Blogging is not in my comfort zone as I am not comfortable talking about myself and opening up. I am basically a shy and introverted person, so I am stepping out of my comfort zone and giving this a try.
Reasons that I chose blogging for an assignment are:
- To learn what strengths and weaknesses I have regarding leadership. The hope is that I will build confidence within self, learn more about me and discover areas that I can strengthen or change within.
- The idea is to blog about what we have learnt through the week with the intention of disgesting what we covered.
- The hope is that blogging what we have learnt will help me retain the information. I have a weakness in that department.
I have never thought of self as a leader in terms of leading in a business environment. Of course I am a mother and a wife, so have naturally the responsibility of taking care of my children and my home, working together as a husband/wife team and a family team and that is taking a leadership role.
The thought of leading a crew of employees and/or being responsible for a department or organization leaves me feeling some what intimidated. I come from the era of 'do as I say and don't argue", and I know that I feel very uncomfortable with taking on that type of leadership role. Thank goodness we have evolved from that time and that there are different leadership models one can choose to follow. The more I learn about Stewardship leadership, the more comfortable I feel about taking a leadership role and I look forward to learning more about this model. This model feels right for me as I see many advantages of working with my coworkers on a more equal footing and growing together as a team.
Ken asked us what Strategic and Innovation meant to us. At this point my understanding of these two words are:- Strategic to me sounds very military. Specific plans are made to reach a specific goal and specific steps have to be taken to reach that goal.
Here is a link that talks about strategic leadership, "Defining the challenge".
http://www.airpower.au.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj03/win03/guillot.html
Innovation to me means creativity, openess, stepping out of the norm, looking for differences, trying new things.
Following is a link with a definition by Hutch Carpenter with his interpretation on innovation.
http://www.cloudave.com/202/definition-of-innovation/
My understanding so far on Strategic leadership and Innovation is that the leadership has strategies to reach it's goals, the innovation is part of the leadership model which creates an atmosphere of building teamwork, sharing of ideas, trust, creating a healthier work culture in order to reach the goals in a more conducive and cooperative manner. To me it sounds more like my understanding of stewardship leadership.
