AEE 8420 Week 1 Reflection

I have a variety of ideas of what I plan to learn and take away from this course.  After attending the Effective Coaching and Emotional Intelligence Leadership Session I realized I had only skimmed the surface in terms of what there is to learn about myself and the way I interact with others.  Those others include my co-workers, supervisors, as well as my family and friends.   Many of the topics in the syllabus really interest me and can be applied to my daily tasks and encounters.  I am very interested in the personality types and trait leadership topic.  I work with program assistants and state staff with a wide variety of strengths and challenges.   I am especially interested in how to help bring out the strengths in the various persons I work with and utilizing my strengths to develop those I come in contact with through feedback and delegation rather than doing for them. 

Effective decision making is of interest as this is a daily skill that I am tasked to accomplish.  I want to learn to empower those I work with to have the confidence and competence to make those decisions on their own.  Having program assistants excited and enthusiastic about the changes and challenges of the future involves them taking ownership and buying into the process.  I am interested in developing my skills in helping them grow through feedback and trust.

The topic of leading change is most interesting to me as the past two years have been a time of non-stop changes and uncertainty.   The roller coaster of additional funding to the polar extreme of potential time off without pay has provided much variability to the position I am in, but has certainly added to the challenge of keeping program assistants focused and moving forward in day-to-day program delivery.  Such challenges as having to work with limited resources and no food for class demonstrations, has led to much creativity and ingenuity in many program assistants who may not have realized they could do so much.  From program assistants calling or writing about agencies donating ingredients for recipes, to agencies donating all the copies for classes, or crockpots for participants, many PAs have proven when the going gets tough they can persevere.  These are examples of the confidence and competence that many of the PAs I work with are starting to build.  Learning to continue to enhance and build on that is a goal that I have for myself in this class.   This leads into the topic of leading teams and team science, which is something I am excited to discuss with others on the discussion posting.  With the program assistants in remote locations, finding ways to allow them to share and collaborate most effectively and positively to challenge their status quo is really exciting to me.

I am really interested in learning so much more about my strengths as a leader and how I can continue to strengthen all the areas of my leadership life.  I am aware of some of the items I need to strengthen and am looking forward to increasing my awareness in all areas of my leadership style.  I really enjoy learning from the discussion posts and have learned so much from my classmates in the classes I have completed to date.   I am excited to apply what I learn and for the challenge of growing in a real world scenario daily!