Leadership and Business Improvement - Research Paper Example

Leadership and Business Improvement Leadership is a process of innovating and instigating. It is all about creativeness, adaptiveness, and responsive. Leadership appears at the sphere, not just the end result. Leaders stand their vision, their stipulation to others, and their veracity on realism, on the specifics, on a careful estimate of the forces on the trends. They widen the means for varying the original balance of forces so that employees can recognize their vision. “The old adage "People are your most important asset" is wrong. The right people are your most important asset”. Jim Collins, Turning Goals into Results, HBR, July-Aug, 1999, p.77 A leader is an important person who could form a persuasive vision that takes people to a new place, and to interpret that vision into action. Leaders illustrate other people to them by joining them in their vision. What leaders do is motivate people, empower them. They pull moderately than push. Leadership attracts and rejuvenates people to enroll in a vision of the future. It stimulates people by helping them identify with the task and the goal to some extent than by satisfying or grueling them. Kotter suggests that “leaders should be able to communicate the vision in five minutes and elicit understanding and interest”. If you want to lead people, the foremost thing to do is to get them to buy into common objectives. Then you have to learn how to generate and protract trust. The trust aspect is decisive. Leaders form an environment where people feel free to voice dissent. Leaders do this through actions. Leader does not fire people as they goofed, and in fact support dissent. Leaders have to reward people for differing, to reward modernism, and to endure failure. Leaders link all these with forming a trusting atmosphere but most of the trust comes not from a fastidious technique, but from the character of the leader. To create trust, Leader needs to have following things. First, the leader has to have capability. The employees have to trust his or her ability to do the job. Secondly, people are anxious with congruity that the leader is a person of reliability. If you are an effective leader, what you say is compatible with what you do, and that is similar with what you feel, and that sequentially is similar with your vision. Third, people desire a feeling that the leader is on their side that he or she will be stable. They want to distinguish that in the heat of battle; their leader will support them, protect them and endure with what they require to win. Lastly, leaders they trust need to care about the lives of the people with whom they are working, need to understand with them. Leaders also show care concerning the illusions of his or her actions and the consequences of decisions. Capability, congruity, and loyalty, and being thoughtful is the quality a leader that must symbolize in order for trust to be formed in a group. It gets a long time to generate and maintain. It takes recurring interactions. Leaders are primarily the results leaning individuals in the world, and results get consideration. Their visions or objectives are persuasive and drag people toward them. Intensity coupled with obligation is alluring. These strong personalities do not have to force people to focus on; they are so intent on what they are doing that, like a child totally fascinated with creating a sand castle in a sandbox, they depict others in. All leaders can form a persuasive vision, one that takes people to a new place, and then interprets that vision into truth. Peter Drucker said that the first mission of a leader is to describe the vision. Max DePree , CEO of Herman Miller, wrote in Leadership Is an Art, "The first responsibility of a leader is to describe reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant." (Warren G. Bennis, Joan Goldsmith, 1997) Primarily Vision grabs the leader, and the capability to communicate it eventually eases others also to get on the bandwagon. Warren Bennis visited Ray Kroc at "Hamburger U" in Elk Grove, Illinois, near Chicago, where McDonald's employees can get a "Bachelor of hamburgerology with a minor in French fries." Kroc spoke of his first vision. He was already an extremely successful paper-cup manufacturer when he began manufacturing milkshake machines. He met the McDonald brothers, who owned a chain of milkshake parlors, and that collision of cups and shakes set off the spark a phenomenon we now know as McDonald's. When asked what leads to such serendipitous notions, Kroc answered: I cannot pretend to know what it is. Certainly it is not some great vision. Maybe it is a blend of your background, your natures and your dreams. Whatever it was at that instant, I suppose I became an entrepreneur and decided to go for broke. (Warren G. Bennis, Joan Goldsmith, 1997) Sergio Comissioná, the renowned conductor, when he was with the Houston Symphony Orchestra. For a long time he rejected to be interviewed, which was noteworthy by itself. He would not react to letters; he would not react to phone calls. Following many months Warren was capable to get in a tune with two of his musicians. While asked what Commission was like, they answered, "Terrific." Although when asked why, they wavered. Finally they said, "Because he does not waste our time." (Warren G. Bennis, Joan Goldsmith, 1997) The