Rushil Surapaneni December 2, 2015

UGBA 119 Personal Leadership Profile & Development Paper

Upon reflection of my current leadership philosophy and capabilities in regards to my

frequently practiced behaviors during this past semesters experiential exercises, one common

theme emerged: my introverted and judging type often led me to lead in a manner that was

internally focused and decisive, but limited in fully expressing all of my thoughts. Typologically

defining myself, my introverted judging nature is a combination of preferences that demonstrate

my capabilities as a strong, silent type of leader. Going back to the 1st experiential exercise

conducted this semester, The Change Game, as a manager in this experiment, I ultimately

organized and accomplished the larger task of putting individuals numbered 1 through 5 in order.

However, I noted in my weaknesses that I felt that I was overly reliant on the CEO and another

manager to primarily act as the voices of direction and influence within the classroom. This

observation captured the essence of my personal pursuit in discovering a medium between acting

as an introvert or extravert and balancing taking on tasks as a judger, focused solely on the end

result, or shifting my leadership patterns to that of a perceiver, receptive to broader, more open-

ended thinking. This pursuit gave me a clear understanding of my leadership capabilities through

the progression of experiential exercises: I am a leader capable of pushing groups effectively and

efficiently in completing tasks through emphasizing focus and reflection, but also a leader that

needs to focus on my capabilities in regards to broadening my openness to differing philosophies

and thoughts while expressing my capability and assurance to better serve as a more connected

figure to the larger group.

In regards to my current leadership capabilities, my ability to motivate through providing

an atmosphere of tranquility and positive deviance was a capability I found evident within

strengths I documented throughout the majority of the experiential exercises. In the Tower

Building exercise for example, I noted strengths of mine included my ability to motivate

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workers when they doubted themselves along with maintaining the calm during stressful

periods These strengths can be grouped and defined more so as my ability to cope with

uncertainty. Hrebeniak states that leaders and/or powerbases who practice this ability are

individuals or units that usually increase the dependency of others on them, thus increasing their

power (Hrebeniak, 302). In the Tower Building exercise that I reference to, when I was thrust

into the role of a manager, it was my responsibility to direct workers, who were blindfolded, in

constructing the desired shape of the tower. My workers were both intimidated and stressed about

the demands of this role, but my ability to calmly dictate the steps they needed to take in

construction along with a consistent pattern of praise and gratitude reduced their personal

uncertainty and provided clarity to them on how to operate. This intensification of the power

relationship, having my peers rely on my ability to create an environment conducive to their work,

paved the way for us to execute on our strategic mission. I believe this power-dependency

relationship was largely drawn on my leadership capability of providing the calming environment

necessary in times of ambiguity.

In addition to facilitating an environment of calm, another capability of mine similar in

that respect was my ability to create an environment of positive deviance in hopes of energizing

my peers. This concept serves as the primary theme behind Rosabeth Moss Kanters piece, Three

Tips for Becoming an Energizer, where she speaks of energizers possessing the ability of

redefining negatives as positives by refusing to stay in negative territory, even when there are

things that are genuinely depressing. (Kanter, n.p.). This was best demonstrated in the

Reciprocity experiential exercise where I noted that one of my strengths was offering support.

In that specific exercise, many of the individuals framed their requests in aspects that highlighted

what they were doing wrong. My focus on establishing an environment of positivity in this sense

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focused on serving as an outlet for these people to fall back on during their times of need. I

wanted individuals to see the potential solutions for their problems more so than the existing

hindrances that allowed for their problems to persist. I believe it was this capability that I

demonstrated in this exercise and throughout the course that highlighted my ability as a leader to

energize individuals and develop the mindset within others in reframing situations from the term

negative to the idea of opportunity, allowing for myself and others to grow and find solutions

to any existing problems.

