style

Situational Coaching

February 11, 2013 by nqm5200

I don’t watch football very often but last weekend was the Super Bowl and even I could not withstand the societal tug of that game. As I watched the two very angry looking brother coaches on the field wave their arms and jump up and down, I could not help but wonder, do these men coach? I mean do they follow the leadership style outlined by the situational approach? Let me explain or rather let Northouse explain, “situational leadership demands that leaders match their style to the competence and commitment of the subordinates.” (Northouse, 2013) This leadership approach lays out four general behavior based styles of leadership: Directing, Supporting, Delegating, and Coaching. I wanted to know, during a game, do NFL coaches coach? The answer may appear obvious but let’s walk through a game and the four situational styles to find out.

The flurry of activity before a football game is one of my favorite parts of the whole masculine ritual of contact sports to watch. The athletes strut around aimlessly, stretching and following some routine they’ve clearly mapped in their minds years ago. The coaches do much of the same. They look like players. They walk around the field, slapping rear ends and chatting, perhaps about the weather. Then they scurry back into the tunnels to their caves. Here the coach gives some inspirational speech designed to light the emotional fire smoldering in each player. There is no direction or stratagem being discussed. This is not coaching. This is supporting. “In this approach, the leader… uses supportive behaviors that bring out the employees’ skills around the task to be accomplished.” (Northouse, 2013) And rightfully so because right before the game, players don’t need direction, they know what is about to happen, they need support.

What about during the game? Well that is a complex question. In the moments before a play you can see the coaches feverishly yammering into their headsets with laminated paper sheets held to mask the movement of their mouths. These are the moments they make all the decisions. These are the moments they direct. The choice is made and it is passed down the line, no questions asked. This is not coaching. This is directing. “Using this style, a leader gives instructions about what and how goals are to be achieved by the subordinates.” (Northouse, 2013) Of course, this is why coaches make the big money. They get saddled with the game time calls that no one else wants to make. There is no time for committee. No chance to seek input. A play is chosen and the players must follow their leader.

Of course not everything goes to plan. Not everything is left to the coach. The players must have some ability to play. What if they see something the coach does not or cannot? Coaches must have a level of trust. They must give certain players the responsibly to make split second overrides to their call. They must delegate a sliver of their responsibility. And indeed they do. Northouse says delegation leadership style “lets subordinates take responsibility for getting the job done the way they see fit.” (Northouse, 2013) In that time when the coach cannot be on the field playing the game he cannot direct or support and he must let his players play the “way they see fit”.

But a coach must actually coach, right? Surely he does not use every other style of situational leadership except coaching. Is there some time during the game where the coach must make a directive decision and support the players simultaneously? Of course. What about half-time? That beautiful moment when Destiny’s Child reemerges and the light show blinds millions. According to Northouse coaching “requires that the leader involve himself or herself with subordinates by giving encouragement and soliciting input.” (Northouse, 2013) That is exactly what happens during the mid-game break. Coaches are rapidly working with players to change the game plan, to build or take the lead. Coaches are telling players to hang tough or pour it on or unleash hell or any of the innumerous motivational clich�s. Coaches coach during half time. That is when they are both directing and supporting.

So do football coaches coach? Yes, but they also Direct, Support, and Delegate.

Northouse, P. G. (2013). Leadership: Theory and Practice (Sixth ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

Church Leadership

February 5, 2013 by gjf5006

I have experienced many different styles of leadership while working. However, I’ve also encountered leadership elsewhere. A church that I used to attend had a friendly pastor that not only lead the weekly church gatherings, but was also the primary leader for all church activities. Because of his prominent role in the church, I was given the opportunity to get to know him quite well. During events, I was able to observe my pastor engaging in both initiating structure and consideration behaviors.

Initiating structure behaviors are task behaviors (PSU World Campus, n.d.). These behaviors occur when a leader is directing subordinates to complete a task or defining role responsibilities. Because my church had several activities outside of the weekly church gathering, my pastor frequently engaged in these types of behaviors. One example that I can clearly remember was at a church picnic. Many individuals from the church were interested in helping to set up the church picnic. Once all of the volunteers arrived at the picnic site, the pastor began to assign tasks to various individuals. After assigning roles to various individuals, he continued to check back with the volunteers to ensure they were doing their job. My pastor did not only take part in initiating structure behaviors however. I was also able to observe him taking part in consideration behaviors.