passion of leaders recalls a character from Shaw Man and Superman: This is the factual joy in life, the being used for a rationale renowned by you as a mighty one; the being strength of nature instead of an agitated selfish little clod of disorders and accusations argumentative that the world will not give over itself to making you happy. I desire to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no "brief candle" to me. It is a sort of splendid torch that I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. (George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman) We notice that elevated, strong thread in our leaders comparable to Comissioná's passion concerning the "right" tone. At times it burns simply within the range of their vision, and outside that assortment they can be as dull or motivating as anyone else. A fundamental component of leadership is passion, the fundamental passion for the pledges of life, joint with a very particular passion for work, an occupation, a guiding principle. The leader loves what he or she does and loves doing it. Tolstoy said that hopes are the dreams of the waking man. With no hope, we cannot live on, much less progress. The leader who communicates obsession gives hope and stimulation to other people. Passion can be lived through eagerness, through strength, through established and stanch commitment to a vision. Visions seem to get confidence on the part of employees, self-confidence that is a belief that they are competent of performing to their full prospective. Edwin H. Land, founder of Polaroid, said: "The first thing you naturally do is teach the person to feel that the undertaking is manifestly important and nearly impossible. . . . That draws out the kind of drive that makes people strong that put you in pursuit intellectually." (http://www.anchoradvisors.com/news/Motivate.html ) Though lack of communication and poor leadership skills often lead to ineffective decision making. It effect drastically the companies overall performance. Not only small companies but large organization also gets affected if there is lack of communication and poor leadership skills between leaders and employees (Robert Tannenbaum & Warren H, 1958). Companies such as 3M have made their well-known competence for innovation from mistakes. Johnson and Johnson found the Tylenol event, which was their own actions did not root a fault that, and interpreted that tragic event into reaffirming the ethical center of the company. CEO primarily based Southwest Airlines’ business strategy on a mistake. Starting in business Southwest Airlines simply had sufficient capital to find three planes and they needed four to be cost-effective. Herb Kelleher and his employees could have merely munched the numbers and said that starting this airline was not practicable. In its place, they decided that three planes could be as effectual as four at the end of the day, if they could lessen the turnaround time on the ground considerably enough to form “a fourth plane.” They did so, and went on to become most liked and most gainful airlines in history, in large part based on their capability efficiently to turn planes around at the gate. Effective Leaders can offer voluntary vision and motivation to employees (Ehrenberg, R.G. and R.S. Smith. 1994). A leader values the self-esteem of the individual moreover distinguish the significance and control of freedom. They work to persuade, convince, and guide others to a vision of what desires to be done, and, in so doing, make dedication toward that vision. By doing this, leaders are capable to provoke, infuse, and motivate others with inspiration to carry out the view or vision. Leadership integrates an extensive vision of the circumstances that respect for inner capabilities of the supporters and self-reliance in and recognition of one's own position in showing those capabilities. To offer leadership, then, is for a person to distinguish all of the requirements of the circumstances and to be capable to release the leadership prospective in it to make it happen. Leaders are extremely excellent at inspiring their team's feeling, raising their prospect, and intriguing them in new directions. Though, leaders usually endure from neuroses and have a propensity toward egotism and concern (Katzenbach, J. R., & Smith, D. K. 1993). No, one establishes leadership not simply on grand events, though. Nor is it constantly carries out on a large scale by people officially accepted as leaders. Managers and supervisors can apply leadership at all stages not simply although also by peers and individuals, at times in ways that persuades those with much greater recognized power. Leadership simply takes place while others keenly start, for a phase of time, the aims of a group as their own. Therefore, leadership disquiets building unified and objective leaning teams; there is a fundamental and definitional connection linking leadership and employee’s performance. Moreover, a new pattern of leadership has begun to detain attention. Analysts also envisage leadership of as transactional or transformational (Burns, 1978). Researches have proven that transformational leadership can move followers to exceed anticipated performance. It is seen as a predominantly powerful source of effective leadership in Army, Navy, and Air Force settings (Bass, 1997), a fact that numerous in the military long absolutely