Leadership

PSYCH 485 blog

The Leadership Grid in Action

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The Leadership Grid has five categories of leadership: Country-Club Management, Team Management, Middle-of-the-road Management, Impoverished Management and Authority-Compliance Management (Northouse, 2019). While reading through the detailed descriptions of each management style it occured to me that I have used every one of these management styles at one time or another. Here are some examples.

Country-Club Managment – This one is basically keeping everyone happy so that they are happy to come to work and perform their jobs well. In my opinion, this is the ideal management style. As leaders we all know that to get the best performance from your team they have to want to do the work well for their own motivations. Having a happy staff means that you will get the optimal performance, generally. At my workplace we do as much as possible to keep our staff happy, including but not limited to paid holiday and PTO (not common in non-profit preschools), snacks and coffee provided daily, lunch provided by admin at least once a month but usually more. These are just a few of the things that we do to keep our staff happy which hopefully motivates them to want to do their best.

Team Managment – For me this is the gold standard of working as a team. Everyone knows that they can count on the other members of the team to hold up their end. Admins don’t have to be looking over anyone’s shoulders because they know and trust that their staff are doing their best. When you are staffed with experienced, committed professionals this is what you hope to have.

Middle-of-the-road Management – Generally this is the management style that occurs when we in the admin office are particularly bogged down with student registration and staff hiring. When we are basically just surviving minute to minute, we try to maintain middle-of-road management. We keep our ears open for any urgent situations that need our attention but rely heavily on staff to alert us to any issues that need to be addressed. We know that this is not a sustainable management style for long as it stresses the staff out and they begin to feel abandoned, which means their performance lags.

Impoverished Management – This one is obviously not ideal. Recently my boss and the only other admin at the preschool had to quarantine due to a potential Covid exposure. I was left in charge on the first day with kids in attendance after a nine month closure. Many days while she was out I was drowning in work, some of which I had not been trained to handle. I had zero time to step into classrooms to help or give teachers bathroom breaks. It was terrible. While reading the description of this management style I recognized many of those days that I was left to run the preschool on my own as a perfect example of impoverished management.

Authority-Compliance Mangement – We don’t run into this management style very often running a play-based preschoool. Any type of preschool is very hands-on for all staff members. The few times that I can remember using this style would have been when there were two staff members who couldn’t get along but had to work together for whatever reason. Generally, this would be a situation where two teachers start the year working together congenially and their relationship fractures for some reason. We don’t move teachers mid-year as its too disruptive for the kids. We try to take as much of the need for communication out of their working relationship by giving them both specific lists of responsibilities that they alone are in charge of. It’s absolutely not ideal but it generally works to get to the end of the year. The success of that strategy lies in the compliance part of this strategy, which you can never predict.

Although all five management styles are necessary and have their benefits, I strive for team management. What does everyone else think is the best management style of the five?

References

Northouse, P. (2019). Leadership : Theory and Practice (8th ed.). Los Angeles Sage.

When Your Leader Lacks One of the Three Skills

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I work for two different bosses. One is the director of the preschool in which I am the Assistant Director. The other is the lead Pastor at the church where the preschool is located. I recently began working as a part-time office administrator for the church along with my existing duties as an assitant director. It has been eye-opening to see the differences between the preschool director and the lead pastor in their roles as leaders.

As defined this week, the three skills needed to be a good leader according to the skills approach are technical, human and conceptual skills (Northouse, 2019). Technical skill is the knowledge of the mechanics of the job, human skills are the interpersonal skills necessary to interact effectively with staff and conceptual skill is the ability to think of ideas and solutions to problems to make the business better and innovate. My preschool director excels at all three skills, she is knowledgeable of all areas necessary to keep our preschool healthy and safe for all kids and staff. She has a great personality with seemingly endless reservoirs of patience and she has the best ideas for how to solve complex problems. I am really very lucky to get to work alongside her every day.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said for my second boss. As a pastor, I think that she is probably amazing. I don’t attend this church (or any, to be fair) but she seems to be really good at sermons and congregational care. Unfortunately she lacks the knowledge to do many of the other tasks necessary to be a good leader of a church. The lead pastor has to lead many groups and activities, as well as managing all of the employees of the church. This lead pastor often lacks the most basic knowledge of how her church functions, relying on her staff to keep everything under control. Up until I pointed it out to her very recently she didn’t even know when or if the custodians were working even though she was approving their timesheets on a weekly basis. As far as human skills, she is an admitted introvert, choosing an office on the upper floor of the building in order to avoid bumping into people, rather than use the office that the lead pastor has used for years and years before her, which is right next to the church office and accessible to all employees and congregants. Under her leadership, most of the church staff have moved to areas of the building that makes them inaccessible to church members. Her conceptual skills seem to be pretty rough, many of her ideas are overly complicated and require a lot of tweaking to actually become usable ideas.

All in all, I don’t know how long I can stand to work for both bosses. Working for the preschool director is amazing. Working for the lead pastor is a daily slog. Being able to see the differences in here in writing makes it pretty clear to me what the issues are. The question for me is how long can I put up with it?

References

Northouse, P. (2019). Leadership : Theory and Practice (8th ed.). Los Angeles Sage.

Assistant Director Vs. Assistant to the Director

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My professional title is Assistant Director. I work very closely with my Director, on work projects and in proximity to each other. Our office is very small and we have developed an intricate series of coordinated movements that keep us our chairs from banging into each other all day long. We have worked together for four years now. It is a great working relationship and we have even become friends outside of the workplace.

