Leadership Development Portfolio - Self-Assessments and Analysis - Assignment Example

Leadership Development Portfolio: Self-Assessments and Analysis Part One: vLeader Simulations Scenario One: One-on-One Meeting Scenario One was successful in that my leadership potential in the group improved as a result of the interaction, and the important objectives – getting business cards, getting the computer set-up, and being invited to the team Coffee Break – were all achieved. The final results indicated that I used a participative style; and the final scenario score was 92. The participative style was my intention, even though the scenario of course suggested trying alternatives as a learning exercise. This was the most practical approach in view of the circumstances; even though I was in the role of the leader, I was the least-experienced person in the room in terms of the nature of the workplace. Thus, while the main goal of the exchange was to ensure that at least two key tasks were accomplished or planned (getting business cards and setting up the computer), the real objective was to learn something about how tasks were accomplished in my new environment. I might discover those ways need to be changed, but in order to that I would need to find a starting point or frame of reference. Putting Oli at ease by being receptive to what he had to say follows the advice of Bryan (2010), who suggests that communication and team-building should be the main objectives in any uncertain situation. Having a participatory exchange and listening as much as or more than talking also reduces the bias from my own internal beliefs and perceptions of my external environment, because the more information I can receive, the more accurate my perceptions will be (Darling and Beebe, 2007, pp. 158-159). From Oli’s point of view, it’s recognition of his (and the team’s) value and experience, and a signal that I will give directions based on what is practical and achievable in the organisation. Scenario Two: The New Person This scenario was much more difficult because it presented some objectives that were not viewed positively by the participants, and at the same time presented two participants (Oli and Rosa) who were competing for influence. The overall result of the scenario was positive and the main objectives were achieved, but it also took a very long time. According to the style descriptions, this means the approach was something in between a participative or delegative style. My perception of the situation was that both Oli and Rosa wanted to be assured that their inputs were important to me as the manager, and that neither wanted to be placed in a position of being less important in that respect than the other. So the goal for me was to seek a consensus, and focus on the common concern. The objectives of achieving 65% customer retention and implementing automation were the common concern for all three of us, so the other issues that were not as important were bypassed. My main task was to draw out all the views and make sure no one’s views dominated the entire discussion (Fogler & LeBlanc, 2008, p. 29), so the perception was that everyone was at least temporarily equal in control of the conversation, which is reflected in the sharp drop in my personal influence towards the end of the scenario. If there was a flaw in the way the scenario was handled, it was that it was too long. The tension eased to the point of boredom, meaning that I had gone a bit past the point where everyone was satisfied with the results of the interaction, and were starting to get distracted. So being able to recognise the point where a good consensus is achieved at stopping at the right time is obviously an important factor. Scenario Three: Status Quo Scenario Three was challenging because I was in a middle position; Alan was the most senior person in the group and the leader of the discussion by default, but the discussion was really a sort of conflict between Will and Herman, with the latter having a little more affinity for the objectives we were trying to reach – cutting costs, the call centre work, and getting Rosa out on a sales call. The strategy for approaching the discussion was to bring up cutting expenses, but in a positive way by pointing out that our successes in implementing the previous objectives in the call centre made it possible to do so more easily and with less disruption, Oli and Rosa, the two people under me, were easy enough to bring “onto my team” so to speak, because they both stood to gain something; Rosa would get her sales experience she wanted, and Oli would get a little more influence by having Rosa focusing on a different activity. The idea was to create a problem that would raise Herman’s tension, and relied on his position as an auditor making him naturally focus on costs and benefits. We did not want Will’s idea of a sales retreat to pass, and we wanted to pass the increased call centre budget that Will was trying to avoid. So a solution that developed was costs could be cut with minimum disruption already, thus an increase in call centre work would help to cut them further while increasing business, whereas the alternative was a sales retreat that would not cut costs and would have an uncertain return from whatever investment was made in it. There were two gambles: One, that Herman would sort out that solution for himself and raise the