Running head: PERSONAL LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE
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PERSONAL LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE
Personal Leadership Challenge
FirstName LastName
University title
My personal leadership challenge is that I do not feel like I am receiving the desired level of respect from my friends regarding my career goals. As friends, we predominantly seek jobs in the same career and industry, making discussions about employment and the future easier. However, my friends do not seem to acknowledge my career goals and intentions for my future, which makes me sad and doubtful of myself and my choices in life. However, this makes me want to please them more than focus on myself, which I think is self-damaging. It makes me feel highly misunderstood by my friends, who have been my confidants growing up, making them a sentimental part of my life. My focus on showing my friends my worth is piercing into my mental health and decision-making capacity, seeing that I am mainly doing things to prove a point rather than focusing on achieving what I have planned for myself. The constant need to please my friends is becoming an unhealthy pattern in my life, mainly because I feel that they do not show me respect. My friends do not acknowledge and respect my efforts, which makes me doubt my role in their life. I wouldn’t say I like that they always tend to talk negatively about others, which makes me wonder how they talk about me in my absence. Due to my tendency to please them, I am also unable to air my voice and opinion about this habit. This has also created a barrier between us, making our friendship unfruitful because I cannot share my advice with my friends for fear of being ridiculed.
Being a leader among my friends is important because it boosts my confidence and ensures I have people to turn to for advice. However, existing research on personal leadership challenges has made me question my position among my friends and my influence in creating room for the challenge. Northouse (2019) defines neuroticism as the tendency to doubt oneself because of a tendency to be anxious, depressed, and insecure, which influences one’s leadership approach. Neuroticism as a concept in leadership makes me question whether my PLC arises from my leadership ad personal traits. Shu and Lazatkhan (2017) conduct a study on 82 supervisors that seeks to relate individual elements such as neuroticism and self-confidence to one’s capacity to lead, which identified that neuroticism leads to poor self-esteem and elf-efficacy, which makes such people lose their locus of control because of a higher probability of developing anxiety after going through envy at the workplace. This highlights a possibility that I may be suffering from neuroticism that may be disrupting my self-evaluation and, thus, making me feel anxious around my friends.
I also believe that the great man theory is detrimental to my understanding of my PLC because the concept seeks to outline how leadership is developed. According to Hunt and Fedynich (2019), the great man theory dictates that leadership is rooted deep within one’s traits where some people are born to be leaders while others are meant to be led with the ‘natural leaders’ displaying personal characteristics such as self-confidence and versatility. I believe that this will help me understand whether my desire for leadership is reasonable or far-fetched. I will use additional literature to assess the great man theory, including the assessment by Thompson et al. (2020) that outlines that the great man theory fails to acknowledge the influence of external factors on leadership development. I will use these concepts to assess my leadership capacity and external environment to determine my way forward in dealing with the PLC.
References
Hunt, T., & Fedynich, L. (2019). Leadership: Past, present, and future: An evolution of an idea. Journal of Arts and Humanities, 8(2), 22-26.
Northouse, P. G. (2019). Leadership: Theory and Practice. SAGE Publications Ltd (CA).
Thompson, J., Camp, J. R., Trimble, J. E., & Langford, S. (2020). Leadership Styles. The Wiley Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences: Clinical, Applied, and Cross‐Cultural Research, 499-504.