She is my boss though, which makes me think of our roles as leader and follower. When I first applied for the job of Assistant Director, I interpreted the role as Assitant to the Director, which would have been role-based (Northouse, 2019) working relationship. As the years have passed and we have settled in to our seperate strong suits I have realized that I am actually the Assitant Director of the preschool, not her assistant. Our leader-follower relationship has evolved from role-based to relational-based as we grew to trust each other and we learned each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Our relationship has redefined our roles. It works very well for us. I don’t ask her to take on tasks that require any advanced tech knowledge and she knows not to ask me any math problems that I can’t complete on a calculator.

Recently, the director had to quarantine at home for 24 days due to a potential covid exposure. We had just reopened our doors after being closed for almost a year. She was counting on me as was the staff. I had to handle some situations that I would not have had to deal with if she had been able to be at work. It was uncomfortable at times and pushed me way out of my comfort zone. I did a lot “fake it til you make it” things, such as handle a state licensing visit and our annual health inspection. It was the first time that I truly felt the growth that has occured in my role since I started four years ago. She is back now and I am glad. Not really because the work was hard but more because I was lonely and I missed my co-worker and friend. She recently joked that we should re-define our roles as Co-Directors. If that isn’t a relational leader-follower relationship than I don’t know what is.

Works Cited

Northouse, Peter. Leadership : Theory and Practice. 8th ed., Los Angeles Sage, 2019.

Trait Leadership in a Preschool Classroom

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As a preschool teacher I saw all kinds of leaders and followers from year to year. Every class had it’s strong personalities and the kids who were happy to let someone else decide what game to play next. Some of the kids were already leaders and some had the traits that I now recognize will make them amazing leaders in the future. Reading the list of the five major leadership traits (Northouse, 2019) reminded me of some of the three-year old leaders that passed through my classroom in years past.

Intelligence – W. was a generally a quiet kid but he had something that the other kids recognized as important. W. could read. He could on the very first day of school, when some of his peers were still learning to recognize all of the letters. W. was not a kid that you think would be leader. He was quiet, introverted and generally didn’t really care if he played by himself or with other kids. As the weeks went on and the school year started to really take shape, I noticed that the other kids sought W. out. If he was reading and a classmate asked him to, he would read out loud. A group of friends developed, with W. as it’s leader. They were a sweet group of kids and could generally be found in the quite corner huddled around a book. They were a tight group of friends until they all went off to kindergarten.

Self-Confidence – C. was the son of fellow teacher and red-headed spitfire. His favorite color was black and he only played a game if he thought the rules made sense. He was, in some ways, mature beyond his years. C. was not a very popular kid but he had a core group of friends that had, for whatever reason, decided that it was worth it to let C. make the vast majority of decisions during their time together. The very self-confidence that made C. a great leader to his friends also caused him to be quite a headache to myself and my co-teacher. He questioned every rule until he accepted that the rule was necessary. I admired C.’s ability to argue a point with me even when it drove me crazy. I still miss him and remember conversations that we had now that he is in middle school.

Determination – S. came to my class from a two-year old teacher who told me that she could do anything if you gave her enough time to figure out how to accomplish it. I saw this firsthand the first time that S. needed to wash her hands in the small classroom bathroom. S. was a little shorter than her peers (she still is) and couldn’t reach the taps to turn the water off and on. No problem, we had a step stool for just such a problem. S. politely waited until we had stepped back and then moved the step stool to the side. She stood on her tiptoes and reached as far as her fingers could go. She could reach the taps but not turn them. I though for sure that she would see that she needed the step stool at that point. I watched as she stepped back from the sink, took a minute to think and then hopped up until she was balancing on her stomach on the edge of the sink. She could now reach the taps on her own, no step stool required. S. was like that in all things. S. is now eleven and just appeared on a baking competition on television. She was still the shortest one but it didn’t stop her from winning.

Integrity – Most three-year-olds have integrity. The default is usually honesty in kids that age. G. was trustworthy to a fault. She may have been considered a tattletale by some of her peers who had already discovered the benefits of the occasional white lie. G. didn’t care if it made the other kids upset, she always told the truth and looked out for her classmates. In the history of all of the three-year-olds that I was lucky enough to teach, G. was the only one that I could have entrusted with going to find help from another adult if we had an emergency. I knew that if sent G. to find help she would have understood the gravity of the situation and kept to the task at hand, never getting distracted by a sticker on the floor or a toy left unattended in the gym. G. had and has integrity. As a six-year-old now, she shines in her first-grade class as one of the kids that the teachers can trust to run an errand. G. will mostly likely be a judge someday where she will finally get to be right for a living.

Sociability – J. was a new student who started mid-year. This can be a very tricky time for a three-year-old to start as the kids have formed their social groups and a new kid can struggle to find a place to fit in. Not J. He was like a magnet for friends. He didn’t have the same hesitations that many kids have about approaching other kids to play. On the first day of class he went right up to a group of boys building in the block center and asked if he could build with them. That’s all it took, J. was off. J. and that group of boys settled in to a friendship that lasted long past pre-k, as most of them went to the same elementary school. J. was one of the easiest kids to talk to that I met in my years as a teacher. He always seemed interested in what that other kids had to say and asked questions that showed that he was listening. J. was a natural born leader and I’m sure that even now, as a teenager, he is the kind of person who has tons of friends and cares about them all.

Working with kids allows you to see every type of personality, leader and follower. I’m excited to see how the rest of the semester is reflected in my memories of my students.

Works Cited

Northouse, Peter. Leadership : Theory and Practice. 8th ed., Los Angeles Sage, 2019.

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