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Transformational Leadership: The Real Steps to Achieve It

November 11, 2013 by psf5036

Transformational leadership sounds so good, it’s the hot topic of leadership and has rave reviews in terms of the results it produces, but how do you get there? If you are broaching the subject for the first time, how do you know where to start? Washington, Hacker & Hacker discuss the five ingredients of transformation: “Vision: Where are you going? Leadership: How are you leading the effort, and do you have the skills? Technical Plan: How will you close the gap between the vision and your current situation? Social Plan: How will you enroll others that might be supportive or not supportive of your plan? Burning Platform: Why should you do anything?”

Being a transformational leader is more than just a phrase or term, it runs deep and takes a series of steps in effort to obtain to it in a way that meaningfully impacts employees and the company at large. Firstly, having a vision of the direction you are taking the team is a crucial first step. And this has to be specific. Not only in terms of team culture and how you want everyone to interact, but also specific project goals and how each of those goals tie in to overall company success and moving the team towards making achievements that will move the company forward, by wither increasing intellectual assets or a direct bottom line improvement.

Once you have gone through all the other steps and still feel like there is something missing in terms of your achievement level, the final phase comes into play: “This is what the burning platform is: it is the motivation to move you toward the vision and overcome obstacles in your way because you can no longer, or no longer want to, stay where you are.” (Washington, Hacker & Hacker, 2011)

Washington, Marvin; Hacker, Stephen; Hacker, Marla. Successful Organizational Transformation: The Five Critical Elements. New York, NY, USA: Business Expert Press, 2011. p 73. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/psul/Doc?id=10478046&ppg=86

Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing

October 29, 2013 by psf5036

When a new leader comes on the scene to a preexisting group, a lot of different things can happen, depending on how the group reacts to the leader and how the leader interacts with the group, and whether or not the leader’s plan is successful. In the case of an elementary principal (the leader) who joined a school that was struggling in almost every area, he was able to make some remarkable changes to the success of the students, with support from a majority of the teachers, but seemed to leave a few behind in the dust, in that he was overly pushy when they did not agree, to the point that he was accused of bullying those teachers. On one hand, it seemed that he was doing his best to handle unreasonable opposition from teachers who weren’t willing to change: ““For principals who come into a school where student achievement has not been as high as they believe it can be, communicating expectations for change, improvement and for collaboration is oftentimes met negatively,” said Kent Peterson, a UW-Madison education professor who taught Buhl.” (Defour, 2011)

However on the other hand it did appear that he was overbearing and bullying when met with that opposition: “The conflicts included Buhl calling a teacher an expletive when she wouldn’t change assignments and standing in classroom doorways in ways teachers perceived as blocking their exit. In one incident in which he confronted a staff member about her performance, the employee walked away and Buhl reached out to grab her arm, but she dodged him.” (Defour,2011)

To me this is the perfect example of a team and their leader ‘forming and storming’ and in fact ‘performing’ because great improvements were achieved and students performed better than ever before. However, it is hard to identify the ‘norming’ stage in the way this article was presented, but it would seem that the majority of the teachers who were in support of the principal did in fact experience the norming stage as well, which led them into the performing stage of achieving real results with their students.

Defour, M. (2011, January 16). Principal-teacher conflict simmers at glendale elementary. Wisconsin State Journal. Retrieved from http://host.madison.com/news/local/education/local_schools/principal-teacher-conflict-simmers-at-glendale-elementary/article_e67f6e04-2133-11e0-82d2-001cc4c002e0.html

The In Group Gone Wrong: Workplace Bullying

October 23, 2013 by psf5036

The leader-membership exchange theory provides a brilliant depiction of how the dynamics of the leader-follower relationship within a team setting really works. There are those people who go above and beyond for their job, working hard to get along socially as well as practically with their bosses, and then there are those who just want to get in and get out, without a huge amount of deeper commitment toward their leader and team. In some situations though, the division of in group and out group can escalate to where members of the out group become singled out and even mistreated, to the point of bullying.

Hananel (2013) goes into more depth about what this kind of situation can eventually look like in the workplace, and how it can have a larger than life impact, even from a legalistic standpoint: “On-the-job bullying can take many forms, from a supervisor’s verbal abuse and threats to cruel comments or relentless teasing by a co-worker. And it could become the next major battleground in employment law as a growing number of states consider legislation that would let workers sue for harassment that causes physical or emotional harm.”

So while those in the in-group can reap many benefits like chance for promotion, and a happy trusting work environment, it is important that those who are in the out group for whatever reason, are still treated with respect and kindness by both their manager and their peers.