recognized before the pattern was codified as the Full Range of Leadership (FRL). What the codification did was to authorize methodical exploration of the phenomenon of transformational leadership and the effects of its function to detailed conditions. Besides, it led to an entire new form of leadership training (Avolio, Bruce J, 1997). Again, it must be consequence in new ways of recognizing more successful and effective leaders. Transformational leaders encourage others to do more than they formerly planned and often even more than they thought achievable. They set more challenging expectations and characteristically achieve higher performances. “…today’s networked, interdependent, culturally diverse organizations require transformational leadership to bring out…in followers…their creativity imagination, and best efforts, (Walsman, Bass, & Yammarino, 1990).” Transformational leadership is a development of transactional leadership. Transactional leadership underlines the transaction or exchange that takes place among leaders, colleagues, and followers. This swap is based on the leader conferring others what is required and stating the conditions and rewards these others will obtain if they accomplish those requirements. Transformational leaders do more with colleagues and followers than set up simple exchanges or agreements. They act in ways to attain superior results by employing one or more of the four mechanisms of transformational leadership. Factor studies from Bass ( 1985) to Howell and Avolio ( 1993), Bycio, Hackett, and Allen ( 1995), to Avolio, Bass, and Jung ( 1997) identified the components of transformational leadership. "Some men see things the way they are and ask why, I see things as they could be and ask why not." Bobby Kennedy, 1961, Former Attorney General of the United States. According to Bass, these individuals possess: Charisma. This is one of those leadership qualities that are hard to define; like beauty, you know it when you experience it. I remember a quote, about a charismatic individual by the name of Oliver North. One of his men once said about him, "I would follow him to hell since he is the only man I know who could get me back." Vision. This involves the creation of a compelling picture of the future, a desired future state that people identify with. By creating this vision, the leader provides a means for people to develop commitment, a common goal around around which to rally, and a way for people to feel successful.  Intellectual stimulation. Transformational leaders show new ways of looking at old problems, they challenge the existing boundaries and the mental prisons people put themselves into. Inspiration. To inspire is difficult, requiring as it does a decent understanding of psychology. http://www.legacee.com/Info/Leadership/leaderresources.html Empowering' leadership exemplifies so called 'post-heroic' leadership where there is high prominence upon the competencies of 'enabling' and easing styles of coaching communication with others – which is more coming to be seen as administrative 'best practice', throughout Europe and the United States. One principle aims of such 'catalyzing' leadership and management style is to recognize, release and use contributive talent, by delegating, authorizing and empowering. Mainly, such styles derive from the belief that leadership is primarily about: I. Providing or instigating what people are not yet doing for themselves. II. Serving to generate and validate appropriate visions and values within the team or organization III. Considering issues of 'process' and how people are working or not working and to the accomplishment of objectives and results. IV. Stimulating a stronger sense of ownership and personal liability among people for self-development, personal achievement and continual perfection. We are entering a world where the old rules no longer apply.  — Phillip Sanders (qtd. in Crichton ix) Thus, given the assurance to the continuous changes taking place in all types of organizations, like their host human resource (HR) functions, transformation will be the only conviction for training functions and are accountable for training and development initiatives in their organizations. Training functions will run in a different way as organizations expect more proof that they are causative to organizational success. In response to calls for change in the manner training has usually been done, numerous have responded by calling for redefining the mission of training, renaming training, and even firing or getting rid of in-house training together as it is not cost-effective. Briefly, the pressure is on for trainers and training functions to reinvent, re engineer, regenerate, remakes, and improve what they do ( Shandler 1996). Lots of employees feel disgruntled, disinterested, or stuck in their present positions. Cross training provides employees more diversity and managers more flexibility in the workforce. Regulating job tasks can as well augment worker contentment. For instance, UPS had a high turnover of drivers, a key place for the company. In discussion with the drivers, UPS revealed that they hated to load their trucks but like the driving. So UPS planned a job categorization of loading the delivery trucks, which cut turnover radically, as drivers no longer had to load trucks. Experiential learning, continuous learning, and variation are