Essence of Leadership
Table of Contents
1 Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………. 2
2 Literature Review……………………………………………………………………………………… 2
2.1 Essence of Leadership……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 2
2.1.1 Motivation……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 4
2.1.2 Groups and teams……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 5
2.1.3 Transformational leadership……………………………………………………………………………………… 6
2.1.4 Emotional leadership………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 7
3 Organizational Leadership Behaviour…………………………………………………………… 8
3.1 Background……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 8
3.2 Leadership within the company……………………………………………………………………………………. 9
4 Leader Behavioural Analysis………………………………………………………………………. 10
4.1 Leader Adam………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 10
4.2 Leader John…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 10
4.3 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 11
5 Lessons learnt…………………………………………………………………………………………… 11
6 Reference Notes & Bibliography………………………………………………………………… 13
7 Appendix………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 15
7.1 Appendix Maslows Hierarchy of Needs……………………………………………………………………… 15
7.2 Appendix……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 15
7.3 Appendix Transformational and transactional leader analysis………………………………. 16
1 Introduction
This paper describes critical theories and models of organisations and how they work including impact on people.
It also contains my own reflections from my carrier as well as balancing those against existing scientific studies and models in the leadership area.
In the end, an analysis of the existing company I work for and over 2 leaders view that work in the organisation, as well as lessons learnt to be used to develop my own leadership.
2 Literature Review
2.1 Essence of Leadership
Leadership has been described by many scientists as well as self-learnt leaders. It is not an easy task to describe leadership and I agree with Bass (2008) when he claims that there are a lot of definitions of leadership as many may be as there are persons who tried to define the concept. Proofs of this statement are just to search on the internet for “leadership”, and see on all hits that come up.
One way of describing leadership could be that a leader inspires, motivate, drive and follow up, or as Robbins & Judge (2009, p. 419) describes it ‘the ability to influence a group toward the achievement of a vision’. The challenge today within leadership is the difficulty to be the one that changes people’s behaviours and values. And we need to understand that a leader of today has a legacy of previous not so good leadership, such as the Transactional leadership (Appelo, 2012).
The Scientific Management (Bass, 2008) comes mainly from Frederick Taylor and his theories, created at the end of 1800 and the beginning of 1900. It was the start of the era of a more modern management. Taylor saw the inefficient or ill-directed movements of men as a national loss. He tried to kill the old way of working which was based mainly on personal management to a new way of working based on scientific management. Taylor said that a group of ordinary men could be learnt by following a scientific method to outperform the old way of working. Taylor tries to overthrow the previous management that worked by the more common sense and replace it with actual timed observations. This was the first step towards the best practice-way of working, and that should in the end also improve productivity etc. Taylor thought that this will create a spirit of hearty cooperation between workers and management. He also believed that the workload would share equally among the workers (Kreitner, 2009).
The only good thing I think Taylor ever achieved was maybe the concept of breaking down a complex task into a number of small subtasks, and then optimizing subtasks. This concept has been used in methodologies such as Kanban and Scrum (Kniberg & Skarin, 2009). But the dark side of Taylor’s theories was the “dehumanize” the workers. Today we probably lift our eyebrows when we read about his statement; that the worker could not work properly as the worker was incapable of fully understanding this science. Taylor meant that with command and control management would be the enabler for the worker to do their job better and quicker than they otherwise could do (Kreitner, 2009).
Appelo (2012) wrote that this Scientific Management style has been adopted by engineers more or less since then, and this style is used in many organizations even today.
It was first in the 1980s that researcher became interested in the emotional and symbolic aspects of leadership (Yukl, 2010).
So today we, fortunately, see a contradiction view from Taylor’s Scientific Management, as this way of seeing people as the greatest assets now change into that the people are our greatest liability. And Drucker (2002) also mentioned that the traditional workforce was the previous worker serves the system has changed when we today have increased knowledge workers. Now the system must serve the workers instead. At the same time, Collins (2001) suggested that the people are not the companies’ most important assets in a journey against world class, though the right people are. So it just not to fill the organization with people, they should have the right profiles also. I will come back to this important part when I describe the company I work within.