Consideration behaviors are also known as relationship behaviors (PSU World Campus, n.d.). These behaviors occur when a leader builds trust and camaraderie between followers and leaders. When my pastor was exhibiting initiating structure behaviors, he also carefully mixed in consideration behaviors. For instance, when my pastor was checking up with working volunteers, he was sure to ask personal questions that didn’t pertain to the work being completed. He would ask about the volunteer’s family, events going on around the city, or even the outcome of a popular sports event. This helped the volunteers feel connected to the pastor. This interaction made them feel welcome and may have even seemed to lessen the workload. After all, I knew many volunteers who came to the event early just to socialize with others while helping out.

Leadership styles can be constantly observed. Leaders are everywhere around us and are almost always exhibiting behaviors that are representative of one or more categories of behaviors. I felt that my pastor was an outstanding leader. The mix of initiating structure and consideration behaviors make it even more evident why individuals felt comfortable interacting with him. With the proper mix of behaviors, it is possible to make subordinates or followers not only feel welcome, but also accomplish a significant amount of work.

References:

PSU World Campus. (n.d.). Style approach. Lecture. Retrieved from https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/sp13/psych485/001/content/05_lesson/03_topic/01_page.html

TEAM MANAGEMENT IN THE BUILDING INDUSTRY

February 4, 2013 by

After reading about the style approach, I couldn’t help but notice how much this style is more involved with the followers’ relationship with their leader. The style approach studies leadership by analyzing the leaders’ behavior and how they interact with the followers using task and relationship dimensions (PSU WC, L5). What I found more interesting is discussion of the leadership grid which is shown below. The leadership grid takes the concerns leader’s concerns for people and results at two different axes and scores each leadership style based on their location on the grid (PSU WC, L5). By looking at the grid below, there is no doubt that a team leader is the most successful leadership style because it is focused on both the followers and the results. Team leaders are determined; they help the employees to get involved and committed to the work, they are not afraid to face confrontations, they are open minded, and they enjoy their job (PSU WC, L5).

By looking at the team leader description, it is easy to conclude that this type of leadership is the most welcome in the building construction industry. Team environment is integral to successfully designing and constructing a building. Therefore, having a leader with a team leader style is necessary in order to keep everyone in the team satisfied and engaged in the project. The team leader needs to be able to make unpopular decisions regarding the design while maintaining a good relationship with the team members. It is important to have a team leader during the building design and construction because this style allows for the team members to be as creative and innovative as possible because the leader is open minded and willing to hear the followers’ ideas.

This type of leadership is a great reminder of my internship during the summer and how my boss was an ideal team leader. My boss was able to balance good results with his relationships with the followers. He did this by letting people know exactly what was expected from them in term of the building design while constantly accepting new design ideas from the team to insure a successful building design for the client.

References:

Penn State World Campus (2013). PSYCH 485 Lesson 1: Introduction to leadership.

Retrieved on Jan 27, 2013, from https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/sp13/psych485/003/content/01_lesson/01_page.html.

Volunteerism – What Leadership Style?

December 15, 2012 by mrk212

Back in September, my wife agreed to take on the role of Fall Festival chair. The Fall Festival was a PTSA fund raising event held at my daughter’s middle school. The event is the main fund raising event held by the PTSA and is comprised solely of parent volunteers. She decided to chair the event because she felt it would be a good way to “practice and enhance” her leadership skills. As the Fall Festival chair, it was my wife’s responsibility to ensure everything came together. My wife’s goals were twofold: Make more money than the previous year, and ensure everyone at the event has fun.

So let’s set the stage for the event by providing some background information.

1. My wife works full time (usually around 50 hours a week) and we have a younger son still in elementary school.

2. The financial goal this year was to raise $10,000 and keep expenses low.

3. The school system only provides the school grounds and use of chairs and tables (teachers may volunteer to be targets in the balloon toss).

4. Parent volunteers are assigned a task and are responsible for implementing the task. Tasks are usually various games, prize tables, food and drink coordination, entertainment, etc.

In order to get the ball rolling, my wife decided to meet with the individuals that put on the event the prior year (their kids went on to high school). She took this opportunity to get ideas, left-over supplies, their thoughts on what worked and what didn’t work, and what they would do different if they were chairing the event again. With that information in hand, my wife set out to recruit parent volunteers to run the “main” tasks (mentioned above). Many who were still at the school and who ran events last year signed up to run the same events again this year. This was a big relief to my wife, as she knew that these people already had the expertise to run their events. But even after the initial sign-up, there were still a large number of vacancies that needed to be filled. My wife determined that she needed someone who could head up the task of getting additional volunteers that were needed to run many of the smaller tasks during the Festival (serving food and drinks, checking tickets, set-up and tear-down (of chairs, tables, banners, etc.), and monitoring to name a few. This person would be responsible for making sure these tasks get manned. They would have a variety of tools at their disposal beyond email communications, namely the volunteer website, VolunteerSpot. My wife’s tasks through all of this were to ensure that everything was progressing on schedule, to handle any requests and/or answer any questions by other volunteer parents, to interface and coordinate the activities with the school, and to promote the donations gathering process (this included getting notices into the school’s newspaper and onto the school’s website, as well as updating banners around the school with the names of those who graciously donated money to the event). In order to keep tabs on everything, she established weekly meetings at the school around lunch time about one month before the Fall Festival date. All in all, pretty easy, right?

