WMBA 6010 Week 1 Management Self-Assessment Example

Scored High on Communication, Low on Delegation, and Wrong About One of Them: A Management Self-Assessment by a Localization Project Team Lead, With an Opening Discussion Post

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6010: Managing People and Promoting Collaboration

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Scored High on Communication, Low on Delegation, and Wrong About One of Them: A Management Self-Assessment by a Localization Project Team Lead, With an Opening Discussion Post

The Seat and the Instrument

I lead a team of seven project managers at Larkspur Localization, an invented translation and localization agency of about 70 people that serves as this course's case. Our project managers take a client's source files, such as software strings, device manuals or training videos, and move them through translation, review, desktop publishing and delivery in as many as twenty languages at once. Translators and reviewers sit in Lisbon and work as contractors; the desktop publishing team is in Manila; project managers and account staff are in Minneapolis. I was promoted into the lead role fourteen months ago after four years as a project manager, and I still carry three client accounts of my own.

For the self-assessment I used the Personal Assessment of Management Skills, the scored inventory at the front of Whetten and Cameron (2020), which asks managers to rate how often they show specific behaviors across areas such as self-awareness, managing stress, solving problems creatively, communicating supportively, motivating others, managing conflict, empowering and delegating, and building effective teams. Each behavior is rated on a six-point scale, and the area scores can be compared with those of other managers who have taken it.

What the Inventory Returned

Table 1

Area Scores From the Self-Assessment, With My Own Reading

Comparison groups are those published with the instrument; the scores and the record are composite.

Four of the six results match what I already suspected. Two do not, and those two are worth more attention than the four I agree with, because a self-assessment that only confirms what a manager believes has taught nothing.

Arguing With the Communication Score

My highest score was in supportive communication, and I believed it when I saw it. My written communication with clients is strong; three clients have mentioned my weekly status notes by name in renewal conversations. But the inventory asks about behaviors such as listening for the other person's meaning, describing problems rather than judging the person and owning my statements. Those are mostly behaviors of conversation, not writing.

When I looked at my one-on-one notes from the past quarter, a different picture appeared. In nine of the twenty meetings I recorded, I wrote down a solution before the project manager had finished describing the problem. Two members of my team, in a skip-level survey run by our director, said that I "jump to fixes." I had read those comments as a compliment about speed. Read against the inventory's items, they describe a manager who communicates well on paper and poorly in person.

There is a general reason to distrust my first reading. People's ratings of their own skills tend to correlate only modestly with objective measures or with others' ratings, and the gap is often widest where the skill itself involves reading others (Dunning et al., 2004). A high self-rating in supportive communication is exactly the result a manager with a blind spot would produce. I now treat that score as describing my writing and as a hypothesis, not a finding, about my conversations.

Arguing With the Delegation Score

My lowest score was in empowering and delegating. Here I think the inventory overstated the problem but pointed at a real one. By volume I delegate a great deal: every new project goes to a project manager within a day, and I approve fewer vendor quotes than my predecessor did. What the record shows instead is that I take work back. In the past six months I stepped into four projects after a client escalation and finished them myself, including one where the project manager had already drafted a reasonable recovery plan.

Whetten and Cameron (2020) distinguish handing off tasks from empowering people, which requires giving them the authority, information and confidence to finish the work their own way. My score is low for the right reason and described the wrong way. The fix is not to delegate more tasks but to stop reclaiming them under pressure, which is a narrower and more useful goal.

What I Will Do With the Results

Two changes follow. In one-on-ones, I will ask the project manager to finish describing the problem and to propose a first step before I say anything, and I will ask two team members in three months whether they notice a difference. I will ask about that one behavior rather than about my communication in general. Feedback does not improve performance automatically: in a large meta-analysis, over a third of feedback efforts made results worse, chiefly when they steered people to think about themselves rather than their tasks (Kluger & DeNisi, 1996). Asking whether I let people finish keeps the question on the task. On escalations, I will agree in advance with each project manager what would make me step in, and when a client escalates I will join the call as support while the project manager keeps the lead.

Opening Discussion Post

Hello, everyone. I lead seven project managers at a localization agency whose translators, publishers and managers work in three time zones. My self-assessment returned a top-quartile score in supportive communication and a bottom-quartile score in delegation. I think the first is wrong in an instructive way: it rewarded my writing and missed my habit of jumping to solutions in conversation, which two of my team members have named. My claim for this week is that managers who are strong writers are more likely to overrate their supportive communication, because the inventory's items are about conversation while their reputation comes from written work.

Has anyone else found a high score that did not survive a look at your own records, or do you think self-ratings are more accurate than the research suggests?

References

Dunning, D., Heath, C., & Suls, J. M. (2004). Flawed self-assessment: Implications for health, education, and the workplace. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 5(3), 69-106. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1529-1006.2004.00018.x

Kluger, A. N., & DeNisi, A. (1996). The effects of feedback interventions on performance: A historical review, a meta-analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory. Psychological Bulletin, 119(2), 254-284. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.119.2.254

Whetten, D. A., & Cameron, K. S. (2020). Developing management skills (10th ed.). Pearson.