To be successful in a leadership role you need to realize that human beings are different, as well as the situations you confronted by are different and that there are also your feelings, that you as a leader, need to be managed in a proper way (Goleman, 2000). Unfortunately, many companies just let people undergo leadership training programs without really checking or making sure if leadership is something that really fit the candidate’s values in life (Goleman, 2000). So a sense of urgency would apply to those companies if they had made the mistake to involve people that could not or will not move themselves into next level of leadership development with there full commitment and motivation. And in the matter of fact, it is, unfortunately, a mismatch between what sciences know and what businesses do (Appelo, 2012).
As to become a great leader is very much the same as the process to become an integrated human being, and that need to be the focus of the leadership candidates (Collins, 2001). Today we also need to include awareness, i.e. know what others want. The leaders of today need to stand as patterns and archetypes so the leaders below them hierarchy wise will follow them (Goleman, 2000). The new leaders need to increase feedback so they know what people think about them, which in the next step increase humility if the leaders know Emotional Intelligence (Goleman, 2000).
Collins (2001) believes that every organization could improve and improve their results to world-class level if they deliberately use the framework and thoughts that already today exist.
Collins (2001) point out that processes exist but are not followed or worked by. Competence is in place but not utilized or even the wrong type of competence. Management is there but not so much leadership.
And it is all about that people must get committed to our vision before we start the discussion on what we need to do. At the same time, it is very important that we keep ourselves to the principles when we choose our employees, to be able to transform a mediocre enterprise to a world-class company (Collins, 2001). If the wrong people are in the seats, the change will never happen.
Rewards systems should not try to make the wrong people to do the right things, instead make it possible for the right people to get on-board, and then try to keep them on-board (Collins, 2001).
Collins (2001) also states; With the disciplined people there is no need for hierarchies. With disciplined thinking, there is no need for bureaucracy. With disciplined action, there is no need for excessive controlling systems.
I agree that we often tend to solve problems with a new it system or similar when the real problem matter of fact is the way we lead and manage our companies.
2.1.1 Motivation
Motivation increases the morale of the workforce and that turns into efficiency and effectiveness of the people. Motivation could come from autonomy (i.e. urge to direct our own mind), mastery (i.e. get better and better) and purpose (i.e. the urge to serve something large than ourselves).
In immature organisations, if something goes wrong, it immediately becomes that one person who is fully responsible and owns the problem, and therefore shared responsibility will disappear at once. Sure punishment is also kind of motivating, but if one could just do enough to escape a punishment, then his motivation disappears.
Motivation is the most effective tool for organizations e.g. when they need to meet deadlines. There seem to be five existing and proven motivation theories, that has most influential and practical effect; Maslow’s hierarchy theory (see appendix 7.1), Victor Vroom expectancy theory, Edwin Lock’s goal setting theory and Herzberg’s two-factor theory and job enrichment theory (Kreitner, 2009). But still, those are maybe the proven motivation theories I like to look into Lars Kolind’s thoughts around motivation and how to lead.
Kolind (2009) thinks that we should create motivation by values. And that is the reason of the companies should be more than just making money. It should be a company where it exist a partnership between the co-workers and a network of suppliers, customers and external partners. It should be a cooperating organisation with a value based leadership.
Kolind (2009) takes up one example of values from a medical company. Their values were; Innovative – we have the courage to be different, Passionate – we never give up, Responsible – we do the right thing. But these values are not specific for only this company; it could in the matter of fact be applied to most companies. And if these are so common values, how should people who working in this company feel every day on the job? He (Kolind, 2009) continues; as long as we do not put real value into our core values, it will mean va ery limited impact on motivation. A better value would be for example Unimerco’s value system; ‘Unimerco not accept layoffs as a way to maintain net profit’ (Kolind, 2009, p. 105). So when this company face problems they try to solve it in other ways than layoffs. They maybe even ask the workforce to reduce their working hours or even salary to save money. Unimerco’s definition of their values is really strong and has worked this way for decades. This has resulted in an unparalleled loyalty and team spirit among all employees. So maybe values drive the best motivation?
Many companies have a culture and some have discipline, but only very few companies that has a culture that is based on discipline (Collin, 2001).
