Leadership Development Paper: Reflective Application Essay

 

            

This paper has three primary components. 

 

The first is “My Personal Vision,” which describes your values and vision for the future based on the Exploring Leadership Philosophy exercise.  This focuses on your life and career aspirations.  Consider your instrumental/process (e.g., integrity) and terminal/end-state (e.g., independence) values, your social priorities, what intellectually excites you and what kind of person/friend/spouse you really want to be.  What lifestyle do you desire and why?  Then describe your five year career aspirations.  If the desired and/or predicted image of your career development involves a sequence of jobs and moves, describe them and your rationale for this being the best sequence. If you are not sure, but have identified two or more desired paths, please feel free to elaborate on each one.  Then compare the compatibility of your personal and professional visions. 

 

The second is to diagnose your current leadership strengths and developmental opportunities.  You should seek to understand the role of goal setting in your career, team and organization. Identify warning signs of derailment. Using your own experience, you should diagnose a personal or professional situation where you have been surprised, frustrated, and failed. This process will help you identify current leadership strengths and developmental opportunities. 

 

The third component will build on the first two to establish an Individual Learning Plan (ILP) for the next two years, including your MBA experience.  Your ILP should address desired progress on your personal, professional and intellectual agendas.  To be effective in your life and work, an ILP should reflect some contextual integration of strengths, developmental needs, life/work benchmarks, and current obstacles to your development. Your ILP should have three to five learning objectives.  A learning plan with more than five significant objectives is often difficult to manage and decreases adherence.  Your developmental objectives, if achieved, should greatly contribute to your overall goals for the EMBA experience and prepare you to grow and excel into the next phase of your life.  In addition to developmental objectives, your plan should contain desired outcomes for each objective, action steps that must be completed for you to achieve your developmental objective, coaching and feedback that will facilitate your development, and measurement and follow-up that will help you assess and maintain progress. 

 

In total, this paper should be approximately 3000 words (around 12 pages; it is up to you to determine how many pages to allocate to each section), typed, double-spaced using 12-point font with one-inch margins.