matter of the call centre budget (thus, helping me to avoid going against Will’s request not to bring it up). The second gamble was that Will’s personality would allow him to compromise; after all, if the idea was based on already good performance from my department, that reflected positively on him as my superior. The lesson here was that it is very important to understand the priorities and perspectives of others. The scenario handbook and multiple plays of the scenario gave me a good idea of what to expect from the others, so the outcome was very successful. In real life, it would almost certainly be much more difficult, and misreading someone’s likely reaction could be disastrous. Scenario Four: Two Cultures In Scenario Four, I adopted a starting position that the best outcome would be achieved by supporting the two highest-value ideas, Combine IT and Keep Vendors, and otherwise supporting Alan’s point of view on the other ideas so long as his ideas did not conflict with the two most important ones. Fortunately, those were ideas he supported from the beginning, so that tactic was largely successful, even though I had to compromise on some others in different plays of the scenario (such as trying to pass the idea of Combine Sales in one exercise, and then trying to not pass it in another). The overall approach was intended to be one of consensus-building, finding the set of ideas that everyone could agree on and discarding or deferring the rest (Fogler & LeBlanc, 2008). Kaiser, Lindberg and Craig (2007, p. 41) point out, however, that a key trait in successful managers is behavioural flexibility, which is highly contingent on the circumstances and usually involves conflicting expectations; in this case, the conflict was not between different expectations – Alan, Will, and Herman all reacted as though they assumed I would be aligned with Alan – but between the ways in which they reacted to those expectations being met. Alan reacted positively, i.e. became less tense when I supported him, whereas the other two became more tense. So the flexibility I had to practise was to first of all accept that consensus was less likely than compromise, and then moderate everyone’s tension by going against their expectations, but not so far as to spoil my alliance with Alan. It resulted in a good outcome, but perhaps not the best possible outcome; tension remained very high throughout the meeting, and while my leadership potential increased, the group’s opinion of me declined a bit. Scenario Five: Crisis and Opportunity Amongst the two suggested sets of tactics for Scenario Five in the Idea Strategy and the Work Strategy, there were no tactics that worked exactly as they were presented, except for quickly passing the idea of having Alan speak to the press. For one thing, the “low-cost provider” idea did not appear until much later in the discussion than it was suggested it would, and instead, the Best Service idea was introduced fairly early. That was a challenge, because it seemed out of sequence. Regardless of what the scenario handbook suggested, the most practical idea to resolve first was to determine who would speak to the press and what he would say (downplay or not); the idea to have Alan speak to the press was passed, but the latter issue had not quite been settled yet when the Best Service idea first appeared and was followed quickly by the Rebuild Facility idea, so the reduction in tension achieved by suggesting that the company “do nothing” was rather short-lived. An interesting aspect of this scenario was to see how my personal influence reacted to the introduction of ideas. It increased when I introduced the “do nothing” idea, then quickly declined as other ideas started to emerge, building up again a little more gradually as the discussion grew. At the point where I retracted the “do-nothing” idea, my influence went up immediately, decreased a bit through the exchange about rebuilding the facility, then dropped to almost zero as soon as that idea was passed near the end of the meeting. My interpretation of this was that even though I had done the right thing to reduce tension and allow other ideas to come out, because I had introduced a useless idea, I had sacrificed my personal influence. Since the meeting had good results this was not a problem, but if a bad idea had gained traction (such as Downplay to Press), it seems I might not have been able to prevent it from passing. Part Two: Leader Self-Insights In interpreting my results for the various leadership self-assessments, I decided to focus on contradictions – results that were contrary to my own feelings and perceptions before taking the assessments, or results from one or more assessments that contradicted other results. My reasoning for approaching the reflection in this way is that the areas where I need to improve are probably those areas in which I have a mistaken impression of my own strengths, or in which I am working against my natural orientation. According to the assessments, there were five results that indicated areas where I need to improve: I am somewhat more management- than leadership-oriented. I am significantly more task-oriented than people-oriented. While I have average emotional intelligence, my score was low for relationship management. I am somewhat conformist in my follower style. My “leadership frame” is structural and political, and I have a “blind