Leadership Styles in the Remember the Titans - Movie Review Example

? Leadership styles movie analysis There are various types of leadership applied by leaders any type of organization or administration (Kippenberger, 2002). The leadership style employed gets influenced by the type of organization, agreements within the organization or the team. This paper reviews the leadership styles employed in two movies: “Remember the Titans” and “Miracle”. Remember the Titans Without a question mark, the title of this movie remains an instruction and not an inquest. Dealing with the subject of racial integration in a high school football team during the American 1970s, it is clearly meant as a caveat. What follows is 2 hours of unabashed manipulation targeted less at impassioning racial synchronization than leaving the viewer with a lump in his / her throat and tears in their eyes. In these events, the theme of leadership dominates that environment of an extremely racist society which has to collaborate to achieve in their children’s football. Situational leadership holds the idea that someone changes his or her style of leadership in response to a given situation. Situational leadership appears to be more evident in the movie that any other type of leadership (Kippenberger, 2002). According to Blanchard and Hershey, the leadership type that is suitable for any given situation gets driven by follower development or readiness. Readiness gets normally based on factors like ability, skill, and experience, willingness, or confidence, motivation and commitment. Coach Herman Boone applies any type of leadership that suits the situation on hand, from autocratic dictatorship to democracy. When the coach forces the teammates to share rooms with their different races teammates, a symbol of dictatorship is demonstrated, but it is for the best interest of the team. He changes his leadership when need arises to solve or implement any of his strategies, as we are going to see in the paragraphs below. Autocratic leadership remains an extreme system of transactional type of leadership, where a leader exercises high levels of authority over his or her team members or a society. People within the team get few opportunities to make propositions, even if these suggestions would be in the organizations or team's interest (Kippenberger, 2002). Most people tend to begrudge being treated like this. Hence, autocratic leadership generally leads to high level of rebellion and absenteeism. Also, the team's production does not gain from the creativeness and experience of each team members, making many of teamwork benefits lost. In the movie, the main leader is the character Coach Herman Boone. Coach Boone demonstrates qualities of a firm and inspirational leader. The main obstacle the Coach faces are changing the ethos of a football team in a way that the society did not agree with at that time. He makes autonomous decisions for the team. This type of leadership seems to work since the he is the only team member with the knowledge of the game. He must dominate to diffuse the skills to the young players (Kippenberger, 2002). Bureaucratic Leadership is also demonstrated in the movie. Bureaucratic leaders work by the book ensuring that the ruled and ruler follow procedures precisely (Kippenberger, 2002). This stands a very appropriate style especially when working with young people and in cases where a mistake will cost the team heavily. Coach Boone and some of his team leaders go by the book to play football despite being affected significantly by racism. A charismatic leadership style may appear similar to the transformational leadership style, where the leader injects enormous dosages of enthusiasm into the team, and gets very energetic in driving the team forward. Coach Boone starts tackling the problem of blacks and whites integration from day one in the football training camp. The coach makes the team gets off from the buses and sit with an opposite race team mate, and then he goes ahead to make that person their roommate for the duration in the camp. Through Boone's discipline and charismatic leadership, two leaders among the team members emerge, Bertier and Campbell. However, this type of leadership requires great responsibly and long - term devotion from the leader, since it may collapse upon his or her withdrawal from the team (Kippenberger, 2002). Although a democratic leader makes the ultimate resolution, he or she invites team members to contribute to the policymaking process. This not only upsurges task satisfaction by accommodating team members on decision making, but it as well helps to develop peoples skills (Kippenberger, 2002). Team members feel on top of their own intentions, and so get motivated to work harder by more than only a reward. The relationships that got created in the team made “the Titans” such a strong team. Every player chooses to create a mutual relationship with the entire team despite their racial disparity. They are able to do this as a result of the great example set by Boone along with Yoast. If Boone and Yoast would not come up with a way to coach together well it would have been tough for to unite the team. They both led the team by example. Consequently, they also made a team that was could self-lead and self-motivate each other without the presence of the coaches. In one part of the movie, the team calls a team meeting without the coaches to resolve some matters the players were holding. The determined inspiration of the coaches inspired the players. However, this type of leadership could not work on the onset. As partaking takes time, this style may lead to things happening a bit slowly than an autocratic tactic, but often the end outcome remains better. It is most suitable where teamwork is essential and practicable (Kippenberger, 2002). Transactional style of leadership begins with the notion that team members come to an understanding to obey their leader entirely when they take a task on the transaction is (generally) that the organization acknowledges the team members efforts, in return for their compliance and effort. Intrinsically, the leader has the duty to punish team members when their work does not meet the pre–determined set standard. In “the Titans” team, the coach exercises these powers (Kippenberger, 2002). Laissez - Faire Leadership is also found in the movie especially in latter scenes. Laissez - Faire is a French phrase meaning “leave it be” and gets used to define leaders who leaves their colleagues to continue with their work. We see the coach instructing the players in the movie and leave them to play how they got coached in the field. He does not get in the field and play with the players or tell the how to play in the field. It can be effectual if the leader screens what gets achieved and communicates the same back to the team frequently. Most often, the Laissez - Faire leadership succeeds for teams in which all individuals are skilled and experienced self - starters (Kippenberger, 2002). Miracle Miracle is a movie that depicts a true story of a 1980 US Men Hockey team as they prepared and competed in the Winter Olympics staged at Lake Placid. The head coach, Herb Brooks, along with his subordinate