Posts

Analyze Strengths and Weaknesses – Eric’s Story

/0 Comments/in /by

I’m Eric Philippou, and I’m writing this blog as part of my college internship at ILI. I recently completed a series of assessments and will now analyze the information. Gather what you’ve learned about yourself into the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis tool. This is a great tool that you can use at any time for many different situations. You can use it n the context of your career plans and some athletes I know use it for their sports also.

Eric SWOT

Real World Application

It helps to take several different assessments to give me different views of myself.  I recommend taking all of the assessments, especially those that are free. After screen capturing or printing the results, please read them carefully to see how to apply them to your daily life. Remember to put 80% of your focus on strengths and 20% on weaknesses. Perhaps take some time Monday through Thursday to focus on a different strength each day, and on Friday, focus on a weakness. For example, I’ll play to my group’s strengths on Monday based on the vibrancy assessment. On Tuesday, I’ll focus on using my “Peacemaker” abilities from the Enneagram. On Friday, I’ll focus on mitigating the weaknesses and threats from my SWOT assessment. Do that, and you may become more comfortable as a leader.

In the next post, I will answer the reflection questions about what I learned during the assessments and SWOT analysis.

Reflecting on Personal Vision – Eric’s Story

/0 Comments/in /by

Eric Philippou FencingI’m Eric Philippou, and I’m writing this blog as part of my college internship at ILI. During the past three posts, I completed exercises to help me define my vision and values.

Reflection Questions

After each of the six steps in the innovative leadership development process, I’ll provide some helpful reflection questions. If you can answer all of these questions in detail, you’ll develop a firm understanding of your vision, and your action plan can be implemented almost immediately. The “What do I think/believe?” section refers to your intentions, and the “What do I do?” section refers to your actual behavior. The “What do we believe?” section refers to your group’s intentions, and the “How do we do this?” section refers to your group’s actions and processes. Think of any organized group you belong to (student club, sports team, fantasy football league) and use that to answer the last two sections I mentioned. If you’re not in an organized group, join one and save those reflection questions for after you’ve joined. Remember – even as a new group member and not a leader, you can still display leadership by influencing change. In my answers, the organization I refer to is my varsity fencing team.

Reflections on Eric's Vision

This marks the end of the first step in becoming an innovative leader as a college student. The next post will analyze your strengths and situation in step two. I’ll provide you with some personal assessments to take, this way you get a firm understanding of your personality type, special skills, how you can work best in a group setting, and much more.

photo credit: OSU Athletics, Ohio State University

Defining Vision Based Actions for College Students – Eric’s Story

/0 Comments/in /by

Vision Based ActionsI’m Eric Philippou, and I’m writing this blog as part of my summer internship at ILI, a leadership and management consulting firm. I am entering my final fall semester at T­he Ohio State University, majoring in Strategic Communication. I like marketing and plan to attend business school in a few years. I’m also on the varsity fencing team at Ohio State.

This summer, I am starting a blog that helps students find their life purposes, plus a step-by-step guide on bringing this vision into reality. I am giving you information from a workbook written by a combination of college faculty and leadership development and executive coaching experts who make business executives very successful. This book will be published late in 2014. In this post, you will find your values. Throughout this blog, I will provide my answers to the exercises as an example. This is part three of the four-part Vision topic. My answers are in italics.

In this post, I’ll show you how to set a realistic career direction based on your vision.  We discussed creating your vision and identifying your values in the last two posts. In the next post, I will answer some great reflection questions. It turns out reflection is a key part of this process.  

Putting Vision into Action

Now that your vision is outlined, it’s important to put it into action. Consider your values and vision, as well as your skills. In this exercise, you will find ways to incorporate your passions into how you make a living. Also, think of ideas or topics that you find extremely interesting and are somehow involved in almost everything you do – school, work, social activities, entertainment media, etc.

Step 1: Identify your foundation.

  • What are you most passionate about?
    • Values: love, excellence, meaningful work
    • Respect
    • Order or being organized
    • Creativity
    • Doing things the right way and not cutting corners
    • Doing the right thing in general
    • Success/winning
    • I would be lying to myself if I didn’t put “food” on this list
    • Deep thinking
  • What are your economic needs, and what can you do to meet them?
    • Overall financial stability: enough to not be worried in case of some family emergency, such as one of my family members needing surgery.
    • I want to create sufficient funding for the NPO.
    • Somewhere between a modest upper-middle class lifestyle and the guy from ‘The Wolf of Wallstreet.’
    • Business strategy
    • Marketing/sales
    • Project management
    • Public speaking
  • What can you be great at?
    • Marketing/sales
    • Business strategy
    • Project management
    • Friend
    • Philanthropy/non-profit work
    • Teamwork
    • Public speaking

Step 2: Review and Identify Overlap.

