1. Which leadership area are you naturally drawn to? Why?

How
might you use one of your strengths to be a more effective
leader in this area?
I am naturally drawn towards authentic leadership. The very reason behind
this is that I am a positive attitude person and try to develop myself and lead
others. Ideation, which is one of my top 5 strengths can be utilized to make
myself as an effective leader in this area. I like to ponder upon new things
and generate new ideas and creative ideas. I treat my ideas as my truthful
self-concepts and at the same time I welcome others ideas and thoughts and
promote openness. By doing so I can develop myself and lead others
effectively. Throughout my life I have been evolving as a leader by constantly
learning and developing my creativity and logical thinking. Whenever I come
across a particular situation first of all I try to understand the situation from
different perspectives and try to come up with some new ideas to handle the
situation. And also I compare my opinions and understanding with others,
this enables me to understand where I stand and what my areas of
improvement are and how I should react to the situations. In this way I am
aware of what my capabilities are and increase my knowledge and skills so
that I can lead others effectively. In my under graduation we did a project in
which we had to build a model of an oil rig. I came up with an idea to use the
cheap and readily available materials like cardboard sheets, small branches
of the trees/plants, glitters and other stationary items like sketch pens,
tapes, scissors etc. We used all these materials and built an oil rig model
which was good. We were appreciated for our low cost and good model.
While we were building that model all the ideas of our team members were
considered and analyzed. So in that project by sharing the ideas I developed
my existing knowledge and skills and also I lead others by sharing my
creative ideas.
All in all I firmly believe that in this highly competitive world it is important
for us to be creative and believe in self and coordinate with others to become
effective in leading others. And my positive attitude and willingness to
develop myself and promote openness will certainly make me a better
leader.
2. Which leadership area do you not really understand? What is it
that you dont understand specifically? Do some online
research and find an answer to what you dont understand.

I do not have a clear understanding upon virtual leadership. I do not

understand specifically how a leader performs his/her virtual roles. There are
mainly 3 roles for a virtual leader. The first role is to continuously scan and

interpret the communication and cooperation that facilitates a close working

relationship between people or organizations. I firmly believe that trust
worthy relationships can be effectively maintained if we interact with people
and talk to them directly (face to face) rather than through some virtual
means. Lack of physical interaction and social interaction raises the concern
for predictability and reliability. For example, in this present world social
networking sites have grabbed the attention. However we also do observe
that it lead to a host of issues. Many people developed trust upon others and
utterly failed in the end. Many committed suicides and there were many
frauds. As there is no way in these social networking sites for a person to
trust others completely I reckon that building cooperation and promoting
communication will not be much effective.
The second role is to maintain and handle the diversity. In virtual teams we
find a lot of diversity because the geographical boundaries disappear but at
the same time it brings the challenge in understanding the people who are
from different cultures. We should have enough knowledge about the
cultures and we have to adapt to different communication methods to
maintain harmony in environments where diversity exists. All these poses
much problems in understanding the environments and will not result in an
effective leadership.
The third role is to perform the role of an operational coordinator. This role
entails identifying the right resources to handle the teams and motivate the
teams. But all this work has to be carried out in virtual settings. This role
cannot effectively handle the teams because the normal way of interaction is
not possible. We have to be precise and short and are also time bounded.
With all these conditions the efficiency reduces to a great extent.
As virtual leadership faces challenges like physical interaction, understand
the diversity and less time it is quite difficult to perform the role of a virtual
leader and raises doubts upon virtual leadership skills and roles.