Moving past my capabilities of creating an environment conducive to easing the tensions

of my peers, I believe that my ability to be decisive and focused on my actions allowed for myself

and those around me to become better leaders and workers. Professor Kanter touches upon this

ability in her article on energizers when she writes that energizers might take time to deliberate,

but they keep the action moving (Kanter, n.p). I believe I best embodied this as a leader during

the experiential exercise, That Vision Thing, when as a worker, I was quick and decisive in

my movements without hesitation. This exercise comes to mind specifically because of the

complexity in regards to the chain of communication on how to construct the shape of the

structure. Coupled with the fact that as a worker, I was blindfolded and my manager did not see a

physical copy of the structure, but instead was relying on the vision of the CEO, information

flow had the potential to be stagnant because of the confusion in regards to execution. I realized

early on that it was my responsibility to put together the vision required by the CEO in a manner

that was efficient within the time constraints we had. I believe my decisive mannerisms as a

worker served to improve the confidence of my manager, which in turn allowed for my manager

to spend more time clarifying with the CEO of what exactly her vision was. Even though I was

not in a traditional leadership role in that sense, my personal leadership capability to keep the

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action moving allowed for the other leaders around me to gather greater amounts of information

to execute the strategy in the most efficient manner possible.

In addition to my decisiveness, what complements this ability is my capability as a leader

to maintain the focus of my group by setting simple goals and priorities from the get-go.

Personally, I dont enjoy the philosophy of an abstract, flexible solution. I go into group activities

with the mindset that there should be an established, mutually agreed upon objective to work

towards. To set this objective, I focus on establishing goals that are not only clear, but also simple

for my peers to understand and follow. Ram Charan and Larry Bossidy speak to the importance of

this as one of the seven essential behaviors of leaders in their book, Execution. They write that

effective leaders know how to simplify things so that others can understand them, evaluate them,

and act on them, so that what they say becomes common sense (Charan and Bossidy, Ch. 3).

One of my clear capabilities as a leader is to share the bigger picture and then nitpick the finer

details to achieve that picture. In the consulting exercise with Triage for example, during our prep

time, I took the reigns in regards to questioning what our strategy was and asked my team to

determine a goal for exactly the reasonable range of points we wished to achieve. Following that I

asked for us to stay focused on one category at a time to formulate a well-constructed and

cohesive argument. This exercise effectively captured my capability as a leader to assist my

peers in developing a focus around a simple objective. The Triage exercise presented to us many

challenges with varying point spreads in regards to attacking each challenge. I believe in a sea of

requirements and goals to hit, I began the attempt to chart a direction for my team by focusing on

one challenge at a time rather than confronting the entire entity. My ability to simplify our goal

and make it seem doable allowed for me personally to better understand what our strategy ought

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to be and I believe allowed for my teammates to formulate concrete solutions in attacking each

challenge one at a time.

I believe these capabilities I have listed all combine to form my greatest presumed

leadership ability, which is the self-confidence that I bring to groups and attempt to draw out of

from those I work with. Throughout the majority of my experiential exercises, strengths that both

my peers and I consistently referred to in my reflections on the exercise regarded confidence. My

peers frequently mentioned that the confidence I brought in the way I presented ideas and handled

dilemmas gave them confidence in their own abilities to hit targets. As both a person and leader,

the feeling tendency I portray from my Myers-Briggs type directs me in acting and leading in

manners where I manage with a human touch. I am always concerned with how my team is

emotionally driven and see my natural self-confidence as an opportunity to boost and drive the

morale of others around me. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, in their article Inner Work Life:

Understanding the Subtext of Business Performance, found that the best boosts to inner work life

were episodes in which people knew they had done good work and managers appropriately

recognized that work (Amabile and Kramer, 11). I believe in this notion that the performance of

others is enhanced by the confidence those around them show towards them. During the Card

Sorting exercise, I recall in trading cards, I would often expand myself into a power pose,

speaking loudly and quickly running through deals while praising my fellow dealmaker,

Alexander Lin, on the efforts he was putting forward. My own personal confidence and the

confidence I demonstrated through praise towards Alexander seemed to elevate his performance

as I noticed him be commanding a greater presence when negotiating with other groups. This

ability to demonstrate my self-confidence and push it towards others in the form of praise is what

I believe to be my greatest current capability. I believe this takes my ability to create an

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environment of positivity and tranquility along with the focused, objective-driven nature of my

personality and showcase to others, externally, the trust I have in them to perform.

However, coupled with my strengths and abilities as a leader exist opportunities for

growth. As an introvert on the Myers-Briggs scale, the theme of active communication headlines

capabilities I seek to further develop in my career. To put it candidly, I am energized by thoughts

and ideas while drained by intense discussions. I fear debate and confrontation not because I

doubt the validity of my opinions, but because I would rather listen than talk. While in certain

aspects, this type of behavior is necessary to empower others and provide reflective thought,

Larry Bossidy highlights that dialogue is the core of culture and the basic unit of work and that

only a leader can ask the touch questions that everyone needs to answer, then manage the

process of debating the information and making the right trade-offs (Charan and Bossidy, Ch. 1).