2.1.2 Groups and teams
Maybe we could define groups versus teams by summarize Belbin (2006) research to; the group is a collective of people without any stronger relations. And people that had the possibility to create relations with each other and have a common goal have the foundation to create a high performance team.
Groups and teams are influenced by their culture differences, and for example, Asians have a high value of the team norms. Often they speak in terms of; we. In Japan for example their approach are very supportive if a team member will not succeed with his task and team will probably help the team member to correct the problem.
Mole (1993, p. 155) wrote that ‘Western culture values the ultimate superiority of individual over the group’ and he also mention that the Japanese culture is a contradiction. The loyalty is to the team and the team members have no self-interest other than that they want to be successful.
Belbin (2006) theory about the different team roles is very interesting and it is also possible to direct connect to reality. As a leader ,you sometimes have the fortunate to select your own team, but mostly you will inherit a team from a previous manager. So as Belbins (2006) himself point out the theoretical situation where you should have all of the team styles in the group is maybe a utopia, but it definitely something to strive for and it is definitely possible to design team anyway. If you have the opportunity to start up a group from beginning it is important that you as a leader do recruit the same type of team member as yourself (Belbin, 2006), as by doing so that team will most certainly not become a high performance team.
So the situation mainly is that you inherit a group and then try to find a good way of collaborate in an optimum way. As the different team roles could be working against each, e.g. a ‘Chairman along with two dominant Shapers both above average in mental ability. (The CH will almost certainly fail to get the job of Chairman.)’ (Belbin, 2006, p. 82). The leader’s job is to design the group and to make them understand the positive and need of variance in a team to achieve better results.
When you create or design a team it is good to know the 3 strongest team models in every person, as this will support you in the building of a team. So if one person has Shaper as the first role, Completer-Finisher as the second and Chairman as the third. The team member will adapt depending if it exist another e.g. Shapers in the team that is stronger than them, and the team member will take the next role instead, in this specific case, Completer-Finisher.
Today’s staff have a higher level of education than before which means that today’s leaders will mainly lead knowledge workers. These knowledge workers have great insights and access to much more information via the internet as any humans ever had before. Therefore leading those teams is shifting from previous manage and control to facilitate how these employees could add value to their organization (Appelo, 2011). These teams will need another kind of leadership to be able to look beyond the short-term performances and goal achievements (Appelo, 2011). The leaders for those teams need to have an integrated approaches and clear long-term vision. They need to overcome several of issues and adapt fast different changes. So leaders tomorrow need to increase performance through motivation and moral enhancement (Kolind, 2006). The challenge is to shift employee’s behaviour or values and to do so only excellent leaders will be able to be successful in a shorter perspective. Excellent leaders in my definition are the transformational leader (Bass, 2008) or ‘level 5 leaders’ (Collin, 2001).
So I totally agree that leaders need to adapt to different leadership approaches during our way of leading. Hersey and Blanchard (Bass, 2008) believed that leaders should adjust their leadership styles as the people and the specific situation requires, what they called ‘Situational Leadership’. The Situational Leadership model implies that if you use the right leadership style in the right situations, the staff will grow and also be mature in abilities and confidence. So if the leader is willing to work with the development of the people they will get a more mature team in time. And if the leader continues to be sensitive of the different situation and apply the correct style, the leader could then reduce the directive ness in his leadership and trust the people in the team in a much higher level (Bass, 2008).
High performance teams are not easy to create so it is important to keep them, because it is not about markets, technical competition or the product. It is about finding the right people and keep enough many of those people with the correct calibre (Colins, 2001) to achieve great results.
2.1.3 Transformational leadership
Bennis (1997) said “I used to think that running an organization was equivalent to conducting a symphony orchestra. But I don’t think that’s quite it; it’s more like jazz. There is more improvisation”. And I agree that this is what we today see in the companies in a much larger scale than before (Appelo, 2012).
Excellent leadership will especially play a critical role in our future companies, but even that scientist state that the old Transactional Leaders still exist in the companies, but are not needed today (Bass, 2008). Bass (1999, p. 9) point out that a transactional leader is more of what your country can do for you, and the transformational leader stresses what you can do for your country.
