Leadership

PSYCH 485 blog

Lead From Within

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The practice of being a servant leader can help your organization achieve great things. The purpose behind servant leadership is to, as a leader, serve the people or followers that you are leading. The act of servant leadership has a responsible notion that he or she is accountable for the well being of those that are “less privileged”, where there are possible “inequalities” or injustices that may exist and if so removing those barriers (Northouse 2016). This person is able to use less power and give more power to the people that are being led (Northouse 216). Under servant leadership, there are ten characteristics that one should represent in order to effectively become a servant leader.

A servant leader needs to be able to effectively listen to their followers and have a good communication. Having the discipline to listen is “one of the most sincere forms of respect” and shows that you are expressing an interest to that individual (Daskal 2016). Expressing empathy to individuals shows them that you understand the constraints or challenges that they may face and you have an understanding from their perspective. The servant leader should be able to heal followers. Servant leaders show a compassion for their followers and their personal well-being by “healing to make one whole” (Northouse 2016).  Northouse discusses that Robert Greenleaf, who is the founder of servant leadership, describes the healing as both ways from the servant leader to the follower. As a leader heals a follower, they too are healed as well. Focusing on awareness of their surroundings and what is taking place. The art of awareness allows the servant leader to remove themselves from a situation and look at “perspectives” that may be changed for the better good of the organization. Using a persuasion technique is far better than forcing followers to perform or complete tasks. Allowing the follower to see the reason for the action and allows them to embrace the course of action, rather than being forced to do so. The value of a servant leader to conceptualize the tasks or goals provides a much narrow path to take while not keeping things to broad. Having a clear sense of goals or actions places emphasis on the challenges at hand and what needs to take place to overcome them. Focusing on “the big picture” weeds out the “day to day” mundane tasks of the operation (Northouse 2016). The foresight attribute could be one of the strongest to have.  A leader needs to be able to fore-see things that will happen in the future. This keeps a competitive edge on many levels and promotes a sense of direction. Essentially, you need to be proactive in depicting the future based on the present time compared to what has happened previously (Northouse 2016). The commitment to see people grow can be a rewarding experience. After all, what good is a servant leader if they do not see that their employees grow. As a committed leader to each person, leaders want to see them “grow personally and professionally” Northouse 2016).  This is based off an inclusion of people making choices for the organization and for themselves so that they can grow.  Lastly, a servant leader should build a strong community within the organization. Having a group of individuals that can feel comfortable and be able to “connect with others” allows for a wonderful working environment (Northouse 2016). This example represents wanting to come to work each and every day feeling good about what you contribute while building strong relationships.

We have just discussed the attributes that a servant leader should have. At some point in our career, everyone has exhibited some form of servant leadership in a work environment. We can ask ourselves this question, Can we do more for our followers and help them succeed? This understanding can be a win/win scenario for both the leader and the follower.

 

Reference:

Northouse, P. G. Leadership: Theory and Practice (7th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. 2016

Daskal, Lolly: The Dilemma of the Servant Leader.

The Dilemma Of The Servant Leader

Photo Courtesy of www.rallydev.com

Team Style Approach

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When working with a team of employees towards a common goal, it is important to understand the leadership values that you can bring to the table. About eight years ago, I started in a leadership role while advancing my career. Our profession is generally task driven, greens need to be mowed daily, bunkers raked, drinking water replenished and a lot more. The style approach reflects the most in my career where I believe you need to be able to cross the task behavior and relationship behaviors in order to have a successful team. Northouse states that the style approach or behavioral approach describes how someone accomplishes goals and how they respond to people (Northouse 2016). Under this approach there are two fundamental behaviors that should take place for a team to be successful. The leader should have their authority compliance hat on so tasks can be completed yet understand that people are not tools but human beings. Tasks completion is important in the golf industry because tasks that are not completed on a daily basis will be noticeable to the golfing cliental. As one task is completed we move on to the next task as soon as possible. You can imagine running a 188 acre property with just 27 people can be time consuming and we need to be able to be as efficient as possible. This is a day to day regimen because the course needs to be prepared and look its best for the golfers. Now on the other hand, the leader should exhibit the behavior of Team Work. The leader acknowledges that both the task and the people on the staff are important and in a constant state of communication (Northouse 2016). The staff should be looked out for and treated with the highest regard as well as the task that needs to be completed on time and as efficient as possible.