  • Creativity and deep thinking are involved in all of the professional skills that I can be great at (my creativity led me to try marketing and strategy initially)
  • Excellence and success in my professional field(s) can create wealth
  • Doing the right thing and love overlap with philanthropy
  • Having a lot of money of my own can help fund my NPO
  • Meaningful work and philanthropy
  • Business strategy
  • Marketing/sales
  • Project management
  • Public speaking

Step 3: Harvest the ideas.

  • Based on overlaps, do you see anything that can be incorporated into what you do or how you work?
    • My passions for creativity, excellence, deep thought, and success, combined with economic needs/wants, tell me that I should pursue a career that involves marketing, business strategy, and/or project management.
    • I should work in companies and projects that I find meaningful, ethical, and beneficial to others.

Look at your answers carefully and consider as many ideas and overlaps as possible. Even if something you think is useless, writing it down anyway is good.

Next week, I will share my answers to key reflection questions. Building the reflection “muscle” is important as a leader. I will share my reflections for each step in the leadership development process.

Defining Personal Values For College Students – Eric’s Story

/0 Comments/in /by

Values I’m Eric Philippou, and I’m writing this blog as part of my summer internship at Metcalf & Associates, a leadership and management consulting firm. I am entering my final semester at T­he Ohio State University in the fall, majoring in Strategic Communication. I like marketing, and I plan to go to business school in a few years. I’m also on the varsity fencing team at Ohio State.

This summer, I am starting a blog that helps students find their life purposes, plus a step-by-step guide on how to bring this vision into reality. The information I am giving you is from a workbook written by a combination of college faculty and leadership development and executive coaching experts who make business executives very successful. This book will be published late in 2014. In this post, you will find your personal values. Throughout this blog, I will provide my own answers to the exercises as an example.

This is part two of the three-part Vision topic. My answers are in italics.

Checklist for personal values

Step 1: Define what you value most. Values shape the way we think, feel, and act in our daily lives. To effectively achieve your life goals, they must match your values. From this list, select your top ten most important values to living your perfect life.

List of Personal Values:

Values checklist

  • My top 10: integrity, love, expertise, excellence, meaningful work, creativity, freedom, influencing others, self-respect, order

Step 2: Elimination. Now, from your top ten, narrow your list down to your top five values. Now narrow it down to your top three.

  • Top 5: integrity, love, excellence, meaningful work, influencing others
  • Top 3: love, excellence, meaningful work

Step 3: Integration. From your top three values, ask yourself:

  • How would your life be different if those values were prominent and practiced more?
  • I would probably have better results in school, work, and personal relationships. If practiced earlier, like in high school, I may be at a different university or even a different area of study.
  • What does each value mean, exactly? What do you expect from yourself, even in difficult times?
  • Love: care for the people around me, especially for the people close to me. In difficult times, I would think of those closest to me and perhaps look to them for help or motivation.
  • Excellence: overall skill, expertise, brilliance, and high-quality performance. I expect myself to always pursue excellence in everything I do, especially in difficult times when it is needed the most.
  • Meaningful Work: the work I do excites me, and I look forward to going to work and doing it every day. In difficult times, I would like my work to be meaningful, and something I love to do, because it will push me to keep going and give me less incentive to quit.
  • Does the personal vision you outlined reflect those values?
  • Yes, as far as I can tell.
    • If not, should your personal vision be modified?
      • If not, should you reconsider your values?
  • Are you willing to create a life in which these values are paramount, and help an organization put those values into action?
  • Now that I see how it could benefit me, yes. The things holding me back from doing so seem less important, and almost silly, so I have no reason not to go forward with such a life.

Real-World Application

So you’ve narrowed down your values and determined how to integrate them into your life. Try something out: write down your top three values and tape them somewhere so that you see it a lot, and strictly live by those values every hour of every day for the next few days. After a few days, monitor any differences in your usual days and the last few days of acting on your values. I tried this, and I found myself to be more productive in my work, more vibrant during personal interactions, and overall very happy. Hopefully you’ll get similar results, and if you do, you know you picked the right values to live by.

In my next post, I will discuss how to put your refined vision into a realistic plan of action, and I’ll give you some reflection questions. At the end of it, you should have a concrete plan of action that you can implement almost immediately, and you’ll be well on your way to becoming a great leader and college student.

To become a more innovative leader, you can begin by taking our free leadership assessments and then enrolling in our online leadership development program.

Check out the companion interview and past episodes of Innovating Leadership, Co-creating Our Future, via iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify, Amazon Music, Audible,  iHeartRADIO, and NPR One.  Stay up-to-date on new shows airing by following the Innovative Leadership Institute LinkedIn.

If you are interested in receiving Eric’s ongoing blog series or our other articles by email, please sign up in the box on the right labeled Get Email Updates From Us.

Photo credite www:flickr.com banksy graffiti