In your reflection blog, consider how difficult it must be for a leader to grow into a person who can lead a system-wide change effectively. Perhaps you remember leaders who attempted system wide interventions but failed because they were not capable of pulling it all together. On the other hand, you may know leaders who were able to do what you thought would be impossible. From your point of view now, what is required for a leader to be successful?
I consider myself to be a participative leader. As I note in a past post on
Supportive Behavior,
participative leadership is a managerial style that invites input from employees on all company decisions. This occurs when staff is given pertinent information regarding company issues, and a majority vote determines the course of action the company will take (Yukl, 2010). I prefer my coworkers be in the same page before we move forward with any plan. We may have reservations behind closed doors, but my hope is we can come to enough common ground that those reservations are minimal. There’s nothing worse than moving forward without someone fully dedicated to the plan.
The Apple video focuses on the negative comments about people that were the catalyst for a positive environment. They were different, thinkers that worked their way to the top while being able to adapt to their environment. Despite disbelievers, they never lose sight of the objective.
I am sure everybody thinks they are a good leader, but in comparison to where I have been in my leadership training and where I am now, I believe I am much better than the average supervisor, and this is because of a lot of mistakes I have made in the past. for instance, when I work in corporate event management, I worked with a lot of people who were quite determined. a lot of them went to the local university, Temple University, and were majoring in hotel and tourism management. They knew they were doing work that would support their career in the future, and one is to make your they were securing good contacts for references and recommendations. They are not my problem.
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For some reason, it seems like those with the most responsibilities
work harder than those who have absolutely nothing going on. |
However, there was one staff member who never wanted to do work. He was a college dropout, wanted to pursue rap and developing his own clothing line, and was preparing to become a father to one of his two girlfriends’ fetuses. All he ever did was come to work late, shoot the breeze in the kitchen and do his work as slowly as possible. He would even try to negotiate with me at the end of the night to close the office as slowly as possible: “You’re hourly, too. We could all use more money!” A good worker who was close to him was one of the best workers we had, so I started by complementing the friend in his presence: “Great job guys; ____, as always, top notch stuff.” I wanted him to feel free to change rather than being coerced (Brown, 2011). I tried coaching him: “What do you like about this job? What are you getting from it that can help with with your dreams of becoming a successful music and clothing line mogul?” He complained that he didn’t make enough money, and I told him, “get here on time, do your work efficiently, and I’ll make sure you’re in the running for that raise.” I could not get a good month straight out of him without ½ hour latenesses, and during this period, he began inviting his pregnant girlfriend to sit in our office during closes. After a month, I was sure we could do better without him.
After a long discussion with the other supervisors, it was clear that he was not a favorite of the staff, but we kept him because of his upcoming parenthood. I simply do not believe this is a good reason to keep bad people, but it would seem that procreation, no matter how unplanned, is a possible precursor to better responsibility commitment. In addition, a supervisor tried to inspire him in his evaluation by saying that this - that he was only being kept because of his future child and that he should keep this in mind as he worked - thus, his reasoning for lateness and sloth became his pregnant girlfriend. I was quite sore about this, and I placed him on night shifts as little as possible.I did not know what else to do at that point, but looking back, I could have requested probation for his multiple latenesses, his lack of professionalism and failure to complete work in a timely manner. From there, I could have drafted an improvement plan and used his actions from then to gauge if he was meeting standards or still failing to provide adequate service to the company.
I am not sure which one is harder to deal with: having one bad apple or having mostly bad apples. i personally believe, if there are one or two people slacking, it’s a personal problem with them; however, if they entire staff (or classroom) is failing or lagging behind, a leader must reflect on their personal leadership style and training of the staff to see where the downfall occurred and how to fix the dynamic.
At a job where I supervised paraprofessionals in a boarding school, only 2-3 employees were average to exceptional. The Resident Assistant serves as the liaison between student and staff of the school. Resident Assistants enhance each resident student's experience by providing information, direction, guidance, friendship, and support. Such interactions occur within the context of creating community. There are informal day-to-day contacts with residents as well as formal floor meetings and programs, and office hours supervised by a professional staff member during evening hours every day and additional midday hours on the weekends, where RAs ran shuttles to local grocery stores and shopping plazas. Just about all of the staff showed up to work late, dressed inappropriately for work, did not do rounds, avoided engagement with the students and failed to do programming.
Our year started off as everyone getting along with me, which was important to me as an implant to a very new area with a different culture. I have strong work ethic, and when I realized my team was not as eager as I was to do the work, I became disenchanted. Staff would switch work days, and not show up for their switched shift, or show up late. This led to some employees working a cumulative of 5-6 more days a month than other workers. I shared responsibility over supervision with five others, who collectively felt that the job did not pay enough to formally document and retrain for the behavior. After I was notified that shuttles were not being run and RAs were skipping rounds to do their hair, I began to note the actions of individual staff members.