Both of these behaviors are essential requiring a heavy emphasis on completing the tasks and heavy influence in leading the staff. You are probably thinking by now that what I have described is the Team Work behavior. Your right I have, and the style approach at times is extremely important for the overall goal of the greens department. People are just as important as the tasks and how we articulate our goals using the style approach will enhance the efficiency by forging good relationships.

 

 

Northouse, P. G. Leadership: Theory and Practice (7th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. 2016

 

Transformational Leadership through Power and Influence

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A transformational leader can be defined as how a person who can move the organization and the people working for the organization towards a greater good. Transformational leaders have the ability to shape their power and influence. The influence enables followers to complete more than the usual expectations, an above and beyond mentality (Northhouse 2016). The power is given to the followers where they can be motivated to maximize their conditions while feeling important to the organization on all levels.

There are a series of factors that must be in place for transformational leadership to occur. Peter Northouse list them as Idealized influence, Inspirational motivation, Intellectual stimulation, and Individualized consideration. Idealized influence can be tied to an emotional level where leaders can use their power as role models and followers strongly look up to them and want to be that person (Northhouse 2016).  The level builds on a trust factor and people in all levels of the organization need to be able to trust their leader. A parallel to trust is having integrity. If integrity does not exist, then the trust of building a relationship will not exist (Northhouse 2016).

Inspirational motivation developed by leaders influences their follower to see the vision moving the organization forward. A leader needs to properly inspire the team through “symbols and emotional appeals” where they are inspired to achieve more than expected than they were thought capable (Northouse 2016). This level of inspiration that a leader can promote, will give the team a positive reinforcement where they are able to achieve even greater things.

Influencing teams using intellectual stimulation unlocks the team’s creativity to be innovative and to take on challenges. Challenges can be certain beliefs or values concerning the leader’s characteristics as well as the organizations ultimate goals (Northouse 2016).  An individual with creative power influence can think strategically and show creativity during tasks and organizational issues that could take place. This allows followers to think on using their own strengthens and their ability to create and make decisions that will influence the team and organization. This leads toward the uncharted waters of developing new and innovative ideas.

Lastly, there is a need to listen closely to what the individuals of a team needs. Individualized consideration provides an atmosphere that is supportive through proper time in listening to people’s needs and wants (Northouse 2016). When a leader can understand the needs of the followers, this can break down barriers and will allow the leader to coach the individual to perform at a higher level.

Relating all of the factors, originates from the use of power and influence a leader can use to transform a team and the organization to the next level. This creates a culture balance of trust, integrity, and communication where the needs of the followers are met and their skills are challenged to perform better than they thought they could.

 

 

Reference:

Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and Practice (7th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

 

Strength Based Leadership

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Strengths Based Leadership has been a hot topic that goes against the grain on traditional leadership. Before, we thought that you should work on your weakness and not your strengths. You already knew your strengths and at the time it made sense to look at your weakness. People had thought, that to be successful, you needed to know everything to be successful.

As we talk about leadership, we want to know what makes an effective leader. Rath and Conchie state three key findings. They believe that the most effective leaders are always investing in strengths (Rath et al 2). Employers should focus on a person’s strengths rather than their weakness. This brings an uplifting atmosphere in the work environment. Second, the most effective leaders surround themselves with the right people and then maximize their team (Rath et al 2). Surrounding yourself with people of the same strengths as you, will not make a well-rounded team. Third, the most effective leaders understand their followers needs (Rath et al 3). When a leader can supply the follower’s needs, it can create a trust, caring working environment. Having an employee know that his boss and company truly cares about them as a personal strengthens the team’s unity.

