Developing Personal Leadership in Organizations - Essay Example

Introduction

In the current business world, most of the organizations have adopted and placed several business demands on the leaders thereby requiring them to impart vision, make important decisions and even initiate positive change within the organization. To be able to handle these demands effectively and efficiently, leaders are required by their followers to be very flexible and adaptable to different change environments Servant leadership theory requires that leaders should make efforts to blend the behavioral theories with a little dab of trait theories so as to effectively guide their followers in the direction of established goals by clarifying their roles and task requirements of each employee. It requires that leaders should learn to be very charismatic and visionary regarding executing their leadership roles so as to inspire followers to transcend their own self- interest for the better of the organization as large (Klagge, 2006). This paper seeks to analyze and assess the organizational behavior using servant leadership model so as to a recommendation for the organizations on how they can strengthen their leadership characteristics.

Servant leadership model

Looking through the business journey globally, it is very clear that modern business organizations require exceptional business leadership skill that is characterized by a lot of creativity, good negotiation skills, very competitive and most importantly very workaholic employees. All these attributes are spelled out in the trait theories of a good leadership style, and they define major features of a successful leader in any business setting. To the best of my knowledge, a servant leader must be one with good leader-member relations and one who accords all his worker a lot of respect just like his/her family (Margaret, 2011). He should be a person who is ready to welcome feedbacks and new ideas from his co-workers thus putting the task structure of the organization low. A servant leader should make the employees operate freely with limited supervision making the organization operate on a flat and non-hierarchal structure that has been accorded the freedom to operate independently without any interference. Servant leadership style is much more of democratic and participative in nature where every employee has a right to say and participate in all activities of the organization (Tickle, Brownlee, Nailon, 2005).

Sharpening personal business development skills are very vital for an effective leader thus for an organization to achieve its business goals and objectives, leaders should learn to be open to change and willing to grow both as an authority figure and as an individual. It is very important for the leaders in any business set up to work continuously towards improving their leadership skills to align the skills with the changing business goals and objectives. Servant leadership model requires that an organizational leader should possess the following attributes:

Good interpersonal skills where leaders continuously strive to improve his or her interpersonal skills regarding having good relationships with both the workers and the customers (Smith, Sharma, 2002). As a leader, employees and even colleagues should feel free and comfortable in approaching you in case they have any problem, and they should not feel intimidated and afraid of your reaction. Spending part of your time as a leader to listen to the employees' questions and needs also helps to create the good relationship between a leader and her employees. This makes workers feel appreciated and respected and as a result, they will also appreciate the little things like paying them a compliment for work well done.

The leader should learn to perform a periodic assessment of their skills so as to ensure that their competencies are maintained higher at all time. The model also requires that a good servant leader to be in a position to continuously learn new things so as to improve their leadership skills by making a list of areas where they would wish to improve for example acquiring a particular skill (Cross, 2009).

A servant leader should be in a position to inspire others: The leader should all the time try to encourage and inspire team members particularly his or her followers to attain their personal goals thus they will be working to achieve organizational goals as well. Involving every team member in planning organizational goals for the future makes all the participants feel like a valued member of the team, and this makes them more excited to work towards achieving those set goals. Establishing higher organizational standards for individual performance play a very big role in challenging team members to move out of their comfort zones and work towards the achievement of those goals. Rewarding individual group members for work well done indicates that they are appreciated and makes them feel more like an integral part of the team thus they are more motivated to work towards the achievement of the organizational goals.

Effective managing of his or her workload: As a good and effective servant leader, it is important to know how to manage workload among the team members especially through learning how to delegate tasks out to employees, prioritizing objectives and setting out the realistic deadline for achieving such goals and objectives. The leader should learn to avoid distractions and say no to unrealistic requests so as to increase the sense of job satisfaction among the staff members and even among employees. This will enable him or her to produce job of higher quality since he or she can put a lot of focus on the business that should be accorded a lot of time.

Assessment is based on the 1-10 scale that follows characteristics of a good servant leadership skills to indicate the degree to which the student possesses the attributes

Assessment

Degree (high, medium, low)

Self-assessment

Supervisor

Co-worker

• Values diverse opinions

High

High

Medium

• Cultivates a culture of trust

Medium

High

Medium

• Develops other leaders

High

High

High

• Helps people with life issues

High

High

High

• Encourages

High

High

Medium

• Sells instead of tells

Medium

Medium

High

• Thinks about workers and not himself or herself

Medium

Medium

Medium

• Able to motivate followers

High

High

High

• Acts with humility

High

Medium

Medium

• Thinks and develops long-term goals and objectives

High

Medium

Medium

Analysis of the results

From the result of this assessment, I have learned that as a servant leader, I should be more focused on serving my followers that serving my own interest. I should be in a position to incorporate the diverse opinions of every employee in the organization especially when it comes to making important decisions. Through this, other people including leaders will develop to so great extent as they will feel that the organization cares for them thus helping to develop a sense of trust among the employees and the leaders. A good leader should be in a position to develop realistic long-terms goals that are achievable within a particular span of time, this will be a motivator to the other employees.

According to the results obtained from the assessment, there are a lot of similarities and differences regarding my leadership skills as a servant leader for example; the result reveals that I am capable of motivating my followers, help other people including leaders with skills of how to deal with life issues. The result also reveals that I have good motivational skills and I am capable of motivating my followers to work towards realization of the organizational goals and objectives. The result however revealed that my ability to build trust as well as taking other peoples’ opinions is varied and it ranges from high to medium.

Recommendation

Taking up management role comes with a lot of challenges following a lot of expectations from the team members and the superiors and therefore a leader must try to balance the performance expectations from superiors with the capabilities and needs of the team members. Getting the balance between the two aspects is more challenging especially to newly appointed leaders who are expected to deliver regarding the performance of the organization and individual workers (Eriksen, 2007).To overcome the challenges, the leaders must try to appeal to the ideal and moral values of his or her co-workers so as to inspire them to think about problems in different dimension thus influencing the followers through vision, framing, and impression management. A leader should try to blind his or her followers together with development ideas and defines the purpose of their movement in a high meaningful manner as a leader thus controlling the negative impression that others may form of him or her. They should make efforts to instill a feeling of confidence, admiration and commitments in her followers as this will help to create a special bond among her followers and articulate a vision as a leader which his or her followers can identify with and are willing to work.

Conclusion

Stepping into a new role often brings a lot of challenge to the newly appointed leaders and therefore it is very important for the leaders to learn the best method to lead the team towards achieving organization goals. As a servant leader, one must learn very many different personalities within the company so as to adjust his or her leadership styles to every member to be able to successfully lead the team. A good leader should appeal to the ideal and moral values of his or her followers so as to inspire them to think about problems in different dimension thus influencing his or her followers through vision, framing, and impression management. Also, a servant leader should be more determined to bring the change process first by changing his or her employees' attitudes from avoidance to acceptance through changing employees' avoidance questions and statements to acceptance questions. To achieve this aim, the leader should try to use contingent rewards to positively reinforce the performance of her followers in a way that is in line with his or her wishes for the organization. As a charismatic and a good leader who is willing to change the organization, the leader should be more strongly correlated with lower turnover rates while maintaining higher levels of productivity and employee satisfaction.