So what is the difference between the Transactional and Transformational leaders? Mainly the focus in the leadership role, as Transactional leaders focus on supervising, organizes structure and group performance. These leaders focus also on find faults and errors in their staff. Transactional leadership is a leadership style in which the people is lead by; rewards and punishments. Transactional leaders approach is not interested in changing the future; they more into keep things as it is, i.e. the same!
So I could only see a need of Transactional Leadership when you have a crisis and emergency situations. But on the other hand, if you are a Transformational Leader you will never or very seldom get into that situation, as your employee will foresee that and do everything in their power to mitigate and take away the risks (Kotter, 1996).
Transactional leadership started somewhere during the 1960th, and at that time it seems to be a modern way of leading. Gary Hamel (2008) talks about this situation have been intact more or less since then. The leadership development within the companies has move with a snails pace, but for example, technology and other development have done huge loops ahead. So he thinks it is time that companies should leave the previous Transactional leadership, and move on to a more modern leadership style.
Kolind (2009) wrote that companies will not survive if they continue having poor service, killing bureaucracy and lousy leadership. He criticise everything from high schools to union that they need to be more innovative.
And what happens when we today see the pace of development changes extremely fast if you compare with previously developments? Development cycles within software companies have been 24 months and today have become 3 months, mainly driven by game developing companies. This would not been possible if these companies moved into an agile way of working. In these organisations the leader’s role are totally different from what we previous are use to (Appelo, 2011). Appelo (2011) do not believe in the traditional hierarchy and linear progression, where you also find most of the existing transactional leaders.
Transformational Leaders focus on morale, performance and motivation of the employees (Yukl, 2010). They include people instead of exclude and connecting the employees via a collective identity in the organization. Yukl (2010) write that transformational leaders are seen as a role model for employees that will inspires the employees and makes them take ownership and interested in their tasks. And these leaders also challenging the employees to take accountability for their work, and teach them to see the strengths and weaknesses in the team. So these leaders focus on the team, not the individual (Yukl, 2010). So the Transformational leader aligns employees with actions that enhance their performance via developing the people so they take the right decision without the leader’s involvement (Yukl, 2010).
Jim Collins (2001, p. 20) describes Level 5 leaders as ‘Building enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will’. I see a lot of similarities between Transformational Leaders and Level 5 leaders, such as they both look at the vision or the larger goal and not focus on their own ego or self-interest.
2.1.4 Emotional leadership
Goleman (2000) refer to many studies that have shown that the most effective leaders switch flexibly among the leadership styles when it is needed. So the more styles a leader exhibits, the better (Goleman, 2000). He explains how high-impact leaders operate via the analogy of a golf pro that use his “gut feeling” when he facing a challenge, use the right club and stylish use the tool to work. Bennis & Nanus (1997) state that the previous USA president Jimmy Carter was probably the best-informed president but still his way of communicating the overall meaning was not received properly, hence people found him difficult to understand.
The Emotional Intelligence (EI) is very important for a modern leader. According to (Goleman, 2000), it includes self-awareness (i.e. knowing your feelings and use them to guide and what your rational minds tell you), manage your emotions (i.e. when you go through what you first feel and not act in affection, are you going through stress, will you say something that you afterwards regret. Then motivation, could you focus on your task and goals without any emotional disturbance), empathy (i.e. recognizes other people’s emotions and feelings by looking at their face, body language or voice) and social skill (i.e. how you handle relationships, can you handle conflicts, be the person people like to work with). See also appendix 7.2.
Anchor (2005) said that; ‘Leaders that is charismatic have components of charisma that is confidence, high emotional intelligence, persuasion, presence – mindfulness’. Good leadership has nothing to do with high intelligence, because what is valuable is high emotional intelligence (Anchor, 2005). Imagine the benefit to work with a leader that has the ability of emotional competencies; tuning into the feeling we deal with, handle disagreements, causing flow to our current work.
Anchor (2005) state that Transcendental Charisma is the good side and lack of ego is called transformative charismatic leadership, and he continues to describe the Egocentric Charisma as the dark side of a High Self-esteem personality, which lack of humility and really decreases perceived leadership effectiveness. Level 4 leaders (Collins, 2001) ambitions are for the self and when they look into the mirror when thing gone good, they praise themselves and when something gone wrong they look out through the window and blame the people instead.