In order to use Strengths Based Leadership, you need to first know what your strengths are. Without an awareness of your strengths, it’s almost impossible for you to lead effectively (Rath et al 10). Discover your strengths and maximize them to the fullest extent. This become the basis of leadership. Knowing your strengths does not come easy and there are ways to help you see what they are. “Strength Finder” was developed by Dr. Clifton and he has put together a web-based program where you answer a number of strategic questions to help you know your strengths. As people have studied great leaders in the past, they have discovered that no leader was similar and each one had their own strengths. Which means they surrounded themselves with people that were better at their weaknesses.

The leader’s followers are looking for basic needs. Rath and Conchie talk about four needs, they are trust, compassion, stability, and hope.  When we talk about trust in a work environment, we want to be able to trust in the wisdom that our leader has. Trust also increases speed and efficiency in the work place (Rath et al 83). Compassion towards employees shows them that the leader and the company truly cares about their wellbeing. Showing employees that they matter by engaging in conversation, asking about their families are great examples. The third is stability. Followers want a leader who will provide a solid foundation (Rath et al. 87). Employees need support and they need to know that they are being looked out for. The fourth and final need is hope. Hope gives followers something to look forward to and it helps employees see a way through chaos and complexity (Rath et al. 89). In know that when a leader can give hope in rough a time, it will motivate people to continue to perform well. No one wants a leader to who is going to talk negatively about the future, employees want some who will give them inspiration.  This example best describes The Authentic Leadership role, where a leader is genuine and trustworthy (Northouse 2016). The Authentic Leadership role has four characteristics; self-awareness, internalized moral perspective, balance processing, and relational transparency.

As a leader, we need to surround ourselves with people who are better at our known weakness. But first we need to find our strengths, Rath and Conchie describe four domains of leadership strength. They are executing, influencing, relationship building and strategic thinking. Instead of one dominant leader who tries to do everything or individuals who all have similar strengths, contributions from all four domains lead to a strong and cohesive team (Rath et al. 23). Leaders who can execute can get the job done, leaders who can influence, can make the team be heard, leaders with relationship building can hold the team together, leaders with strategic thinking can look for countless ways to be successful.

Leaders need to focus on a person strengths and not their weakness. Leaders are charged with making people better at what they do and if we constantly are talking about a person weakness, this will ultimately degrade the employee to the point that performance and efficiency is lacking. I know that first hand when we talk about a person weakness they seem to shut down. We should be talking about their strengths and how they fit into our organization. Putting people where they can excel at is something that gets looked over way too often.  Northouse discusses Servant leadership and how the leader is really serving the follower. He states the servant leadership takes on the role of “nurturing and be attentive to their concerns” (Northouse p225).  This type of leadership helps the follower excel to their maximum potential.

If any of this makes sense, then would you agree that we should be focusing on strengths rather than weakness or should we be looking at both when in a leadership role?

 

Reference:

Rath, Tom et al., Strengths Based Leadership. New York: Gallup Press, 2008

Northouse, P. G. Leadership: Theory and Practice (7th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. 2016

Performance Based Hiring, A new Way of Thinking

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The job description has been in use for many years and has moved company’s light years ahead of other companies. The reason is employees can work very effective when there is a description of what they are exactly supposed to do. This also helps the company by creating metrics to evaluate their progress. Imagine a hundred years ago when there was not a job description and how people were just told what to do. This can be pretty inefficient and make it difficult to compare how people are working. Job descriptions have come a long way, and most recently there has been another angle that discusses a different way of utilizing the job description when you are looking to fill positions. Instead of using typical job descriptions when looking to see if candidates are qualified to do the job, there has been discussed another way and it is called performance based hiring. Lou Adler is at the forefront of this topic and his explanations make you really look into how we are handling the hiring process through our use of job descriptions. He believes that most applicants are not even applying because of job descriptions that filter out to many good candidates. What is interesting is he believes that by using standard job descriptions for employment hiring may be weeding out candidates that may lack experience but make up for it in skills or knowledge learned. Could it be possible that we are not even seeing the best candidates because of a weak job description? What we will look at is the difference between a job description and a performance based hiring model. At the end we should be able to decide what best fits our needs.

