Discovering Your Collective Leadership Edge - Session 3

          This was the final session of the leadership course that the City of Newton enabled me to attend.  The focus of this session was diagnosing our 360 leadership assessment results.  Prior to the beginning of the course we had to give them names and e-mail addresses of six persons.  It was with the intent of assessing our leadership skills from our supervisors, those we supervise, and those we consider lateral to our positions.  Well, I have been at the City (at this time) about two weeks and I don't supervise anyone.  Consequently, I found the discussion to be a waste of time as my results were without basis.  I could have listed my former boss at Geological Consultants, Inc. and my former assistant (who is now my husband's Administrative Assistant), but both would have given me really good marks as we are friends and they would want to make me look good.  What I did take away from it was material to think about and consider in my dealings with others.  At the end of this blog, I will list several of the areas we were to grade ourselves or others in.  There were 4 categories that were on the evaluation:  management of self; ability to diagnose situation; ability to intervene skillfully; and ability to energize others.  Surprisingly, there was no mention of ethics as this is a topic that is brought up in every PAF course that I have taken.   Although they asked for suggestions to improve the course, they did not seem to interested in adding ethics to the mix.  Here are a few of the categories that we were asked to grade others and ourselves in:
*  Actively listen to diverse points of view
*  Ask open-ended questions of multiple people
* Ask for feedback on your conclusions or thinking
* Offer alternative ways to proceed
* Show awareness of the emotional state of others
* Remain calm and in control of emotions
* Seek to identify my strengths and weaknesses
          In all there were 40 questions.  Some of these questions dealt with internalized feelings that one might not show to others so therefore your observers might rate you much differently than you did yourself.  I sat with the City Clerk who rated herself consistently lower than her observers rated her.  My final assessment on this was that it gave me something to think about but was otherwise pretty useless.