Be Your Personal Best

Be Your personal Best

---------individual leadership development project

Are leaders born or learned? The answer is both, of course we cannot deny that some individuals are born with the characters of the leaderships. But on the other hand, as an old saying goes, it is never too late to learn-----including learning to be a great leader. During the Organizational Behavior Course, Personal leadership is a significant factor we need to develop. And as far as I am concerned, I have some personal experience of leadership------team leader in a class assignment, ,vice executive chairman in Lanzhou Univeristy Student Union , interns leader in China Mobile Group and so on , all these experiences offers the opportunities to develop my personal leadership and search for the problems and during the OB class, I also got some theoretical direction for personal leadership. So it is high time for myself to summarize and make a personal leadership development plan.

1. Objective

Reading different books and practicing in everyday life such as team work, class discussion, personal task and so on with the right method to improve my self-leadership skill.

The books I have read during the project:

The Tao of Personal Leadership, written by Diane Dreher,

Leadership Gold ,written by John C. Maxwell

2. Plan and Method

2.1 book reading

During the project, I read 2 books, The Tao of Personal Leadership, written by Diane Dreher, The author tries to offer us new approaches to conflict resolution, community building, empowerment and growth, and renewal by combining the Chinese ancient wisdom of the Tao Te Ching, who advocates learn from nature and self-cultivation, with lessons of successful leadership. I really like book since it is my first time to read the book about the ancient Chinese classic, the Tao Te Ching, which is one of my interesting in China, written by an American people and I really appreciate her opinion about personal leadership: The Tao Te Ching affirms personal leadership, the enduring power of character, which is what lies at the heart of this book, greatly different from other books which focused on one minute-solutions.

Another book is Leadership Gold written by John C. Maxwell. The author desire to develop a tool to guide and shape people's potential to lead. He did not only want to help to teach people in becoming a good boss at work, but also he wanted to develop people to be leaders in life. This book provides some gold advices to our personal leadership: don't isolate yourself to the people you are leading, the toughest person to lead is always yourself , The best leaders will always be the ones that listen to their employees, a leader can improve their performance through an honest evaluation from others , keep your mind on the main things , keep asking questions and keep learning to be an excellent leaders, the best leaders are listeners, and so on.

2.2 personal evaluation and goal setting

Combine these two different books means to combine Oriental leadership philosophy with Western leadership wisdom. Based on the books I have read and the personal leadership evaluation I did(shows below), I desire to develop my personal leadership skills as follows: focus( keep my mind on the main things), time control, cooperation ability especially on the aspect of being an excellent listeners and along with the principle from The Tao that I should remember anytime---- learn from nature and strengthen myself ,which is the essence of Chinese old philosophy of leadership.

Assessment items 5(excellent) 4(good) 3(medium) 2(bad) 1(very bad)

Personal qualities focus √

reliability √

principle √

objectivity √

executive force √

time control √

Attitude discipline √

responsibility √

cooperation √

crisis