Leadership and Organizational Transformation - Essay Example

The paper "Leadership and Organizational Transformation" is a worthy example of an essay on human resources. The presentations on leadership were of great benefit to me, and I got to learn much on the purview of leadership and even impacted my personal thought on leadership. First, I learned that the skills of leadership are transferable from one industry to the other. One does not have to be adept in a given field for him or her to serve as a leader thereof. For instance, in NBT, a pilot was appointed as the CEO after the previous leadership failed to perform appropriately (Chewens, 2014). Normally, it would be expected that the NBT board would look for an experienced person in the field of banking, but this did not happen.  My thoughts on leadership were shortsighted prior to these presentations. I learned that the most important thing in leadership is the ability of a person to influence the actions of people, that is, the people factor which is universal, regardless of the field under consideration.

 Secondly, I learned that it is overly important for a leader to be empathetic. Empathy encompasses the comprehension that the leader’s staffs are human and face various challenges; thus, the imperative need for him or her to be kind.  In the story of NBT, after a new CEO was appointed, the first he did was to understand the situation of the top four executives, and then giving them several chances to change. He is a true leader as opposed to someone, who would fire them the moment he was appointed into office as the CEO. Even though these executives failed to change and as a result fired, the leader exhibited empathy on his staff, and this is a form of motivation. Therefore, the staff embraces the importance of loyalty and dedication to the team (Chewens, 2014). Prior to this presentation, I thought that a leader was meant to dictate what to be done and the subordinates should follow that to the letter. Rather, I found out that this is bullying and not leadership.

Thirdly, I learned that an effective leader walks the talk rather than dictating what is to be done. A real leader has to take initiatives as a way of leading by example as the subordinates follow suit. The staff will be more motivated to undertake a given task when the leader is also devoted to doing it. The subordinates adopt a team-work spirit rather than feeling bullied. Actually, this is one of the objectives that the presentations intended to instill to the participants (Chewens, 2014). Somewhat, my belief in the major work of leaders is to determine what the subordinates are expected to do was proved to be null with real-life experiences to fortify the point. Generally, leaders ought to model the actions they expect their subordinates to perform.

Lastly, I learned that leaders should be flexible and should be ready to learn from mistakes instead of dreading failure. Nobody is perfect and people are failure-prone. What makes the difference is the step that the leader takes after the failure has occurred. For instance, the new CEO of NBT established that the reason for the loss of customers from the bank is that a previous leadership set their standards too high more than they would manage. They had deserted the bank’s image as a hometown bank to that of a regional bank, leading to its decline in business. The new CEO learned from the mistakes of the previous leadership and embarked on the basics of a community bank.  Indeed, his plan worked out and the bank was back on track (Chewens, 2014). As such, leaders should not spend much time blaming the previous leadership; rather its failures should be used as a benchmark for providing ameliorated leadership.