of my peers that I have worked with in the past.
| Adaptive Leadership | Get on the balcony | Identify the adaptive challenge | Regulate distress | Maintained Diciplined Attention | Give the work back to the people | Protect Voices From Below |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| My scores | 19 | 16 | 21 | 14 | 18 | 16 |
| Follower Average | 19 | 13 | 20 | 16 | 19 | 14 |
My adaptive leadership scores were also similar to the scores my followers gave me. These results mean that I have a fairly accurate understanding of how I respond to difficult or unclear problems (1d). However, there are some categories of adaptive leadership where I underestemated myself, and some where I overestemated myself. An example of me overestemating myself is in the "Identifying the Adaptive Challenge" section, I gave myself a score of 16, while my peers gave me a score of 13. I think this is because I believe that I tend to understand the issue in my own head, but don't not always communicate it clearly to the people I am working with or leading (1e). An example of me underestimating my scores was in the “Maintained Disciplined Attention” section. My followers gave me a higher score than I gave myself, which honestly surprised me a little. I think I scored myself lower because I know how easily I can get distracted or frustrated in my own head. Even if I am still keeping the group focused, I may not feel like I am doing a great job in the moment. My followers may not see all of that internal stress, so they might just see that I am still trying to keep everyone on task. This showed me that I might be a little harder on myself than other people are (1e)
Based on the survey scores, I can conclude that I have had a positive impact on my peers as followers. Almost all the results from both surveys were above the median (j). The lowest on the two scales was the "Identify the Adaptive Challenge" section on the adaptive leadership survey. I think this may be because I struggle with recognizing when a situation requires people to adapt instead of treating it like a normal technical problem. Thinking like an engineer kind of makes you treat everything as a technical problem. It puts you in the mindset of "What’s the procedure?" or "Let’s take a look at the documentation." Adaptive challenges are challenging because there isn’t just an easy fix or rules that you can follow to find a solution.