The purpose of this assignment is to design your own personal Strategic Leadership Plan to take you from where you are now, to where you want to be in the future. Make a plan of how you will research leadership  and your own capability, using diverse methods and sources. Remember, you are responsible for your own life and therefore it is up to you to plan for, and secure, your 'best' future.

Introduction

The primary focus of the report is to represent my own development as strategic leader. The report is developed in the form of a critical reflective report. Strategic leadership development encompasses acquisition and possession of varied leadership skills and abilities that make a leader capable enough to influence the subordinates in such a way that they become motivated to improve their efforts to achieve organisational goals and mission. Strategic leadership development process boosts the performance level of the leaders and enables them to handle critical business challenges in easier manner (Hughes, Beatty, & Dinwoodie, 2013). Development of strategic leadership is an ongoing process that required continuous development of a leader.  Strategic leaders are those who give new directions to the organisations through taking varied strategic decisions and hence help the business to win competitive advantage (Adair, 2010). The following report opens the brief overview of the essential characteristics that are required for a person to become a good leader. This is followed in the report through having a detailed analysis of own leadership strengths and weakness that are essential to be considered for development of strategic leadership in near future. The report has presented a detailed plan for developing personal leadership skills for becoming a strategic leader. 

Essential characteristics of a good leader

A good leader is one who possesses specific and unique personality traits that make him/her enable to influence followers in a positive manner. A good leader has optimist viewpoint for the external and internal conditions of the business. Being optimistic, a leader tends to identity all the opportunities and possibilities existing in a market and finds out the strategic ways to have exploitation of those opportunities for related business (Stowell & Mead, 2016). 

Other than this, a good leader essentially needs to have good analytical and decision making power. A leader has to make varied decisions regularly and the decisions have direct impact on the followers. A good leader is one who considers the positive and negative aspects of the decision taken from analytical viewpoint and then implements that decisions which is in favour of the organisation, as well as the employees (Maxwell, 2007).

Effective communication is also among one of the essential characteristics that the leader has to take for having a good understanding of the employees and developing a transparent work culture. With proper communication, the leaders enable the followers to share their problems with them. Motivation is the utmost characteristics for becoming a good leader as without motivation a leader can never get work done by the followers. A leader, who positively motivates the employees have a favourable and supportive perspective of them and hence can get the work done by them in an effective and desired manner. All these characteristics are essentially for becoming a successful and good leader. 

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