7 2 discussion what kind of leader are you
Using the results you achieved in the How Good Are Your Leadership Skills? self-assessment in Module Four and your own experiences, what do you believe is your leadership style? Is it compatible with the leadership style in your organization? If you had to make significant changes in your organization, which leadership style would you choose?
To complete this assignment, review the Discussion Rubric document.
Need 2 classmates responses.
1st response needed
What kind of Leader
Gabrielle Hernandez posted Feb 19, 2020 5:05 PM
In the assessment for Leadership skills I scored a 69. With that score it opened with “Excellent” that automatically gave me a bit of a confidence boost. I went back and forth a bit thinking of the suitable leadership style I see myself doing at the moment and concluded it is the Servant leadership. The style is very compatible with the organization I am now. This past year I have been working with my supervisor to focus a little more of the company on the inside with the employees than the profit and revenue. Receiving feedback from the employees and giving them a chance to voice out any concerns or complaints has increased productivity and lowered our turnaround. This class couldn’t have come at the right moment, I am currently in the process of becoming a manager and learning the different types of leadership skills has helped my mentality going into this new stage.
If I had to make a significant amount of changes to an organization I would choose the achievement-oriented style. The employees would be aware of the changes that will take place. Once aware together as a company goals can be made and achieved in the future.
2nd response needed
Discussion 7
Jeffrey Kresch posted Feb 17, 2020 8:30 PM
Though I have limited management or leadership experience outside of my own company, I still somehow managed to score an 82 on the “How Good Are Your Leadership Skills?†assessment. The other side of that point is that I have worked for many different managers in many different organizations. Whether through watching different management styles over the years, or from watching the reactions of the other employees I’ve worked beside, the servant leadership approach is the one that I have eventually settled into (Bauer & Erdogan, 2018). Prior to that, I was more likely to follow the transformational leadership style due to my reliance on charisma and inspirational motivation, but like the reading material suggests many times, no approach works in every situation due to the environmental variables surrounding the leader (Bauer & Erdogan, 2018). I am not currently in a leadership role with the USPS where I work, but if I were, I would struggle because the managerial structure is built to accommodate a more directive leadership style than anything else. There are definitely opportunities for a servant leader to improve working conditions within an individual post office, but managers are highly micromanaged to keep consistent standards across the many national locations that the postal service is in charge of. My belief is that this type of micromanagement would be a huge limiting factor to the servant leadership approach by essentially tying the hands of the leader in place and thus their ability to empower the subordinates below them.
If I had to make significant changes in my organization, I would still select the servant leadership style due to its inclusion of serving the community surrounding the organization. The community surrounding the post office, as well as the team of people that gets their mail to them, are the heart of the organization. Community members are actually the income stream that runs the entire operation and should therefore be considered the highest priority. Keeping the community members happy falls largely into the hands of the clerks and carriers that are seeing them on a daily basis whether in face-to-face interactions or over the phone. That being the case, I would remove some of the restraints on current Postmasters to enable them to better serve the members of their individual post offices. The current tone of the post office I work in runs along the lines of transactional leadership, which tends to be counterproductive to mine and many other personality types. Changing the managerial restrictions will free current leadership up to actually apply their own style to leading a post office, therefore improving the tone of each post office and the moods of its employees. If the situation required that I had to instead select a leadership style that reflected the current managerial structure, I would choose a transactional leadership style that utilized active management by exception (Bauer & Erdogan, 2018). That is the leadership style that best fits the current structure due to allowing postal workers to do their job, yet proactively looking for problems that could arise and solutions to correct them.
Reference
Bauer, T., & Erdogan, B. (2018). Human relations in administration (4th ed.). Asheville, NC: Soomo Learning. Available from http://www.webtexts.com