Job descriptions are duties, responsibilities, who you report to, conditions that you will work in and what your supervisor’s role will be. This is giving you all of the relevant information you will need to succeed on the job. It also gives the employer a means to measure your efforts while working. For example knowing the specific duties or job tasks that will need to be performed. It can make things very clear to the employee of what he or she is expected to do. If you know what your duties are you, you will now the role you have, be efficient, and mindful which can lead to a higher performance rating rather than working without parameters or specific tasks. Again for the employer you have a very efficient employee who knows where they need to be and what they need to be doing.  Chris Ceplenski wrote an article called “4 Benefits of Effective Job Descriptions” and states that there are 4 key points that you need to be aware of. First, is better recruitment, a well description of the job for the employee and employer stands out to be the best tool to communicate what the role of the job will be and the requirement? By doing this well, it can improve both internal and external recruitment and can retain and motivate the best talent by ensuring that employees expectations are aligned with business expectations of what the role entails (Ceplenski. 4 Benefits of Effective Job Descriptions). His second points are better compensation and to see its relevance in the market. Ceplenski discusses how having everything spelled out and up to date for the legal aspect is of high importance. One example is the Fair Labor Standards Act that discusses the exempt and non-exempt status of the job that then leads into overtime eligibility or not. And his final point is people planning where he believes this is extremely vital. The two examples that he lists are head count and succession planning. His head count describes what everyone should be doing across the company and will point out any roles that are not being utilized or are needed for future planning. Where succession planning he states that job descriptions will show the role of the employee with a future career path. He gives this a forward looking perspective when you are looking to hire and candidates are interested in the career path. The anatomy of a good job description needs organization information, a job summary, duties and responsibilities, working conditions, job specifications, disclaimer and signature approvals (Dye et al.)

Now we can take a look at another way of thinking. The typical bullet points or must have in a job description will still be there such as legal requirements. What we can look at now is the performance-based hiring process that is supposed to give your insight as to whether the candidate will be a right fit for the job. The definition of performance-based hiring was coined by Lou Adler and is a four step process for hiring that integrates sourcing, screening, interviewing, and recruiting into a seamless approach based on how top people look for jobs and why they accept one positons over another (Luceo, Go Beyond). Lou Adler discusses seven ways to achieve the performance based hiring process so that you can repeat the process long term.