program trademarks (Senge 1990a). Approaches considerately merge on-the-job experiences and formal programmed learning in both individual and group situations. Individual, group, and unit learning are coordinated (Mullen & Lyles 1993). To many organizations, setting up a learning environment is a comparatively novel idea, as others have been in the practice for years. For example, general managers at Motorola were asked to write a paper every year discussing their attainment and signifying what they learned in the process. The methodical repetition of these activities makes organizational learning habitual. As the role of training has improved in organizations, it has as well become big business. For organizational leaders and training personnel, especially persuasive evidence of training costs comes from the budget owed to training initiatives. Training costs are easy to compute. They consist of nonrecurring and recurring expenses. Nonrecurring costs are those linked with the development of training initiatives (such as materials used by the developer and his or her salary), while inveterate costs are those associated with conducting such initiatives. Recurring costs can be further broken down into those fixed (such as facilities) and those that are capricious. Traditionally, the considerable budget costs of training often lead organizations to see simply the cost per trainee and consider cutting training initiatives to save costs. Though cutting ineffective training initiatives might often be appropriate, judging effectiveness by costs alone is unfeasible. Often, such restricted decision making might cost more in lost productivity than it saves in initiative expenses. CBA requires that organizational managers and training personnel pay attention to the benefits of training. As training costs are easy to understand and compute, the same is not true of the gains or benefits from training. The evaluation of gains needs that evaluators not simply place a dollar value on various levels of performance, but also take into account several factors that can change these dollar values. The estimating of the dollar payback linked with program participants' performance after receiving training provides important information to the organization. As the results of the experimental design will suggest any disparities in behavior between those trained versus those untrained, the training personnel can then estimate for that particular group of employees (e.g., leaders or engineers) what this difference is worth in terms of the salaries of those employees. Another factor that should be considered when estimating the benefit of training is the duration of the training's impact; that is, the length of time throughout which the improved performance will be maintained. As probably no initiatives will show benefits forever, those that find longer-term improved performance will have greater value to the organization. While major conceptual and methodological advances in the measurement of training benefits have been made in recent years, actual applications are still few. Recent research shows that organizations with refined training systems look to training to support corporate strategy and change much more often than they look for measuring financial returns on training investment. At successful companies, such as ICI, Royal Mail's Anglia Division, Yamazaki Machinery UK, and Frizzell Financial Services, the organizations focused on pay-forward, a term used to illustrate the benefits from training in terms of the company's capability to learn and change. This differs from a pay back, which refers to straight financial returns from the training ( Lee 1996). An excellent example of training evaluation in practice is the experience of Express Travel Related Services (TRS) continuous improvement efforts. Evaluation is entrenched throughout their Global Sales Learning System, where they measure how satisfied participants are, how well they are obtaining skills during training, how well they apply the skills on the job, and the resulting business outcome. They also measure satisfaction of key stakeholders in terms of their responsiveness (timely delivery of learning); relevance (learning driven by and focused on business needs); economics (learning delivered at the right price); efficiency (sustained knowledge-skill transfer and impact); and efficiency (especially reduced rework and redundancy).Just more than a year into the design and development of their Global Learning System, those accountable for the training effort were capable to report the following facts to senior leadership: Ninety-five percent of participants in all sales learning rated the training "outstandingly." Sales training costs had been reduced by forty percent through the elimination of unnecessary and redundant course offerings. Basically, leadership failure traced back to the decisive source, a numeral of lessons can be resultant to decrease the chances of leadership failure. There is the significance of an encouraging culture, for instance. Failure cannot be barred in a politically driven organizational culture that is reluctant to examine the issues in the proper framework and sustain change. The people in the organization should be eager to intensify at all levels of leadership and management and instigate to operate in a different way. Eventually, it is the individual leader