Learning Activity #1
My best suit is my leadership experience. My willingness to get along with people from various cultures and ethnicities has fueled my drive to succeed in extracurricular events at school and where I have volunteered. I discovered that this ability is critical for high-performing teams, especially those in science. Scholars agree that high-performing teams accomplish much more than individuals, highlighting the importance of developing leadership skills (Cheruvelil et al., 2014). Fortunately for me, it comes easily.
Being a student is a journey towards building and improving my weaker technical skill. That is the purpose of training. Lectures and class exercises will go to greater lengths in boosting this set of talent and with time, I will be better than I was before college.
Conceptual skill develops with working experience. As my careers grow, I will face hurdles and every moment of overcoming these obstacles is a learning point. Several of these successes and failures give me experience and further develop my conceptual skills. Hodge, Danish, and Martin (2013) note that increasing level of management requires long-range thinking which employs more conceptual skills.
Learning Activity #2
How might your strengths and weaknesses impact your career plans? My strengths are likely to boost my career since there is no workplace without people. No one operates in a vacuum, and hence my strong people skills are likely to be a plus. Business executives put more emphasizes on more solid soft skills on job applicants (Robles, 2012). Having a combination of both hard skills and soft skills plays a critical role in securing a job and which careers path I take. To climb the ladder, people skills come in handy and the results achieved as well.
Weaknesses suppress growth in the corporate world. Being a manager means managing lower level workers who are technical in their respective duties. It also means managing other managers. Any show of weakness in technical abilities may lead to sabotage and eventual failure in leadership. Good managers need to understand what happens in the daily operations of a firm. Lower level employees would respect a manager who knows them, hence better results for a company. Balance in management and technical skills enhances better relations and clear communication of organization objectives to the rest of the team (Alexander, 2013).
References
Alexander, K. (2013). Facilities Management: Theory and Practice. Routledge.
Cheruvelil, K. S., Soranno, P. A., Weathers, K. C., Hanson, P. C., Goring, S. J., Filstrup, C. T., & Read, E. K. (2014). Creating and maintaining high-performing collaborative research teams: the importance of diversity and interpersonal skills. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 12(1), 31–38. https://doi.org/10.1890/130001
Hodge, K., Danish, S., & Martin, J. (2013). Developing a Conceptual Framework for Life Skills Interventions Ψ. The Counseling Psychologist, 41(8), 1125–1152.
Robles, M. (2012). Executive Perceptions of the Top 10 Soft Skills Needed in Today’s Workplace. Retrieved from http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1080569912460400