The level 5 leader creates more charisma (Collins, 2001) and the ambitions are for the company and work for the companies ideas, not there own, they deflect praise and accept blame. When they look in the mirror they accept things are wrong and when they look out through the window they see all the wonderful things that happen and occur out there.
Anchor (2005) state that (cited in Csikszentmihalyi, 1996) Transcendental Charisma produces flow that increase with 33% improvements at work.
Level 5 leader always focus on people first, then strategy (Collins, 2001). They make everyone feel extremely valuable, by beginning very focus on the person. They have high awareness (i.e. see and understand what others want). They are the role model, patterns and archetypes in the company who increase feedback. If the feedback increases, you know what people think about you – which in the next step increase humility (Anchor, 2005).
Goleman (2000) explains how to become more of an EI leader: meditation makes us become more tuned to our feelings, desires, and increase the self-discipline across the board. Avoid emotional hi-jacking as your emotions dictate what your response is to your actions. Use present language, i.e. how children learn and recognize patterns of intuitive judgement by study leaders is his advice.
3 Organizational Leadership Behaviour
3.1 Background
My employer (the company) is a large global hi-tech engineering company with more than 100 year of history. Its employees have a legacy of include a lot of brainpower. Part of that is mainly that the Human Resource department recruits those kinds of profiles. In my view, this has a no bigger impact of the company, but as the company grew larger the pressure became heavier on the leaders.
As Bass (2008, p. 135) wrote ‘generally, more intelligent people are likely to be more task-competent and emerge as leaders, regardless of the situation’. But today we face a problem and the statement ‘Many bright, able, and technically proficient individuals fail as leaders because they lack interpersonal competence’ (Bass, 2008, p. 135) has been a truth that hurt the company.
The company has many task-specialists in its organizations that have been promoted to leader roles without leadership assessment, education or training. Unfortunately, that is why many leaders within the organization focus mostly on delivering results nowadays. The company is now moving a lot of its operations into India where excellent leadership is decreasing radically (Chavan & Chavan, 2011). So will the company produce excellent leaders?
3.2 Leadership within the company
During the years, different top management who ran the company had different leadership styles, which are mainly transactional. The second last top manager used a slogan: Know your number, Simplify, Walk the extra mile, Customer first, Speed and Quality.
Goleman (2012) also agree that high-tech and technology companies are highly develop on the IQ side, but are much undeveloped on the social side. In these companies there are a huge problem such as a good leadership will need Emotional Intelligence to lead the teams and manage technical discussions as well as the social ability to catalyst the work efficient (Goleman, 2005).
In the company, I see a lot of engineers who often are promoted to leader roles, without any leadership training or assessment, as the main focus are on technical results and tasks. I previously had a manager, which had a PhD in engineering science, where the manager’s leadership style was clearly Transactional Leadership and focused a lot on the command and control management. The manager didn’t use coaching style; instead, he held a very hierarchic leadership style approach. Therefore instead I did avoid communicating with him unless I really needed. Instead, I lead more or less my own department by transformational leadership. I could probably try to take the discussion with him to convince him to use a better leadership style, but I often think about what Steven Covey referring to what Albert Einstein observed, ‘The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them’ (Covey, 2009, p. 48).
Another Australian manager in the same company had a leadership style that was; ‘throw the employees out in the deep water and see if they manage to swim to the shore’. Still, this manager had a lot of knowledge in leadership theorizes, but he didn’t use these knowledge in his daily leadership work. Probably he also was lacking of Emotional Intelligence. As Mole (1993, p. 103) state ‘Managers aspire to be effective, decisive and tough under the motto ‘managers have a right to manage’’.
I agree and have seen the same as Achor (2005) describes, that there has been a long period of male domination in America, where the jungle fighter manager receiving all the rewards. But now, because of globalization and information technology, the virtuosos of interpersonal skills will be the future leaders of the corporate world. Leadership is not about domination, it is about persuading people to work towards a common goal. But many managers still use the old management strategy by using people’s build-in fear and thereby have them under control. ‘American bosses are not generally skilled or experienced in dealing with the argument or open disagreement from their subordinates’ (Mole, 1993, p. 147), but this is also used in other cultures and counties.
