The benefits of developing a leadership philosophy – for an individual leader or an organization – include:*

Ø  It makes a promise that the individual leader is now bound to deliver upon. The leader understands the minimum standard he/she is expected to hit with his/her leadership efforts.

Ø  Individual leaders can reflect daily on their plans, decisions, and actions to gauge how well they are living their leadership standards. A proactive part of this reflection would be engaging key players in conversations about how the leader’s efforts are perceived by those players.

Create Your Personal Leadership Philosophy

Ø  An effective leadership philosophy is different than your personal purpose, values, and valued behaviors. While your leadership philosophy will be built upon the foundation your clear personal purpose and values statement creates, it is specific to your leadership efforts (in the workplace, in a community organization, wherever you are taking a leadership role).

Ø  Let’s define an effective leadership philosophy as a values-aligned statement that helps you inspire consistent high performance and positive relationships with all of your team members, every day. It is NOT espousing leadership theories from recent business book (or even HBRs readings). Rather, it is developing your own personal, authentic, philosophy that derives from your core beliefs. I would hope that the materials you are exposed to in this course will aid in your journey.

Ø  Therefore, reflect on the readings, videos, audio, personal insight activities, assignments and discussion we have been exposed to over the last six plus weeks (see your journals!).

Ø  In a paper (no more than 10 pages, 12pt font, double spaced) respond to the following questions and any other you feel are important:

o   As a leader, what are your highest values?

o   What’s the contribution you want to make as a leader

o   What makes you distinct as a leader?

o   Drawing from High 5 Test as well as other sources, what are your strengths as a leader?

o   Describe your plan for building trust, showing compassion, providing stability and creating hope?

o   What are five words or phrases people would use to describe your leadership style?

o   How would people of different levels describe their relationship with you?

o   How are you building your influencing capital?

o   How do you want to treat people?

o   How will you build your team?

o   How will you ensure your team’s engagement?

o   How do you approach (and delegate) tasks?

o   What are you doing to continually build your leadership capacity?

o   What do you want your legacy to be?

Ø   This paper should include a separate one page Personal Leadership Statement (see http://www.academyleadership.com/LeadershipPhilosophy/ ) click on “View Samples” to download some examples.

Leadership Philosophy Rubric Total Points 100

Criteria	Not Acceptable	Acceptable	Proficient	Exemplary
Questions/Components Addressed (35%)	Incomplete does not contain basic section contents of leadership philosophy	Includes at least three sections for leadership philosophy.	More than three sections of leadership philosophy and fully developed comprehension of the content sections	Including all sections, fully developed with appropriate introductions for each section
Leadership Statement (30%)	Made weak statement, or did not articulate philosophy effectively.	Included components of leadership philosophy	Included components of leadership philosophy and elaborated on three or more in detail	Included all components and elaborated on each with clarity and detail.
Formatting &  Citations (15%)	Formatting is inappropriate for document.  Citations are non existent	Formatting is appropriate for document, minimal citations.	Formatting is appropriate for document. Uses a variety of layout and design techniques and includes variety of resources.	Formatting is appropriate for document.  Shows some creative expression in the layout and design and variety of resources and citations.
Grammar & Mechanics (20%)	Document over all is written poorly with too grammar or spelling errors.	Document over all is written clearly in some detail with no grammar or spelling errors. Some passive voice.	Document over all is written clearly in good detail with no grammar or spelling errors. Minimal passive voice well developed paragraphs	Document over all is written clearly in some great detail with no grammar or spelling errors. Used topic sentences to develop paragraphs and active voice.