spot” for human resources and symbolism (score of 0 for each of the latter). These are areas of concern because other parts of the self-assessment showed that I am more socially-oriented and interactive with people, which has always been my perception as well, than these particular results indicate. For example, the assessments showed that I have multiple intelligences and a learning style that prefers the interpersonal, intrapersonal, and musical or rhythmic to the logical/mathematical or verbal/linguistic. The assessments also showed that I have a servant-leader orientation highly oriented towards a participative style, good listening skills, a high affinity for feedback-seeking and feedback-mitigating behaviours, a lack of communication apprehension, and a collaborating conflict management style. Taken by themselves, these results reinforce my belief that I am an empathetic “people person,” but on the other hand, I had a very high MACH (Machiavellianism) score, which is frankly discouraging. Taking that together with the results that indicate that my working style is more task- and process-oriented almost leads me to the conclusion that I am a bit manipulative; I understand people well enough to use them to achieve process goals, without giving any in-depth consideration to long-term consequences. My plan for making the best use of these results has an overall objective to improve the areas where I feel I am deficient without reducing my useful strengths in other areas. Being task-oriented and having greater strength in management rather than leadership suggests that I am good at understanding processes and organising tasks to complete them. Thus, the challenge is to develop ways to channel what social strengths I do have – listening, collaboration, processing feedback, and participatory team management – into efficient task management without “using” people, but rather supporting them for their long-term growth and increasing performance. That plan is not, however, one for which a simple rule book or set of instructions exists, and so I must continue to study and practise to learn more. Understanding my objective and what I am trying to achieve at least provides better focus for my continued training, so I can study more effectively and apply lessons to practical situations more quickly. Part Three: Personalised Leadership Approach and Development Plan My Personal Model of leadership is based on a style described in the book Leadership: Limits and Possibilities (Grint, 2005). The Heterarchic model relies on responsible followers and constructive dissent, and requires the leader to recognise his limitations and adopt different roles as necessary. The result of this is leadership that is developed from the “bottom-up” so to speak, where my influence as a leader is built from the actions of my followers and my real role is to organise those actions in the most productive way. This approach to leadership is the one that best matches my results of the self-assessments described in the previous section. My own work experience that has been most helpful in giving me a “real-world” lesson in leadership was as a volunteer Desk Assistant in the library of a secondary school during 2005-2007. Obviously that was not a leadership position, but in working closely with the Librarian and the teachers, I was able to observe different styles of leadership and take note of approaches and practices which seemed to be effective. My Personal Model is based on this experience. The Personal Model has three major elements, which each have a number of specific details that are discussed below: Focus: Fundamentally, leadership has a purpose to achieve results; there is no point in practising leadership just for the sake of being a leader. Trust: The leader must have the trust of those above and below him. Performance: Specifically, encouraging and improving the performance of subordinates and the organisation through effective leadership. The focus element of my personal leadership model is based on my characteristics revealed by the self-assessments: task orientation, management orientation, and a structural/political leadership frame. While these are handicaps in terms of leading people in some respects, my leadership model seeks to place them in the proper context and make the best use of them. Where the handicap is revealed is when leadership becomes unbalanced, or in other words, becomes too task- or process-oriented. As Pearson and Parker (2008) explain, there is a fine distinction between “management” and “organising”. The former requires and makes use of leadership to delegate responsibilities and tasks to achieve an objective, whereas the latter is very much like one’s doing all the work himself; rather than finding ways to apply people’s best abilities and talents to achieve an end goal, the “organiser” applies them in step-by-step fashion, so in a sense they are doing the job “his way,” rather than doing the job the best way (Pearson & Parker, 2008, p. 49). My present perceptions and practise of leadership reveals some differences between Espoused Theory and Theory-in-Practise. My espoused theory of leadership follows the hetearchic model described by Grint (2005), and in detail is better described by the Systems Model of leadership explained by Sternberg (2007), which contains the three key elements of wisdom, intelligence, and