coach Craig Patrick, tackles the difficult duty of preparing young team, majority just out of the college, to participate in toughest competition in the world. Their strategies, coaching styles, and interactions with the boys all contribute to the prosperity of the entire team. Their exceptional leadership styles help takes the team to a colossal upset over the USSR and an ultimate gold medal at those Olympics. Even though I saw this movie numerous times, it was interesting to particularly watch and then evaluate the leadership of Craig and Herb (Kippenberger, 2002). The movie starts as Herb is first in conflict with his case of winning the head coach position, and then picks his Olympics team. The tryout scene consists of Herb watching his players for a day and chooses them without consulting anyone, even his assistant coach, Craig (Kippenberger, 2002). Decision making is a significant aspect in leading, and how coaches make their decisions can have an enormous impact on the players, management, fans, and anyone else who may be involved. Phillip Yetton and Victor Vroom developed a “Vroom - Yetton Decision Model” for helping those in leadership positions to make decisions in different circumstances. The model consists of sequences of questions that leaders must ask themselves. These questions then point to a particular decision making approach. Some of the different approaches include collaborative decisions, collective decisions and autocratic decisions. Herbs decisions stood definitely autocratic making all decision on his own, but it could be labeled as semi - autocratic because he used other coaches and films to get a contextually on the players and hence assist him make an enhanced decision. This stands a good strategy in a situation like this according to “Yetton and Vroom”. Even though Herb took problems completely on his own hands and selected his whole team on his own, the condition at hand made that potential for Herbs decision making approach successful (Kippenberger, 2002). Once the team gets selected, the movie begins with meeting of the players and commencing practice and competition. It gets interesting to watch the team evolution, and how they pass from a group of rival college toddlers to a national Olympic hockey team. Definitely, the coaches play a significant role in their team evolution and lead them to play at their absolute best (Kippenberger, 2002). Miracle remains a film that chronicles not only the performance of the 1980 Olympic hockey team. It also goes in profundity into the coach leading styles, the relationships, hard working, and the team interaction that it takes to triumph an Olympic gold medal in the finals. Craig and Herb are two coaches that blend well together and balance one other out to make a coaching staff that leads the complete set of a successful hokey team (Kippenberger, 2002). Craig kind of coach who any player can go to, who encourages and cares, the one who takes the players as friends, not just as players. This shows a democratic type of leadership employed by the coach. Herb tells the coach this specifically, that it stays his job to be pals with them and take care of any of their personal problems. His role is distinct when he questions Herbs training methods and expresses apprehension for the player’s welfare, when he tries stopping Herb from making his players do all the sprints, and when Craig “cleans up” emotional messes that Herb leaves in a locker room while trying to inspire the team in between epochs (Kippenberger, 2002). Craig may be classified according to the Blake Mouton Managerial Grid. Mouton model has two scopes: concern for performance and concern for people. Coaches may be classified on both scopes and may be “country club leaders” (low concern for performance, high concern for people), “impoverished leaders” (low concern to both performance and people), “produce or perish leaders” (high concern for performance and low concern for people), or “team leaders” (a high concern for both performance and people) (Kippenberger, 2002). Craig would fall on high concern for people and somehow in the middle of concern for performance. He remained the coach who wanted to be the player’s friend, but as a hockey Olympic coach he also had a good deal of care about performance but had to balance out Herb passion to give the team the best balance. Herb, conversely, seemed to only care on performance at all times. He states in the initial scene that he wanted to get a gold medal and seems to stop at nonentity to get it. He watched a film for numerous hours, often deserting his wife and kids, threw kids off to the ice if they were not performing up to his prospects, and punished the team members by having them do sprints till they could fall over and anger for poor performance as well as lack of hustle subsequent to a game (Kippenberger, 2002). He portrays transactional model of leadership. However, his concern for the players remains also evident, particularly in the second part of the movie. He keeps a player in the team who got hurt because he worked hard and earned a slot to the team, and he defended his team on the advisory panel, reminding them that they remained just kids, he was protecting them. So even though Herb stood highly concerned with the team performance, he was as well between middle to high on the concern for players, placing him adjoining to the “team leader” perfect on the managerial grid. This demonstrates his ability to lead in a democratic style. Miracle shows on the viewer what it takes to not only become a successful coach and powerful team, but also a successful leader. A huge slice of the success of the US Hockey team in 1980 came from the coaching staff leadership and the work they laid into their team to get to shine beyond anyone’s expectations (Kippenberger, 2002). In comparison of the “Miracle” and “Remember the Titans” movies, there stand some differences in the leadership styles as well as the similarities. In both cases, it remains clear that team working is a key determinant in success of any team. We learn that team working does not come easily: it must come along with some frictions. These frictions include resistance, social issues, opponent retaliation and lack of cooperation. We also learn that racism can be evaded, if not eradicated, by proper leadership skills implementation. The best leadership style that’s seems to adapt in all circumstances id the situational leadership style that adapts with the current circumstances. This type of leadership can be termed as effectual since it operates according to the demands of the situations. For instance, of handling a stubborn young group, as seen in the two movies, a dictatorial leadership style fit best in the initial stages and later on other mild modes of leadership can be employed. However, the best leadership style remains to be democracy although; it needs a lot of consideration since it has to be applied on an experienced and responsible team or organization. In both movies, we get to know that leadership influences team working not just by command by role modeling. References Kippenberger, T. (2002). Leadership Styles. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Read More