Source: Hananel, S. (2013, March 1). Growing push to halt workplace bullying. Retrieved from http://bigstory.ap.org/article/growing-push-halt-workplace-bullying

Leader-Member Relations

September 28, 2013 by psf5036

When Jim became manager of the tire shop, the team was hostile and angry, constantly bickering and complaining at one another, and worst of all, they tended to take it out on customers. Work wasn’t getting done, customers were frustrated, the yelp score was low, and the shop was losing business as a result. On his first day, Jim immediately called a meeting where he stated that whoever didn’t properly do their work would be reprimanded, receive a dock in pay for lack of work, or fired. He handed out new quota requirements for all of them completing oil changes and tire rotations in faster times than ever before, and said he expected them to meet the new quotas within a week. Over the course of the next week, one worker came in late several times, and appeared to be the least motivated of the group, pulling others into his slacking time with him. After warnings, Jim told him to go home for the day, causing him to lose a day’s wages. The other workers quickly began to get into shape, and amazingly, within the week, the quotas were met. While there were a lot of grumblings behind his back at first, things eventually began to calm down. More customers started coming in and they started maintaining more repeat customers as the completion time improved. While Jim didn’t appear to prioritize the feelings of the team, his no-nonsense task focused approach actually turned things around.

Part of the contingency model of leadership is the leader-member relationship and more specifically, what kind of atmosphere has been created by the relationship dynamic (Fiedler & Chemers, 1974). How confident and loyal followers feel toward the leaders has as much of an impact as how the leader is able to perform as his or her own skills and abilities.

Imagine you are a leader in a situation where the atmosphere could easily be described as ‘bad’ at best, if not hostile. Trust has broken down, a project has failed, team members are all pointing fingers in every direction and people are angry. Now you come in as the leader. How would you handle this? It turns out that certain preferred leadership styles actually perform well in this type of situation. (Fiedler, 1967) Those with a low LPC (least preferred coworker) score clearly show a tendency to do well in both extremely positive situations where things are already going great, or extremely negative situations where there are some serious problems that need to be solved. So what does this mean?

Having a low LPC score tends to show that you are task oriented: you focus on getting the job done, and getting the task at hand completed, regardless of the cost to the relationships involved within the team setting.

Fiedler, F. E. (1964). A contingency model of leadership effectiveness. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 149- 190). New York: Academic Press.

Northouse, Peter G. (2012-02-02). Leadership: Theory and Practice (Kindle Locations 2746-2747). SAGE Publications. Kindle Edition.

Northouse, Peter G. (2012-02-02). Leadership: Theory and Practice (Kindle Locations 2509-2510). SAGE Publications. Kindle Edition.

Can Good Leadership Be Predicted Through Testing?

September 23, 2013 by psf5036

There are several different kinds of tests that employers use for predicting how well an employee will perform, how reliable a candidate may be, or as a way to compare between candidates to make final hiring decision. But is it possible to use this kind of testing to predict leadership abilities? Many of these tests such as the Wonderlic Personnel test evaluate for quick thinking, and logical thinking, quick decision making skills as well as comprehension of language and numeracy. All of these are important factors of intelligence that have shown to be a very valid indicator of future success. However, some elements of intelligence, like social intelligence and being able to handle situations in a diplomatic way is not really possible to be caught by a test. I also think that forward thinking, as in strategizing, is not really found well by these kinds of tests. I believe (but would obviously need to test in order to prove this) that there are plenty of excellent managers who are able to think strategically to ensure long term success of their company, reviewing multiple factors in the decisions they make and even in the types of long term goals that they set for themselves, their team and the company, but may not be very quick thinking when it comes to test taking and may not even have very good math skills or other kind of skills that impact their success on this kind of test.

This question has been examined by researchers. In fact, Hannah, Balthazard, Waldman Jennings and Thatcher examined leaders self concepts and how their ability to adapt and deal with situations of great complexity and their actual EEG brain patterns when given complex strategizing tasks are related. They discuss that “findings provide a deeper understanding of the latent and dynamic mechanisms that underpin leaders’ self-complexity and their adaptability” (2013)

In the following youtube video Dr Daniel Goleman discusses how social intelligence (how you read people, what you take in and ‘hear’ how well you react etc) has been shown to be the most important indicator of good leadership. So it would seem that intelligence testing wouldn’t really be able to provide the best prediction of good leadership skills, because the intelligence they test for do not include social and emotional intelligence.

references

Hannah, S. T., Balthazard, P. A., Waldman, D. A., Jennings, P. L., & Thatcher, R. W. (2013). The psychological and neurological bases of leader self-complexity and effects on adaptive decision-making. Journal of Applied Psychology, 98(3), 393-411. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0032257