Since a couple of years, we got another leadership style that hasn’t been in the company before, at least not visible before. The new top manager comes from within the company and has one focus: to find the right leaders in or for the company. By that, I also think he will succeed to create a capability, better organizational culture and leadership development of employees and teams (Bettridge & Outhwaite, 2012).
The top manager first change in 2009 talked a lot about You, Me, and We. And by just expressing that signal to the organisation: You (employees) come first, Me (as a leader) and We (as the company) are the most important parts to start a change and hopefully make the company successful in the future. Now the top manager comes with the slogan: Brain, Heart and Guts, i.e. think, feel and trust your gut feeling. This is clearly a huge change and very different from previous top manager’s approach. I like to think it is a new paradigm and also including a top manager that stands for transformational leadership. It will take time, and the question is; will we have the time it takes?
4 Leader Behavioural Analysis
In order to protect the true identity of those leaders I interviewed, alias names were given in this paper. Please see the appendix 7.3.
4.1 Leader Adam
He thinks that an excellent leader someone that beliefs in leadership. And he also mentions several times during the interview that you as a leader need to have the courage and keep to your principles. Collins (2001) also mentions that leaders should be principled, but not reckless. Consistently apply the same tough standards at all levels continually, especially among senior managers. I feel that Adam is a very strong leader regarding his principles, but does maybe to strong sometimes. At the same time, this could create a trust from his employees as they know what he stands for. Collins (2001) also point out that if you keep your best employees and they feel safe it means that these best employees does not need to be worried about loosing their jobs and instead can concentrate fully on the job.
Adams passion in his leadership is planning, organizing, coaching and setting up challenges for his employees. For me I think he has a mixture of transactional and transformational leadership, but that he, well averring of it, moving away from transactional into a more transformational leadership style. At the same time, he works in an organisation that has transactional leadership as a base in leadership’s styles. He has a flare of command and control leadership style still, but I think he will turn into the good side of leadership. To change your self is very difficult, and as Covey (2009) pointed out that it is like a space rocket which represent the change should leave earth which represent old habits. It take a lot of energy and power in the beginning to get out of the gravity from earth, but when you finally reached the space it is very easy to operate.
Adam talks a lot about trust and that this is the key for employees to feel if they should be able to perform well (Covey, 2009). He also sees that a many managers and even his own manager try to keep the status quo. And that probably come from the simple fact that they don’t want any turbulence and discussions they can’t handle. In other words Maslows (Bass, 2008) fight or flight theory, and in this specific case flight reactions. But that will not lead the company forward as Collins (2001) state, if the wrong people get aboard there will be no change.
4.2 Leader John
Excellent leadership for him is three things; to be clear, positive and supportive. During the interview, he mentions the words like feelings, grow, trust, openness and fair play (Goleman, 2012). So in my opinion he has a good emotional intelligence. I also think he has a good level of transformational leadership style but I sense also little to much of “what’s in it for me” to be honest (Collins, 2001). Although no one is perfect and I see and hear a lot of good supportive actions from his leadership.
He also thinks that good leadership begins with a clear vision (Bass, 2008) that the employees could work from. People want to perform, but to do so they need to understand the reason behind it and exactly what we going to do.
John has a very curious nature and therefore he often reacts when e.g. people during a conversation suddenly get a lot of energy. He knows that that energy come from somewhere and he is interested to understand why it happens and the reason. He also thinks that a victory is always best if it is shared with the team as it could show that the group finally became a team (Belbin, 1999).
4.3 Conclusion
These two leaders are not representative for the company unfortunately. It is a more transactional leadership style in this company they work at, and that Collins (2001) describe as one genius with 1000 co-workers, where you first define the vision and then recruits the most skilled to fulfil the vision.
But at the same time, it also shows that transformational leaders exist and they could survive in that environment, although their carrier will probably not be very good. Worst case scenario is if these few transformational leaders leave as you then loose the embryo to build a new culture with transformational leaders.
Where Collins (2001) point out that you first choose the people then the strategy. I think that is a very nice thought, but at the same time very difficult as a company with so long history could not easily just turn around that legacy. I totally agree with Collins (2001) when he say that if you get the right people in the seats that only thing you then need to do is look for the best road to world class performance.
