8607-520 Assessing Your Own Leadership Capability and Performance

Unit Overview

8607-520 Assessing Your Own Leadership Capability and Performance is a unit within the ILM Level 5 qualification in leadership and management that helps the leader sot understand their levels of performance. This unit is designed to help the leaders to identify areas of strength and weaknesses hence ensure that they can work on their weaknesses and achieve the desired levels of competencies and capabilities that improve their contribution to the organisation. Within the modern corporate sector, it is important for the leaders to ensure that they understand the trend in leadership and develop the desired leadership standards that are effective in steering the organisation to success.

This involves benign able to align the leadership styles with the values and cultures that are developed within the organisation. The leaders, therefore, must be able to effectively assess their contribution to the organisation against the expected standards and values and improve to align with organisational expectations. 8607-520 Assessing Your Own Leadership Capability and Performance is a unit that focuses on providing the leaders ability to develop this evaluation of personal performance and facilitate success in line with the organisational needs and expectations.

The main purpose and aim of this unit is to develop an understanding and ability within the leaders to effectively lead teams to achieve organisational values and goals using the most appropriate leadership techniques. This is a requirement that managers and leaders must have to ensure they fulfil their roles and responsibilities over their teams. The unit is taught in 15 hours of guided learning and contributes 6 credit values towards the completion of the ILM Level 5 qualification in leadership in management.

Suitability of the Unit

Assessing personal capability and performance is an important aspect of promoting success in improving performance. It is through the assessment of personal performance and capability that an individual is able to understand areas that they need to improve and develop effective measures that they can use to improve this area through continuous professional development. This is more important for leaders who have the responsibility of facilitating the accomplishment of different tasks within teams. These leaders have an influence over a larger number of people using leadership styles to achieve organisational values and performance.

8607-520 Assessing Your Own Leadership Capability and Performance is, therefore an important unit that contributes towards the acquisition and development of skills that can be used to achieve these goals and objectives. The unit is designed to mainly meet the learning needs of the middle managers within the organisation. It helps these managers to understand the most effective leadership styles to develop within their areas of responsibility which are mainly in the departments, lines or regions.

 They are guided to develop effective improvement techniques to align their leadership behaviours and styles to organisational values. However, the unit is also applicable to other individuals, including top management, who make decisions for the organisation in general and team leaders, who are required to positively influence the team members that they lead. Employees can also pursue the unit to build the ability to identify their performance and gradually improve in alignment with organisational values and expectations.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of the unit, the learners should babel to:

• Identify the most prevailing leadership styles in their organisations

• Assess the impact of these leadership styles on the organisation's values and performance

• Assess their personal ability to apply different leadership styles in different situations

• Assess their ability to communicate the organisational values and goals to the team members and employees in their areas of responsibility

• Assess their ability to motivate others and create a commitment towards the organisation’s goals and values

• Justify the effective leadership styles that they have employed in their areas to motivate the staff and ensure they are committed to organisational values and goals

• Select and implement the most appropriate leadership style in their own area of responsibility to motivate employees to achieve the organisation's goals and values

Key Learning Areas

8607-520 Assessing Your Own Leadership Capability and Performance is a unit that builds the understanding and ability to assess and evaluate leadership styles. Some of the key learning areas within the unit include:

Leadership Styles

This area of learning lays the foundation for understanding leadership styles that can be used within the organisation. The learners are taught different approaches that they can use within the organisation. They are introduced to leadership theories and steels and guided to understand the roles of leadership within the organisation. The learners are also guided to generate a connection between organisational values and acceptable standards of behaviour within the organisation.

Personal Leadership Capability

This area of learning helps the learner to understand their response and effectiveness in achieving the set goals and objectives in their area of responsibility. They are guided to understand the approaches that they can use to evaluate their ability to implement different methods of communication that motivate the leaders and contribute to achieving the desired goals and objectives. They are guided to understand different theories of motivation and develop an understanding of the most relevant that they can use within their organisational context. The learners are also taught the best approaches to communication of values and goals to ensure they are able to receive feedback on leadership styles and their impacts on the employees.

Implementing of Appropriate Leadership Style

This area of learning focuses on creating an understrata ding of the role that the leader plays in motivating the employees to achieve desired organisational goals and objectives. It involves the learning of factors such as emotional intelligence that must be understood in developing leadership models and theories and its impact within the organisation. In this area, the leader is taught to use the most effective techniques in communicating, persuading and negotiating with either team to achieve the desired organisational goals and visions. They are also guided to understand and appreciate the significance of leaders in improving the performance of the team members.

Evaluation

Upon completion of the unit, the learners are put through an evaluation process. This includes a written assessment to evaluate the mastery of theory and practice. Simulated exercises and supervised practices are also used to assess the ability to implement the learned concept in practical settings.