Leader Self-awareness

Provide a 250-350 word response to student’s response, and justify and support your answer using your experience and source support from the assigned readings. Deep’s Initial Response to DQ7-B: I have worked for a leader who was not self-aware. This leader had a lot of positive and admirable attributes that should have resulted in a good leader. However, this individual’s lack of self-awareness created cascading problems in their personality and leadership style that negated their positive attributes, if not immediately, inevitably over time. This unawareness manifested in this leader as an imbalance in his reflection “injects” that lead to narcissistic tendencies and flawed interpretations of many situations and interactions (Kamena, 2011, p. 4). The inability to accurately gauge situations and human interactions while existing in his own echo chamber led to many members feeling disregarded, unseen, and unheard, which seriously degraded morale over time. On a deployment, this leader was convinced that his air conditioning was broken and asked a sergeant to wait in his room for a few hours until maintenance arrived to fix it. The maintenance technician looked at the air conditioning, turned off the heat setting, and turned on the cooling setting. When informed of this, the leader outright refused to believe he could have misunderstood how the air conditioning unit worked because he “was an engineer.” This leader tended to get argumentative when contradicted or told information that conflicted with his perception. The culture in the squadron was very much a “his way or the highway,” which led to stagnation and many people “shutting up and coloring,” biding their time until he departed. I am ashamed that I didn’t confront this leader about his lack of self-awareness, but it was due to various reasons, some more shameful than others. This leader wasn’t always wrong, and the confidence with which he would either be right, wrong, or somewhere in between never varied. Even when wrong, it was a beautiful trainwreck. The shameful reason is that he seemed to like me, and I didn’t catch on to his ineffective leadership as fast as others. As a result, I lacked the moral courage to jeopardize what at least initially seemed to be a solid mentor. As Ciulla points out, it is important to study exceptional and sub-par leaders, and there were many instinctual lessons gained from observing this leader (2012, p. 15). One outcome is that I tend to avoid using autocratic leadership, favoring inputs from members of my teams, which allows for various perspectives. However, the danger of studying what not to do can lead to an over-correction, such as trying to avoid autocracy at all costs even when the situation calls for it, struggling to make decisions on your own, and thereby failing to inspire confidence in your team. This underpins the importance of solitude in leaders, as discussed by Deresiewiecz, to allow thinkers who can think for themselves while also balancing injects from your inner circle, institutions, etc., as discussed by Kamena (Deresiewiecz, “Solitude and LeadershipLinks to an external site.,”2010). For context, in the text below is the initial question: Self-reflection resulting a knowledge of our personal strengths and weaknesses is an important leader competency. For a leader to capitalize on personal leadership strengths, first that leader must recognize those strengths. Conversely, a leader must recognize his personal leadership weaknesses to compensate for those weaknesses in other ways. Taking responsibility for our leadership weaknesses and doing something about it is demonstrating your integrity. Have you worked for/with a leader who was not self-aware of his or her leadership weaknesses? If so, what was the effect on mission and morale? Did you confront the leader about this? Why or why not?