  1. Move away from using the traditional job description for filling positions. He states that top people do not look for skills or experience but rather challenges and opportunistic value. When we write a job description instead of skills perhaps we should be listing the work that needs to be completed. Instead of specifying what needs to happen we could look at what results are need to define and complete the job requirement. The job description should be stating what the performance expectations are and what results are needed in order to accurately give a representation of the job. For example, if we state on a traditional job description that you need to lift fifty pounds on any given time, we may want to actually say what we are lifting. This can just give some insight to the requirements.
  2. To make the job description say what he people will actually be doing with the skills. This can be called a performance profile, and as Adler states, is the center piece of the performance based hiring. This will describe performance objectives and describes how this person that accepts the job to be successful. Lou states that it is different from the traditional job description and instead what the person needs to do in order to full fill the needs to be complete the job. He uses and example where “Have five years of accounting experience and a CPA,” and his suggestion is to “Complete the implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley reporting requirements by Q2.” You can see here that the wording actually can open the door to a lot more candidates that may be qualified to learn the skills.
  3. Look at ways to advertise for the positions. Are they “based on how the best look for jobs”? There are different avenues to use to help you find the right person or for that matter the top talent pool. Adler discuses developing multiple channels and “based on quality, cost and time” and work each channel for optimization. Some examples of the avenues to look through are resume databases, internal transfers, internet-based advertising employer referrals, recruiting from college, job fairs are one of many ways to grab talented people.
  4. Disregard the questions that are not relevant. Instead ask questions about the person’s accomplishments in the past while observing how this person has grown. You can gain valuable information by asking what achievements has the person made or their most recent accomplishments.  You can assess the person’s ability on what they say but also in how they say it. Asking a question as to what accomplishment stands out the most to you that you have done and then describing it. Adler believes that getting the right answer to this question will tell you everything you need to know in order make a hiring decision.
  5. Hiring people who can do the work and are competent. To assess true motivation, you will need to look for multiple examples of where the person has excelled at and the underlying environment and circumstances (Adler, Hire with Your Head). Looking at their examples they give and whether they are consistent will tell you that there is some measureable performance that has happened in the past.
  6. In order for us to properly assess a candidate, we need to be able to keep our emotions in check so that we can make a sound and thoughtful judgment during the hiring process. You are wanting to collect relevant information during the interview to help make your assessment.
  7. The final point, you will need to be strong at recruiting during times of increased talent. This will give you the opportunity to hire top talent on a regular basis. There will be at times that the top talent is being heavily recruited by other companies. You then need to be able to essentially fight for them to be interested in your positions and nothing can help more but having a performance based hiring process in place to help you land the right people for the right job.

This is very interesting way to look for prospective employees. Lou discusses that it is important to look for people on what they can do on year one instead of what they can do on day one. This opens the door for more candidates who may not have the proper job description. It can focus on what they can learn, what their abilities are to perform over time. Hiring a person who has the experience and skills might look good on paper, but they may be missing on the ability to perform their job to the company’s expectations. We have probably at one point in our lives seen in the work place people get hired for the skills and education and only to fail at the performance aspect and either quit or get fired. Take a Chef who is applying for a job and he is a well-seasoned and veteran Chef of fine dining. He has all of the skill and experience needed. This person may fit everything to perfection when it comes to using the traditional job description. Unfortunately this person had a performance issue and could not meet expectations because he was not aware of the results oriented business that this was. Now we have a Chef who has previously worked at Chipotle, a lower end fast food place as compared to the previous candidate. This person did not have all of the skills and experience as the fine dining Chef had. He was lacking in fine dining because it just did not have that experience. So what this person does have by using a performance based hiring technique is the ability, the motivation, the drive and the high performance goal oriented mind set to actually learn everything and be accomplished on year one instead of day one.  Sometimes we need to look further into the mindset of a candidate to see what they capable of doing and what they are not are. With traditional job descriptions we are really looking for someone to fill shoes. What we really need to be looking at his someone who can walk in their own shoes.

 

 

  • Adler, Lou, The essential guide for Hiring and Getting Hired. Lou Adler, 2013
  • Adler, Lou, Hire with your Head. New Jersey: Wiley, 2007
  • Luceo, Go Beyond: Performance Based Hiring: luceosolutions.com
  • Griswold, Allison. “What employers Get Wrong When Writing The Job Description.” Business Insider. 15 Oct. 2013 Web. 8/1/2015
  • Jagoe, Andy. “The Most Dangerous Threat to your Startup Hiring Efforts.” Venture Grit. 2015 Web 8/1/2015
  • Dessler, Gary, Human Resource Management 14th Edition. New Jersey: Pearson Education Inc., 2015
  • Ceplenski, Chris. “4 Benefits of Effective Job Descriptions.” HR Daily Advisor
  • Dye et al. “Well Written job descriptions are worth the effort.” www.purdue.edu/hr/LeadingEdition/Ledi_404_job_descriptions.html

 

 

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