Is determination in a manager always a positive leadership trait or can that actually become a negative trait? I had a recent conversation with my manager and she said to me “I will do whatever it takes to not let the company fail.”
As we are learning about leadership traits, I found determination as an appropriate subject to discuss in my first blog. Northouse describes determination as “the desire to get the job done and includes characteristics such as initiative, persistence, dominance and drive.”(p. 25)
I found her statement to be very interesting because our conversation was in regards to her micro-managing our department. My manager micro-manages the department leaving me annoyed at times because I have to explain over and over that everything is under control and that she needs to lay back at times. My title and position within the company is assistant production supervisor / lead technician. Her title and position is the production supervisor. I found her statement to be misleading in that I felt that her determination to not let the company fail is exactly why the company will fail.
My manager does not recognize that her determination can actually be hurtful to the company. In my attempt to explain to her that she does not communicate anything of importance such as company change and my responsibilities as the assistant production supervisor and how that leads to the team feeling unsettled in our department. My manager is in the middle of implementing a major change to our department and she did not share or discuss any information in regards to this change with me. The team is hearing about the change through rumors and they have major concerns about this change.
The team is very comfortable with discussing their concerns with me but they are not so comfortable with discussing their concerns with the manager so they lean on me to speak up for them. As I explained more about our overall team concerns, that is when she made her determination quote. She did not care about our concerns but only her own determination to not let the company fail. I then tried to explain that by her taking on so much and not sharing the information with me that she is setting us up to fail. She holds so much information that if she was to miss more than 3-4 days of work, things will not run as a system but instead be chaotic as we try to piece together exactly what she does so that I can pick up the slack or we wait until she gets back. This scenario hasn’t happened because she has never taken a vacation longer than two days in the eight years that she has worked there.
Can determination actually be seen as a negative?
References:
Northouse, P. G. (2015). Leadership: Theory and Practice (7th ed.). (pp. 18-42) Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc.
Robert James Guthrie says
I like your example of determination in your current place of employment. I agree with you, I think that determination can definitely either help or hurt a project. Looking at your situation specifically, it sounds as thought as your manager is not effectively leading. I believe that there are other leadership traits that are also causing problems in your situations. I have also worked for someone who had a similar style of management, and looking back it did nothing but hurt the rest of our team.
Good communication skills are definitely missing here along with being overly determined, which in the end hurts the entire team. With out having much background on this situation it is hard for me to really say, but I have a feeling that there are other leadership traits that are missing from your situation. I think you need to take a step back and really analyze what is going on in your work place, being overly determined is obviously present but there could also be other factors. Intelligence could play a role here as well; the manager may feel like they are they only one that can make a competent decision. Looking specifically at determination, it is difficult to define what is an acceptable amount and what is excessive. It may all depend on the specific situation and the people involved. I think that in most cases determination helpful but there can be instances where it is also detrimental.
Amanda Klassen says
I apologize for my accidental early post above, getting back to what I was saying.
Determination is one of those “power” words that we hear so often, but I feel that not many people know exactly how to exactly get to the point where they are able to exactly establish what they are longing for. This is where I believe things can tend to go wrong…
I can relate to you oh to closely about having a manager who is a micro-manager. She wants everything run by her one day and then the next she is telling us that that doesn’t want to have to “babysit”. It can become infuriating, not knowing what type of “manager” she is going to decide to be day-to-day. Stick in there and know that you are not the only one who deals with this kind of drama day to day! One day it will be us in charge, and with the help of this class we will already be one step up from out current “supervisors”!
Amanda Klassen says
Determination is one of those “power” words that we hear so often.