creativity. Creative leadership can take a variety of forms, but always involves the key abilities to generate ideas that are relatively new, high in quality (i.e., effective), and appropriate to the task or problem (Sternberg, 2007, pp. 34-36). Intelligence has two components, academic and practical intelligence, while wisdom is the ability to use creativity and intelligence for the common good (Sternberg, 2007, pp. 37-38). In practise, however, my subconscious approach to leadership is trait-based; in other words, my position as a leader combined with my particular strengths is a sort of a fixed package, and leads me to approach leadership activities in much the same way regardless of the circumstances. Hackman and Wageman, on the other hand, suggest that a better approach is not to focus on broadly developing leadership traits, but in developing traits that can applied at appropriate times depending on the situation (Hackman & Wageman, 2007, p. 44). This idea is similar to the idea presented by Complexity Leadership Theory (Uhl-Bien, Marion & McKelvey, 2007), which characterises leadership as a focus on enabling the learning, creative, and adaptive capacity of organisations. The trust element is perhaps the most important element of the three. Regardless of what the approach to leadership is, subordinates must trust that they are being led in the right direction and that their own welfare is being considered, while superiors must trust that the leader-managers below them are competent to carry out tasks directed towards the organisation’s overall goals. The research literature defines trust in three different ways, either as a trait, an emergent state, or as a process (Burke, Sims, Lazzara & Salas, 2007, pp. 608-609). My perception of trust, the espoused theory so to speak, is that it is an emergent state that develops, as Burke, et al. explain (2007, p. 609) as a result of the context, communication and behavioural inputs, and the outcomes of interactions. Another way to put it is that “trust is earned.” Positive interactions with other people that are characterised by honesty, reliability, competence, and other good traits create trust. This is consistent with a relatively recent shift in thinking in leadership studies, which view leadership as being defined by practises and interactions rather than on individual qualities or traits (Crevani, Lindgren & Packendorff, 2010). In terms of a gap between my espoused theories and theory-in-practise, that was only revealed in one respect by the self-assessment exercises, where I found I had a surprisingly high MACH score, as explained in the previous section. Most of the Machiavellian indicators are considered manipulative and pragmatic, and in some cases actually unethical. Because of the nature of trust as an emergent state, manipulative or pragmatic leadership behaviours are not necessarily barriers to trust; if the outcomes are effective and beneficial to all concerned, according to the emergent perspective, they can still contribute to the creation of trust (Burke, et al., 2007). But there is obviously a big risk of doing harm if a subordinate feels “used”; trust may not be created in that case, and will be much harder to create in later interactions. The performance element of the leadership model connects the focus and trust elements, in the sense that “focus” is the intention of leadership, “trust” makes leadership possible, and “performance” is actually engaging in leadership. Performance can be defined rather simply as the successful achievement of objectives. Sometimes these objectives are layered, or overlap one another; from a leader’s perspective, my objective is to successful direct my team towards the completion of tasks for which we are responsible, or the achievement of objectives set forth for the organisation. The performance element is the one in which I believe I have the biggest gap between espoused theory and theory-in-practise. My preference and the intended approach is the shared leadership approach, wherein performance is achieved by adopting different roles in the group so that the effect is there is no leader in the hierarchical sense (Carson, Tesluk & Marrone, 2007); if anything, I serve as a director or facilitator, keeping the group on track by steering leadership to whichever member is most appropriate for a particular situation, based on their talents and inputs. That situational awareness, however, is a clue that I am not really practising shared leadership as much as I am following contingency theory or situational leadership (Vroom & Jago, 2007, pp. 19-20). There is one situation from my own experience in the library that is a good example of this. The Help Desk was usually staffed by three or four volunteers, but originally had no particular roles for each; because of the large number of students, the Librarian decided it would be better to organise the work at the Help Desk in some way and assign particular areas to each volunteer in order to help students more efficiently, and left it to me to come up with a plan. In a meeting with the other volunteers, two options emerged: Either have volunteers concentrate on particular areas or subjects (such as computers, or reference materials), or have volunteers concentrate on grade levels, i.e., a volunteer to help the first-year students, another to help the second-year students, and so on. I honestly did