Leadership Philosphy - Personal Statement Example

Personal Philosophy of Leadership I being a manager have 24 employees under me who I have to take along with me for the betterment of the company. Effective leadership requires the leader to take the whole group along. It is not necessary to involve the whole group in decisions regarding the group’s success however; the members of group are ‘helpers’. These ‘helpers’, if motivated and encouraged to work together, may quicken the process of success. This is what my experience led me to realize.

Leaders in the service industry need to be more attentive since the customers and workers are in a direct contact. The motivational theories helped a lot in running the business successfully from the very beginning of my professional career. The knowledge and understanding of such managerial and leadership concepts were the only assets I had. Motivation emerges with the feeling to improve the surroundings. An effective leader must know that motivation is the key to improve the group’s performance and the chances of success.

Motivation, however, is not easy. It requires continuous performance appraisal and strong communication skills. This is the point from where effective leadership enters. The motivational techniques that I adopted were the comments of the customers on the comment cards. Those feedbacks were then analyzed to measure the performance of the team and helped in realizing the weaknesses which needed proper attention and techniques to be resolved. This experience leads me to think over the charisma concept.

The believers of this concept assume that the charisma is God gifted and the influence of charismatics is because of the powers bestowed by God to those leaders (Conger & Kanungo, 1998). However, my leadership experience clearly directs towards continuous efforts and application of managerial and leadership concepts (like motivational theories etc.) to be an effective and successful leader. Values of Leadership which have helped to cope up with growing tensions My task as being a leader of my time helped me to create my views about leader and use motivational techniques for my staff.

I being a manager in my firm have a lot of burden when it comes to financial procedures. Following the protocols of US GAAP and International Accounting Standards is important in our job and I being a leader have to ensure that my staff is following all the necessary protocols. I have used motivational techniques to provide my staff with good feedbacks so they can be encouraged to complete the tasks of the company. Financial statements, capital statements and trial balances are also to be analyzed by me and my employees and as I can’t do all this work alone I take my employees with me while I work on the tasks.

It is important that all my employees work on it as per the techniques and for this purpose I encourage them with techniques and my charisma. Similarly all the financials of the company including Profit & Loss statements, bank statements and loans also lie under my jobs. And again all these tasks are completed by the efforts from my employees. Leadership here is so important to get all these tasks completed because if I was not an effective leader I would not have been able to get my employees together to work on the tasks properly.

Gradually with time I realized that all these traits of leadership are important to get a department work efficiently. If this was not the case then our company would suffer losses and the whole team would not be able to complete the tasks as per the criteria. My approach of leadership is related to the contingency type of leadership. The contingency approach of leadership is associated with the path-goal theory more closely than others (Dubrin, 2001 pp. 32-34). The path-goal theory follows the same idea as defined in the expectancy theory of motivation.

The main idea is the relationship or connection between the leaders behaviors on employee participation and performance in achieving the tasks assigned to them. The path-goal theory is more inclined towards the rewards in order to attain higher motivation of employees and higher performance efficiency. Path-goal theory emphasizes on servant leaders, who are less dominating and more helpful. The leaders working under the contingency perspective of leadership are more like coaches, facilitators and guides to the employee team.

I adopted this approach so that none of my employees feel that I am dominating at work and feel uneasy. Hence these employees would then work collaboratively with me so that we can work for the betterment of the company. Bibliography DuBrin, Andrew J. Leadership: Research Findings, Practice, and Skills. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Print. CONGER, J. A., & KANUNGO, R. N. (1998). Charismatic leadership in organizations. Thousand Oaks, Calif, Sage Publications.