Non Commissioned Officer Academy Vision Statement

The Non-Commissioned Officer Academy (NCOA) has been a positive environment in which my leadership skills have been honed, and the vision of both who I am now and who I want to become has been brought into focus. This is partially due to the professional leadership development plan (PLDP) module entries that I have accomplished throughout the course. This Vision Statement will articulate the leader that I embody now, encompass each of the PLDP entries and tie them together to give me a clear roadmap on how I will improve over the next 3 to 5 years, and also explain how I want to be perceived as a leader—to my subordinates, peers and supervisors. To begin with, my focus when accomplishing the PLDP module entries was to identify areas that

This will keep me on track as I work on the targeted identified areas of leadership development. First off, the first area of improvement is to further develop my transformational leadership ability—specifically in the area of intellectual stimulation (Module 3). I will do this by consistently soliciting the knowledge and feedback of subordinates, fellow officers and higher-ranking Commanders in order to take in the knowledge each echelon has to offer so that I can increase my own understanding of my fellow Airmen as well as ensure each contributor understands I value their expertise in how I accomplish my job. Improving my intellectual stimulation ties directly into becoming more cognitively flexible, or transitioning my way of thinking to a more knowledge or strategic base, rather than just on people (Module 5). I can improve this daily by simply allowing myself to look at the needs of the Air Force and missions—while still focusing on the needs of the maintainers and their work schedules, but simultaneously creating courses-of-actions (COAs) that provide accommodations for subordinates, fellow junior officers and senior Commanders. Moving from the concept of cognitive flexibility, we can see the relationship of being a flexible leader directly correlates to the

The final piece of my leadership improvement stems from creating a balanced situational climate in which includes not allowing my judgement of people or situations to be driven by perception (Module 8). It’s imperative that I continue to work over the next 3 to 5 years to eradicate this through solicitation of feedback from all Airman that I interact with if I am displaying this attribute. I will want to know from my subordinates, peers and supervisors if they see me going into a situation or talking about people before gathering all of the facts. This will be the final piece that ties together the leader I am striving to be—a leader that is full-spectrum transformational, that is fully adaptive and flexible, that is a self-managing follower, that promotes a situational climate, and also promotes an environment based on facts and not