Leadership Capabilities

The final blog post for this course is about leadership.
Fitting, seeing as how the whole course is on leadership.

My thoughts of developing leadership capabilities is just like developing anything else:  It takes time and practice (or repetition).
You don't learn about how to be an effective leader from a book or from a course.  You learn how to be a leader from living.
You can learn different principles so that you can lead under different circumstances, but you can't actually learn how to lead unless you do it.

Principle can only take you so far.

So the best way I can think of to develop my leadership capabilities is to get out there and actually do it.

I think the place where I can develop the most is in my delegation and feedback skills.  I have never been very good at effectively delegating, and my giving and accepting feedback are definitely in need of improvement.
It is hard for me to take feedback in a non-personal way.  I can reflect on a time in my job where I was getting a lot of quick feedback from my supervisor and it was really rough for me.  I took it as me doing a bad job, and her correcting me all the time.  And that really got to me.
But I learned later that she did not have that mentality about it at all.
She was doing small course corrections so that I wouldn't get in trouble with someone even higher up later on.  She was actually looking out for me, because as long as we could catch it and change it before someone else found out, then it would be as if it never happened.

So that is something related to my leadership capabilities that I plan to get better at moving forward.