and his or her boss. With no shared awareness and responsibility between leader and boss, a fault game results where everybody loses. For instance, at HP, the commencement of the end for Carly Fiorina was while she lost touch through the board of directors. The similar shared awareness and accountability have to hold linking the leader and his or her subordinates. While Mattel CEO Jill Barad lost touch with her organization and snubbed to give opinion, stock fallen by forty percent. Averting leadership failure as well needs a strategic pattern between senior management and employees to recognize leaders who are stressed and to form a structure within which they can transform ineffective behaviors. Any counteractive measures whether proper training, mentoring by colleagues or training by an outer resource should be in a non disciplinary manner, and a positive understanding for the leader. Thus, for leadership development to have its planned organizational and individual effect under the new pattern the commitment of the organization is completely critically. Those accountable for today's and tomorrow's leadership development cannot afford to take the organization's commitment for granted. The real test of the organization's commitment can eventually only be found in funding, senior leadership participation, attendance, enduring program evaluation, and the degree to which leadership development is an equal partner in the organization's strategic plan. Like any commitment for senior leadership there is no one means to ensure their commitment to leadership development. Though, one way to establish whether there is commitment to leadership development is in a documented vision or policy that specifically makes clear the role and purpose of leadership development. The subsistence of such a vision or policy should help establish and give meaning to leadership development in the organization. This means that leadership development subsists to support the organization's overall goals or strategic agenda. In any case, mere organizational statements lacking true senior executive or top leadership support are meaningless. Senior leadership should be willing to document how specific examples of leadership development will put in to achieving agreed upon goals. Having all levels of the organization’s leadership responsible for attainment of these objectives is just as significant, starting with top leadership, which should lead by example. Accountability entails the need to have measurable ways to check on the progress. Like any other plan undertaken in the organization, once top leadership is committed to the role of leadership development in attaining organizational results, a thorough need’s analysis should be conducted to establish what the specific goals and objectives are for leadership development in support of the organizational vision and expected consequences. Leadership development should be viewed as a key element in the achievement of the organization's visions and attainment of expected results. It is the role of leadership development to make this connection as a part of the organization's commitment to its vision and thus to leadership development. Those who responsibly for leadership development must always be attentive to ensuring that leadership development are part of the overall organizational strategy and vision. References: Warren G. Bennis, Joan Goldsmith; Learning to Lead: A Workbook on Becoming a Leader, Perseus Books (Current Publisher: Perseus Publishing), 1997 http://www.anchoradvisors.com/news/Motivate.html Jim Collins, Turning Goals into Results, HBR, July-Aug, 1999, p.77 Ehrenberg, R.G. and R.S. Smith. 1994. Modern Labor Economics: Theory and Public Policy. New York: Harper Collins College Publishers. Katzenbach, J. R., & Smith, D. K. (1993). The wisdom of teams. New York: HarperCollins. Burns, James MacGregor. Leadership. N.Y.: Harper and Row, 1978. Bass, Bernard M. “The Ethics of Transformational Leadership.” In Kellogg Leadership Studies Project, Transformational Leadership Working Papers Transformational Leadership Working Papers, The James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership, 1997. Avolio, Bruce J. “The Great Leadership Migration to a Full Range Leadership Development System.” In Kellogg Leadership Studies Project, Transformational Leadership Working Papers, The James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership, 1997. Shandler D. 1996. Reengineering the training function. Delray Beach, FL: St. Lucien Press. Senge P. M. 1990a. The leaders' new work: Building learning organizations. Sloan Management Review (Fall): 7-23. Mullen T., & Lyles M. 1993. Toward improving management's contribution to organizational learning. Human Resource Planning, 16: 35-49. Lee R. 1996. The "pay-forward" view of training. People Management, 2 (3): 30-32. http://www.legacee.com/Info/Leadership/leaderresources.html Reisner, Robert A.F. “When a Turnaround Stalls.” Harvard Business Review, February 2002, 45. Sorcher, Melvin and James Brant. “Are You Picking the Right Leaders?” Harvard Business Review, February 2002, 78. Kotter, John. P. "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail." Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review. March–April, 1995. Robert Tannenbaum & Warren Schmidt, ‘How to choose a leadership pattern’ Harvard Business Review 2, 1958 Read More