Once again, I decided if inspiration, rewarding the best, and one-on-one talks about personal concerns were not effective, and my colleagues were not going to take action, I’d discuss doing so with my supervisor; however, after his display of apathy was noted with regards to difficulty in getting replacement staff (again, the job did not pay well), I decided to pick work shifts with a majority of “good” workers on it. I also offered to work a greater amount of the more work intensive day shifts instead of night shifts. After about a month and a half, some staff noted that they never worked shifts with me. Once again, I expressed my concerns with their work ethic and how much work was done with particular individuals. leaders know how to communicate effectively. This means you need to cater your communication to the people you’re working with. I should have taken the approach of asking how shifts without my supervision were going, and I would have discovered why they were asking about my absence. I would have been told, as I was from better workers, that working on shifts with lazy staff and an unattentive supervisor seemingly resulted in more student write-ups, which then lead to even more work. What some workers hear when i responded to their inquiry was, “I don’t like working with you, ___, because you don’t take your job seriously. Change and I will work with you.” Apparently, this was not taken well and those who did not perform well became offended. They would say the power went to my head. They did not feel that i had a right to evaluate their work, as I only supervised 2 RAs outside of office hours.
Leaders are proactive and do not stop until he or she is satisfied with the result. In retrospect, I should have suggested monthly or bimonthly formal evaluations, but instead of supervisors evaluating staff, allow supervisees to evaluate each other. Perhaps even the students should have been able to do an evaluation of the service provided during the night shifts, to show the inconsistency of service between workers. Also, a chart for accomplishments may have provided a better representation of the problem of unmet expectations. An effective leader possesses a certain drive to want to take charge and action in getting things done and accomplishing a task/goal. Instead of circumventing the poorer workers, I should have worked with them MORE, to change their understanding of how the work should be done. I would have loved to instill a staff member of the month award as well, so that employees who went above and beyond knew they were recognized for their sacrifices.
Though this program and through time at other positions, I’ve learned how integral hiring the right people is to team success.
According to Kreitner and Kinicki (2013), the common themes in the varying definitions of leadership include that it is a process between leaders and followers, it provides influence, it occurs at multiple levels in any organization, and it focuses on goal accomplishment. Past performance is such a good indicator of future success. Therefore, for myself, I’ve learned how to take my negative work experiences and see them as growing pains and learning experiences. I enjoy that my supervisory position presently allows for me to pick my direct supervisors from a pool of previous workers for the department but at a lower level; I can spend the entire year looking at the work of my supervisee’s supervisees and seeing who would be best for the next level position if it becomes available. When I chose one of my present supervisees, I looked at all of his evaluations and concerns from the year before, and asked about those incidents and successes during his interview for his present position. I was able to start off the year with what i wanted him to improve on and what would not fly in his new position. We’ve been able to have an amazing relationship because there weren’t many surprises about what I wanted, how I worked (my outgoing supervisees gave him the rundown) and what he needed to change to be successful with me. In the beginning of the year, i also did a SWOT inventory with both of my direct supervisees (something i do not necessarily enjoy but I believe gives workers the opportunity to start the process of goal-setting that I want them to use for self-evaluation later in the semester) and encouraged them to give me a list of their expectations of me as a supervisor.
Brown (2011) notes that leaders “will no longer be seen as grand visionaries, all-wise decision makers, and iron-fisted disciplinarians”, so it’s important that those receiving leadership are getting it the right way. I feel that it's fair for supervisees to evaluate their boss and I personally find my workers’ evaluations to be more meaningful than my supervisor’s. it takes a certain person to become a successful leader who is inspiring, motivating and leads by example. I’ve now learned that millennials are not inspired to work by money. They can get money elsewhere, but they also may feel stuck where they are and need to get pushed out to move on. But that should not be MY goal! You have to be able to connect the work getting done now to what people want to do in the future. Consequently, I think they help me gain skills I know I need to have to success; I am unlearning some of the habits that I used as a student to get work done and realizing they may not have been as helpful then either. You need to care about them and inspire them; sometimes the inspiration needs to come before the hard work does. If millennials think they are doing a great job, they’ll actually start trying to live up to expectations. Lastly, I’ve recognized I need my workers as much as they need me, and perhaps I need them more. It’s a lot of time and money to replace someone! They have to see you as a viable resource in accomplishing their goals, and when they have a use for you, they will respect you and do what they need to do.
References
Brown, D. (2011). An experiential approach to organizational development (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Kreitner, R. & Kinicki, A. (2013). Organizational Behavior (10th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Yukl, G. (2010). Leadership in Organizations, 8th edition. Prentice Hall.
