This week in my FIRE A111 Fire Admin class we were assigned to read "Developing a Plan for Self-Evaluation" by Harry, R Carter, "Leadership Do's and Don'ts" by Mica Calfee, and "Is Your Leadership Bicycle Broken" by Jeff Simpson. All of these articles were very insightful and helpful on my path to becoming a better leader.
To learn more about who we are, we were encouraged to take a couple personality tests. The first test was produced by Carl Jung and Isabel Briggs Myers. For this test it asked you a series of questions about how you feel on certain subjects, for example: "As a rule, you proceed only when you have a clear and detailed plan" (Jung Typology Test). To answer these questions you simply chose if you strongly agreed, agreed, uncertain, disagree, or strongly disagreed. Most of my answers were to agree and disagree with a few uncertain's, I only chose strongly agree for one out of the sixty four questions. After taking the test my answers were calculated and the result was that I am 3% Extravert, 3% Intuitive, 6% Feeling, and 6% Judging. In the description of my type it said that I am a global learner, I see the bigger picture, and help others before helping myself, but may take on too many burdens that I can handle. The second test was an emotional test, it had the same format as the Jung/Myers test. The results from this test said that I had high emotional intelligence, meaning that I am able to work well under pressure.
Even though it's still hard to understand how they can calculate who you are by such basic questions, I feel better about becoming a leader some day after taking those two tests. They gave me a better understanding on what I need to work on.
Before I become a good leader I need to work on is delegation, I always want to be in there doing the work. A good leader is one who can stand back and let others do the work so he/she can focus on the entire picture and see problems before the arise
Your last statement about being a good leader s to allow someone else to do the work while you stand back in my opinion is the wrong answer. In my experience a good leader is someone who actually helps with the work and gets their hands dirty. The people n the floor will see this as you wanting to help with their hardship and not just stand by and take the credit. I also have realized that there is a balance between standing back and actually helping hands on. In order to evaluate your crew you must stand back and watch to see if their are any mistakes that can be fixed, this is usually training. But you want to do the task at hand in order to show that you have the knowledge and physical ability to do it yourself, this way they have an idea of exactly what you want them to do and they have confidence in your ability to lead because you have shown them that you know what your doing by example. If you know what I mean.
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