For example, in the Road Names experiential exercise, Roberta and Grace took the lead in

terms of organizing the information of all the names we had selected for boulevards and roads.

However, I thought the process by which they organized the information, through writing

everything down on multiple boards, was scattered and confusing. At that moment, I should have

questioned whether the information we were collecting and the manner in which we were doing

so conducive to success. But rather, I took more of a backseat, letting this problem persist and

ultimately hurting our overall team score. A leader concerned with execution would not have let

this occur, but would have asked the perceptive question of whether there was a better alternative.

In order for execution to take place, as a leader I need to place a priority on challenging the

process to be actively engaged in the discussion necessary for strategy execution.

The opportunity to develop this capability of an extrovert serves as the foundation in

regards to expanding my leadership abilities. The first step I must immediately work on for this

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foundation is pushing the capability of listening out, rather than listening in. Throughout my

life, I have been told to go with my gut. As a leader, I have ran with this concept in fear that by

not going with my first instinct, I would be bypassing opportunities that might not arise again.

However, by committing to this philosophy, I often fail to consider the opinions of others in my

strategy evaluation, hence my inability to listen out. Linda Hill writes that one of the three

imperatives of being a boss is recognizing that your team members are individuals too (Hill,

n.p.). She proclaims the most effective managers maintain high levels of interaction by being

easily and frequently available to team members (Hill, n.p.). From my missteps in the

experiential exercises, I can personally attest to the importance of this concept. My own

teammates in the Viking Attack exercise gave me feedback at the end of the exercise stating

that if I took more time in considering everyone elses opinion, we could have more successfully

structured an answer rather than running in the same circles in regards to coming up with a date

and location. This is my personal first step in developing my capabilities towards becoming a

more extroverted and communicative leader. I must remove the notion that my gut is right 99.9%

of the time and learn to better listen out for the opinions of others. This will serve to foster trust

and collaboration between my peers and myself and will allow for me to lead better by

understanding the dynamics and potential options our group possesses in regards to execution.

Upon mastery of this step of listening out, rather than listening in, I plan to shift my

focus next to learning on how to open the heart in regards to developing the ability to

emotionally connect with my peers as a leader. Often times, such as in the case of the BaFa BaFa

experiential exercise, I put both my mental and physical efforts into integrating myself within a

team, but never develop that passion and desire to completely fit in. Often times, this inability to

connect is driven by my vision being obstructed in pursuit of achieving the final objective

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necessary for success. In the BaFa BaFa exercise, I was eager to see and learn the workings of

the Alpha culture, but during my time in that culture, I never took the initiative to be a part of it. I

was silent and cast myself as aloof, leading me to judge, rather than accept, the different culture.

Earley and Mosakowski write in their article, Cultural Intelligence, that a person with high

cultural intelligence can some how tease out of a person's or group's behavior those features that

would be true of all people and all groups (Early and Mosakowski, 2). As a leader, I need to

develop this capability of piecing together a harmonious functioning relationship in situations

where differing cultural factors are at play. Committing to do so however requires me to take that

next step of learning to open my heart in unfamiliar situations. I need to take the initiative from

the beginning, unlike in the BaFa BaFa exercise, to embrace the intricacies and finer points that

are brought forward by different cultures and the opinions and thoughts that spring outwards from

them. By doing so, I will be able to strip that notion of being an introverted leader that is cast-off

from the general group. By adopting this step following the ability of listening out, I will able to

better digest and comprehend the realistic value brought forward by those I lead who come from

backgrounds and cultures different from mine and who derive their opinions and thoughts in a

manner distinct from my own typology.

This translates into the next step within my timeframe, which is developing the capability

to possess an acute awareness of my place as a leader in various situations. After listening out

for the ideas of my teammates and learning to embrace those thoughts through opening my

heart, I need to find my place. I need to read situations better, evaluate the role I need to take,

and place the work back on the shoulders of my peers for them to accomplish team objectives.

