Leadership Development Essay - My Career Goal and It Requirement

Tango! Managing Self and Leading Others (MM1051)

 Individual Assignment – “Leadership Development Essay”

TUT010

Introduction, my career goal and it requirement

        As a university student who study a degree of bachelor of business administration, my career goal may seems to be a little bit distract from business. I would like to be an executive chef of an Italian Restaurant. I have a part-time job, which is a cook, in an Italian Restaurant for half year. The more participation in cooking I have, the more motivation of putting “cooking” as my career goal may get stronger.

Based on the feeling of wonderful cooking, assurance form the customers and diversification of ingredient, an executive chef is the exactly position I want to achieve. Being an executive chef is not an easy task. Not only the experience of working in kitchen is required, but management skills also are so significant that it is top management position of food preparation.

Most importantly, being creative is one of the significant requirement of being an executive chef. Since menu’s and dish’s planning is the most vital selling point of a restaurant, executive chef is required to have creative idea of exploit different dishes or meals with different ingredient to create a freshness for customers.

My deficiencies and the targeted area of improvement

        Dahl and Moreau (2007) states that when consumers engage in activities with a sense of both freshness and satisfaction, they enjoy the experience more. In order to provide unique dishes, creativity is very vital for me to achieve my goal. According to The Big Five Personality Test, I have low mark in openness to experience or intellect. I present a conventional, narrow interests and uncreative person. Moreover, it states I prefer traditional and familiar experiences.

It is definitely my deficiency of being an executive chef. Creativity is not only focus on the innovation of cooking, but also the ways to solve different problem. An executive chef may face to many categories problem, for example, shortage of some kind of ingredient. Executive chef need to have strain capacity and creativity to handle complicated emergency. It seems that I need to improve my creativity and become more innovative before I get to the way to achieve my career goal. Also, I need to enhance my cooking skills form the working experience and the ability of think out the box. Since I am a person who would like to familiar with the past experience and have less courage to innovate new combination of ingredients. It will lose the interest of cuisine and cooking. Therefore, the main targeted area of improvement will be my creativity.

Research on the area and Improvement strategies

        Majority of people may think that creativity is an inherent ability and intelligence, which means it is difficult to have an enhancement of it. In fact, there are some way to enhance and improve personal creativity.

First, I can enhance my creative problem solving skills. Peterson et al. (2013) recovered that constraints often inhibit creative problem-solving. Constraints management training have a positive effect on enhancing the creative problem solving skills. Through the practice of facing different constraints, I can think more about how to solve it. Also, I can find out the work of prevention first. For example, I can purchase one kind of ingredient by two to three food supplies, if one of them cannot deliver the ingredient on time. I still have another way to prepare my dishes. As we can see, I can through my part-time job to have the constraints management training and know well about the constraints, such as, time limitation and goods limitation. When the problem comes up, I can have more solution to solve it.

Secondly, I can use the diversity of team to grow my creativity up. As Shin, Kim, Lee and Bian(2012) reported, cognitive team diversity is positively related to individual team member creativity. From Harrison and Klein’s (2007) research, team diversity is the distribution of differences among the members of a team with respect to a common attribute, such as aged difference, educational level’s difference and difference from international experience. I can take advantage of team diversity, which means I should listen to difference opinion and ideas from the different colleague. I can think more improvement based on their ideas in order to nurture my creativity. For example, I can ask my colleague and my master to give me the same dishes’ recipe. There must be a little bit difference and I should think about how can I make it better.

Third, I also have to absorb more concept and basic knowledge. Since I am a fledgling cook. The difference between a cook and a chef is also about the skills, knowledge and experience. Creativity is the ability to improve things based on the basic knowledge. If I work hard on the basic knowledge of Italian food, I may find which combination of food is traditional and which is the best. To build up a corner stone for executive chef, study the basic knowledge is the step which cannot without.

My development plan and Conclusions