An Analysis of Strengths and Growth Areas and an Individual Action Plan for Your Development at Your Current or Future Organization

Individual Assignment: An analysis of strengths and growth areas and an individual action plan for your development at your current or future organization:

Keith Wheeler

Boston University

Author Note

Keith Wheeler, Students, MBA Managing Individual and Organization, BU

Correspondence regarding this paper should be addressed to:

Keith Wheeler, BU, E-mail: kdw@bu.edu

An analysis of strengths and growth areas and an individual action plan for your development at your current or future organization:

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the course lessons from class, the discoveries you have made about yourself through all the self-awareness exercises and the knowledge you have gained about your company from the previous papers on organizational culture and leadership. Organize and develop an action plan to further your professional career and obtain your career goals. The first step is to construct a detailed analysis on my key strengths as well as areas that need to be developed further. Next, I will develop strategic goals based on the concepts learned in class that will help elevate my managerial and leadership skills as well as justify how they are related to the culture and the structure of my company. Finally, I will construct a detailed plan with implementation steps and a timeframe for achieving my goals.

Analysis of Strengths and weaknesses

Throughout the course we did numerous exercises that uncovered our personal characteristics and traits. It is these personal characteristics and traits that are the foundation of our strengths and weakness. For example, during the MBTI assessment I learned that I have introvert characteristics (Briggs & Myers, 1998). I always knew that I was quiet and preferred to think things over before acting upon them; I just never knew they had a name for this characteristic. I was surprised to discover during the MBTI class exercise that there were so few introverts in class as well as in the business world. Initially, I thought that I did not have the internal make up to be a great leader but this finding led me to do some additional research. I found that some of the most popular and powerful leaders of the business world are actually introverts, such as, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Charles Schwab and President Barack Obama (Kahnweiler, 2009). I'm known as an even keeled individual, a good listener, extremely focused and prefer to think before I speak. It is these introvert tendencies that are actually the root of some of my strengths. Another self-awareness model was the Learning Tactics Inventory (Dalton, 1999) which measures yours abilities as well as your learning behavior. From the Learning Tactics Inventory I learned that my highest score was on "action" which was not a very surprising discovery. I tend to use "Action tactics" and being an engineer, I pride myself on being able to successfully assemble things without relying on the manual. I just jump right in and start assembling the item and figure it out as I go along. My lowest score was on "feeling" which was below the 10th percentile. It wasn't surprising to me that feeling was my lowest score out of the four characteristics but it was surprising how drastically low I scored compared to the other categories. Feeling and empathy are a weakness of mine that I need to work on. I feel that sometimes my extreme work ethic and dedication hinders my ability to have empathy of others that may not put forth as much effort as I do. The last self-assessment was the CareerLeader report (Anonymous, 2012). The CareerLeader report indicated that my strongest interest was managing people and teams. Managing people and teams has always been something I have enjoyed and something that has come naturally to me. I feel that pursuing my MBA will only strengthen and improve my managerial skills. The CareerLeader also indicated that my strongest skill is my work ethic with a score of 100%. My work ethic is based on my strong determination to succeed. The CareerLeader also indicated that my oral and written communications as well as my projection of confidence are two areas that need improvements. I feel that my weak communication skills are a direct result of my inability to effectively and openly verbalize my thoughts. I feel this weakness can be rooted back to my childhood as I was an only child and never had to share my thoughts or feelings with siblings.

Goals and action plan

My short term goal is to transition out of Project Engineering and move over to Commercial/Operations Management within the next 12 months with a long term goal of becoming a Director by the time I complete my MBA degree. In order to achieve these goals I need to improve upon my weaknesses. I will need to focus mainly on my communication skills and be more attuned to the way I present myself in front of others being sure to portray self-confidence. The culture at NxStage,