This was one area that I struggled significantly within this past semester during the experiential

exercises. In The Resisters exercise for example, I performed poorly as one of the two resisters

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because I gave up my position too easily from the beginning of the exercise. I was fearful that if

someone caught onto anything I said, I would be identified as a resister. This assumption I

developed from the moment the exercise began led me to instantly determine that my place in the

exercise was to maintain a persona of distance as much as possible. This immediacy in regards to

coming to a conclusion of my place in this exercise led to the ultimate downfall of my own role

and the ability of my team to execute as the other resister, Jared, was forced to fend for himself

after I was promptly identified. I need not be so quick to rush to a decision on my role, but rather

possess the self-awareness to read the situation, utilize situational thinking to evaluate the best

role for my peers and myself, and execute in a diligent method by dividing the work in the most

beneficial manner to the team. Charan and Bossidy write in Execution that when leaders know

themselves, they are more able to take responsibility for their behavior, adapt to change, and

embrace new ideas (Charan and Bossidy, Ch. 3). I must work towards better understanding

myself and my place as a leader in different situations so I have the flexibility to adapt to

challenges that may arise. I cannot rush to judgments about how to execute, but rather must

develop the capability to take the information I am given and have embraced, and determine

where and what my ideal role is for myself and my peers in an activity.

To tie all these steps together as a leader, I must develop the capability to not only answer

questions from my peers, but also frame questions towards them to bolster the ability to

realistically accomplish strategic objectives. I need to realize as a leader, my functional

responsibility should be to continually question the processes on hand to achieve maximum

efficiency. Charan and Bossidy refer to this by claiming that when they ask leaders to describe

their organizations strengths and weaknesses, they generally state the strengths fairly well, but

theyre not so good on identifying the weaknesses (Charan and Bossidy, Ch. 1). As one of the

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individuals who took a leading role within my group in the Terra Nova experiential exercise,

my reflection highlighted many of the strengths both my team and myself exhibited, but didnt

account so much so for the weaknesses that ultimately hampered our ability to work together as a

group. My group was ambitious and possessed an individual, Chris, who had come from another

group that was successful in the past Viking Attack exercise. We quickly developed a strategy,

a plan of action and dove into the work. However, there were instances where I personally was

confused and lost in regards to where we were going as a group. Reflecting on this, I should have

asked for the realistic steps our group should have been taking. I should have addressed whether

we were too ambitious and where we were lacking. This exercise highlighted the importance of a

leader to frame the larger picture of realism for the group by asking those questions that challenge

the status quo. To truly listen out, embrace the heart, and find my place, I must put together

the final ability and step of questioning the path towards realism for my leadership capabilities

to truly expand in a more extroverted and expressive mannerism.

Reflecting on my leadership capabilities as exhibited this past semester, I see that I ought

to continue to build upon my frequent behaviors that reflect my ability in enabling others to act

and stimulating a positively deviant environment, but I must do so in a way that incorporates

more so of an extroverted commitment towards challenging the process and encouraging the

hearts of my peers. Empirically, it is difficult to measure this with hard data in a time-specific

manner, but logically, it can be measured through the way my peers react and respond to my

leadership initiatives I take and the capabilities I work on developing. If I notice a significant

increase in my peers bouncing more of their ideas off of me in constructing solutions and

developing a more open dialogue in regards to their feelings and emotions dictating their work, it

will be then that I realize I am effectively expanding on my current capabilities as a leader.

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Works Cited

Amabile, Teresa, and Steven Kramer. "Inner Work Life: Understanding the Subtext of Business
Performance." Harvard Business Review. Harvard University, 01 May 2007. Web. 15
Dec. 2015.

Bossidy, Larry, Ram Charan, and Charles Burck. Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things
Done. New York: Crown Business, 2002. Print.

Earley, Christopher, and Elaine Mosakowski. "Cultural Intelligence." Harvard Business Review.
Harvard University, 01 Oct. 2004. Web. 15 Dec. 2015.

Hill, Linda. "Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader." Harvard Business
Review. Harvard University, 11 Jan. 2011. Web. 15 Dec. 2015.

Hrebiniak, Lawrence G. Making Strategy Work: Leading Effective Execution and Change. Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School. Pub., 2005. Print.

Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. "Three Tips for Becoming an Energizer." Harvard Business Review.
Harvard University, 28 Sept. 2009. Web. 15 Dec. 2015.

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