Self-Assessment

Self-Assessment         Jessica Bertagnolli     Nurs6655    

During Nursing 6655 Advanced Leadership, there were many opportunities to learn about and discuss various aspects of leadership. During the beginning of the semester we created groups to work in and had an opportunity to tell a little about ourselves. With this being an online course, I did not know any of the members of my group prior to this class.

Reflecting back on the beginning of this semester, I think that the members of my group could have gotten to know each other a little more. I did glean information about my partners as the semester progressed as we had discussion with guest speakers and I did share information about myself that was going to affect my availability to the group during certain times (when baby was due), but we could have had more in-depth knowledge about what professional strengths each of us had to share/offer.

According to Porter-O’Grady and Malloch (2011), it is important to understand how all of the pieces fit together to make the final product. We must all have an understanding and appreciation of what the others are doing in order to be efficient and to produce a quality end product. I think that by establishing communication and a relationship at the beginning of the semester, it would have allowed our group to better communicate and establish roles throughout the semester.

Part way through the semester, I read through the final paper rubric and created a rough outline of topics that I thought needed to be covered in the paper. I emailed this out, working off of the topic that another team member had proposed as a focus for our paper. There was no feedback for a few weeks and I did not pursue. About a month later, another team member offered to work on an outline and I pointed out that I had begun a rough draft and to please look at what I had started as it was taken forward. I feel that I should have pursued a response and encouraged the progression of the discussion when I first initiated it, because I felt like my work and effort was not utilized. This takes us back to the topics of communication, rework and efficiencies.

During the process of creating our final paper the issue of efficiencies continued to be on my mind. Again, I think that it might have helped if we would have created a better line of communication from the very beginning of our work relationship. It is important to set clear expectations from the beginning, not only to avoid misunderstanding, but also to have accountability. As Porter-O’Grady and Malloch describe, to be accountable one must have a sense of ownership. It is important that each team member feels that they are valued and have an important part in the final product.

I feel that our group created quality products and I also feel that our parts were not defined. We ended up working well together and had input throughout. I think we were all open to ideas and flexible, as it was a smooth process of creating papers. It stood out to me just once that because of the vaguely defined roles, one team member tended to create more work for themselves due to a lack of communication and clear expectations about topics and direction.

The group work for this course gave me an opportunity to work closely with other emerging leaders. In my professional experience, I have mostly worked with groups of experienced leaders and/or groups of emerging leaders being led by experienced leaders. In this course, we were to lead ourselves in defining roles and expectations. I think we did a good job assigning each other tasks, such as what power point slides to be responsible for and who was going to be the one to present our power point.

          In the past, I feel that I have been more outspoken as a leader than I was during this course. I think it is because I anticipated not being available 100% related to having a baby. My professional experience has allowed me to lead large groups in shared governance, being a chairperson. This experience was different in the sense that we were all co-chairs in the group.

I plan to take the experience and knowledge from this course forward by being more aware of relationships and communication. Having good communication is one of the major foundations to good leadership. Communication and relationship building takes effort and consistency. I think it would be good to have weekly huddle meetings about all that is going on during a course. This allows us to get to know each other and better understand the value each of us brings to the table. At the end of each huddle, there should be a summary of what was discussed sent to all members. This would really help to organize, set expectations and be accountable.

Porter-O’Grady T. & Malloch K. (2011). Quantum Leadership: Advancing Innovation, Transforming Health Care (3rd ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning, LLC.