not know what would be the best option, and tried to apply a collaborative method to conducting the meeting; the problem was, no one else seemed to know what the best option was, either, and were more willing just to let me make a decision. In the end, that is what I did, interpreting the “situation” (lack of interest and/or knowledge of everyone else). The result was reasonably effective, but problems arose later when the other volunteers began to complain about the areas they were assigned; most of that could have been avoided, I think, had I been more persistent in making everyone participate fully in the meeting at the beginning. Filling the gap between intended theoretical orientation and theory-in-practise in terms of the performance element is challenging, because the relevant indicators from my own personality and leadership self-assessments show that I have attributes in both directions. I have a preference for a collaborative style and a participatory orientation with respect to servant-leader interactions, as well as a receptive personality with respect to feedback and communication in general; my learning style is heavily weighted towards interpersonal interaction and self-reflection instead of analytical or linguistic methods. On the other hand, I have a strong perception of power-distance relationships, frame my leadership approach in structural/political terms, and I am more task-oriented than people-oriented; I have a strong affinity for management, organising and monitoring than leadership in the symbolic or aesthetic sense (Hansen, Ropo & Sauer, 2007). In view of all the foregoing, specific gaps between theory-as-intended and theory-in-practise can be described in terms of steps to close them: Develop more flexible leadership traits using the systems model of creativity-intelligence-wisdom (Sternberg, 2007). I am already capable of recognising variable situations, but do not always successfully modify my approach to suit them, because I do not have sufficient flexibility in my skills and knowledge. The key part of the systems model for me is creativity. Gaining additional education and practise in generating ideas as opposed to responding to others would help to make me more open-minded, and thus assess different circumstances and contexts more effectively. Shift from a more task- or process-oriented focus to a focus that is guided by complexity leadership theory (Uhl-Bien, Marion & McKelvey, 2007), which is more people-oriented because it casts leadership as activity that enables rather than directs others. The obvious pitfall here is that it might be easier to get sidetracked from the objectives that need to be completed (the focus aspect of the personal leadership model), so in order to avoid that this shift in orientation must be accomplished in tandem with the efforts to develop greater flexibility. Nonetheless, putting greater emphasis on enabling subordinates rather than directing and monitoring should improve results, because it encourages trust creation. Maintain an “indirect focus” on aesthetic leadership. The focus must be indirect in the sense that directly adopting behaviours or taking actions to develop an impression of being a transformational, charismatic, or authentic leader is impossible; the impression is a result of positive outcomes, not the cause of it (Hansen, et al., pp. 548-549). What can be done is to be mindful of how leadership activities may be perceived by others, and where there is a choice between two actions with otherwise comparable outcomes, following through with the one that better supports enabling or trust-building. There is a practical reason for this: If I am taking an approach to leadership that is more shared and participatory, there is the potential that my influence will decrease; I will become less the decision-maker and more a supporter of others’ or consensus decisions. Thus, establishing an impression as a leader – being the one “who makes it all happen,” even if the way it happens is not easy to identify and is more a result of group attributes properly applied rather than my own – is important to set myself apart. Shared leadership may be the best way to accomplish goals, but when the opportunity for advancement arises, I will want something to make me stand out and be the choice for a better position and greater responsibilities. In order to successfully follow this plan, I realise I will need much more study and training. Areas that will be of particular interest in the near- to mid-term future will be studies of innovation and innovation processes, team dynamics and communications, and motivational aspects of leader-follower relationships. References Bryan, L. (2010). Dynamic management: Better decisions in uncertain times. McKinsey Quarterly, Winter 2010, 4-12. Burke, C.S., Sims, D.E., Lazzara, E.H., and Salas, E. (2007). Trust in leadership: A multi-level review and integration. The Leadership Quarterly, 18, 606-632. Carson, J.B., Tesluk, P.E., and Marrone, J.A. (2007). Shared Leadership in Teams: An Investigation of Antecedent Conditions and Performance. Academy of Management Journal, 50(5), 1217-1234. Crevani, L., Lindgren, M., and Packendorff, J. (2010). Leadership, not leaders: On the study of leadership as practices and interactions. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 26, 77-86. 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