5 Lessons learnt
A reflection that I done during this module around the essence of leadership, is that I am very passionate in transformational leadership. Unfortunately, I do not receive the level of support for my type of leadership style that is need in the existing organization. I believe organizational supports for your type of leadership are very important to be a successful leader. I don’t feel or see that happening and I consider my fight or flight behaviour (Bass, 2008). So far it seems that I have used the fight behaviour, but that hasn’t been beneficial for my carrier.
I have also gained a lot of knowledge and understanding around the essence of leadership. Sometimes a real eye opener when I e.g. analyse both the organizational leadership and the 2 leaders. Leadership is not an easy area, but maybe that’s the reason find it so fascinating. How much you ever read theories, understand models or study reality you would always find something new to learn.
So the lessons learnt are that I need to;
Follow the existing leadership culture or leave (Collins, 2001).
If you recruited and do not share the companies values, you probably do not have a good carrier – if you not in the top management.
Communicate clearly and with Situational Leadership (Bass, 2008).
Be clear in my communication, expectations and vision. Secure that all employees understand exactly where we going and the purpose.
See the individual in the team and let them understand the benefits of a team (Belbin, 2006).
Design teams (Belbin, 2006) and especially when you recruit new members to think about their team roles, or even move members (Collins, 2001) if they are not the right ones.
Give feedback on people’s behaviour (Bass, 2008).
Recognize the right behaviour by giving them constructive feedback direct to the person, so they will grow.
An instead of accepting existing bad behaviour that is not supporting the cause, feedback should be given so the people understand it could be consequences.
If possible try to influence the tools that people need.
Secure that the tools are really the one that supports and make the work easier, not the opposite. Then it is only waste (Kniberg & Skarin, 2009).
And always keep in mind what Drucker’s (2005) said: ‘Do not try to change yourself – you are unlikely to succeed. Work to improve the way you perform’.
An interesting anecdote is that I meet Appelo (2011) in person some months ago. We discussed about companies and their different leaders and environments. As Appelo represent the new type of leadership within lean and agile, which he calls is Management 3.0, I was curious what he think about companies as the one I work at. His answer was short as he said that if he would not be glad and feel joy spending his day’s at the company he would leave. Appelo means that we should not accept staying in a company if we feel sad or dislike the environment; life is too short for that. So maybe the starting point for us leaders, regardless of leadership style, is to make our work more enjoyable and fun.
Could it be that simple?
6 Reference Notes & Bibliography
Anchor, S. (2006). Transcending Charisma. Harvard-Psychology of Leadership, video lecture [accessed 30 October 2012]
Appelo, J. (2012). Change Management 3.0. Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.
Bass, B. M. (1999) ‘Two Decades of Research and Development in Transformational Leadership’, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 8 (1), pp.9-32.
Bass, B. M. & Riggio, R. E. (2006). Transformational leadership, 2nd edn. New York: Psychology Press.
Bass, B. M. (2008). The Bass handbook of leadership: Theory, research, and managerial applications, 4th edn. New York: The Free Press.
Belbin, R. M. (1999). Management Teams; Why they succeed or fail. Guildford: Biddles Ltd.
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7 Appendix
7.1 Appendix Maslows Hierarchy of Needs
Source; Robins, S. & Judge, T. (2009). Organizational Behavior, 13th edn. New Jersey: Person Education Inc.p. 210
7.2 Appendix
Source: Mayer, J. D. & Salovey, P. & Caruso, D. (2000). Handbook of Intelligence. Cambridge. p. 398
7.3 Appendix Transformational and transactional leader analysis
| Characteristics of Transactional and Transformational Leaders | Leader Adam | Leader John | |
| Transactional Leader | Contingent reward | Yes | No |
| Management by Exception (active) | Yes | No | |
| Management by Exception (passive) | No | No | |
| Laissez-Faire | No | No | |
| Transformational Leader | Idealize Influence | Yes | Yes |
| Inspirational Motivation | Yes | Yes | |
| Intellectual Stimulation | Yes | Yes | |
| Individualized Consideration | Yes | Yes | |
Source; Robins, S. & Judge, T. (2009). Organizational Behavior, 13th edn. New Jersey: Person Education Inc.p. 453