Well, it was not easy. One thing that I can definitely say about my wife is that she is organized, goal-oriented, and results driven. The problem that I saw (and she felt) was that those parents volunteering didn’t necessarily have the same traits and/or skills. The biggest example of this was from the person who volunteered to run the volunteer sign-up task. My wife handled this task the prior year, so she was intimately familiar with what needed to be done and how to do it. My wife met with this parent and went over the VolunteerSpot website, including importing details from the previous year. My wife even provided email address lists, sample email templates, and general advice. My wife’s expectation was, and as it should be, that this parent would take ownership of the process and run with it. After all, the other parents running the other events had already hit the ground running; why would this be any different? After a few weeks into the planning, my wife had noticed that no one had signed up to volunteer through VolunteerSpot. She reached out to the parent in charge, and they simply stated that they had been busy with work and other volunteering activities. My wife could empathize (maybe just a smidge), but at the same time, she expressed frustration in this parent’s lack of motivation to get this done. Getting other parents to volunteer their time during the event was very critical to ensure a successful, and profitable, event. This continued for the remainder of the weeks leading up to the Festival, and my wife wound up taking on some of the work herself. To the parent’s credit, they did step up near the end, but had it not been for my wife doing the work she did prior to that, the Festival would have been severely under-parented.

The Festival went off without a hitch. Everything went well, the kids had fun, and the PTSA rose just over $10,000 for the school (net, after expenses). There were some areas that needed improvement, and all of these were identified during a “lessons learned” meeting my wife set up a week after the Festival. Will she do it again next year? During the weeks prior to the event, she said no way. After the event, she said she would if asked. It was a lot of work for her, but she felt really good after it was all over knowing how successful it was.

So what leadership style did my wife use throughout this event? I know for sure it wasn’t just one, and no single theory or approach could describe them. It was very interesting to see exactly how much the followers and the situation impact the leadership style. For example, the parent volunteers who had done this before needed very little guidance. Their goals were to do the best they could with their task, knowing that this would help the event, which would help to raise additional money (one of the main, overriding goals). Applied to the Situational Approach, and specifically, the Situational Leadership II (SLII) model, these parents required a Delegating style (low supportive and low directive behaviors). On the other hand, the parent volunteer described above, the one who’s job was to get additional parent volunteers, needed a lot of guidance, direction, and support. Again, applied to the Situational Approach, and specifically, the Situational Leadership II model, this parent required a Coaching style (high supportive and high directive behaviors) (Northouse, 2013, p. 100). I believe there was also a transformational leadership style being applied by my wife as well, at least to those parents that the SLII model would define as “D4” followers. She put forth the effort to inspire these parents to go above an beyond in an effort to help the greater good – the school. While their may not have been much of a moral component to this effort, the inspirational component was definitely there, and it was communicated through a shared vision in which both my wife, as the leader, and the other parents, as the followers, believed (Northouse, 2013, p. 200-201).

This experience, while a lot of work, was very rewarding to my. As she put it, the experience got her out of her comfort zone, and made her think and act as a leader. I think the experience has spilled over into her professional life as well. She is more confident in her job which has paid off in her recently getting a promotion and being assigned as a mentor to more junior employees. Overall, she couldn’t be happier about her decision to take on the role of Chair of the Fall Festival.

References

Northouse, P. G. (2013). Leadership – Theory and Practice – Sixth Edition (6th Edition ed.). (L. C. Shaw, & P. Quinlin, Eds.) Thousand Oaks, California, United States of America: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Leadership Outside the Organizational Setting

December 3, 2012 by mrk212

Lately I have been struggling to find topics on leadership to which I could apply the theories discussed in the Leadership in Work Settings course at Pennsylvania State University. I realized I was struggling because I was confining myself to topics on leadership within organizational settings. What I needed to do was expand my thinking outside of the atypical organizational setting. As a result, I found a plethora of situations to which leadership theories could be applied. For this blog, I will focus on the coaching of young kids in sports (any mention of “young kids” or “kids” in the remainder of this blog will mean kids between the ages of seven and nine).

The idea for this blog came to me while I was fetching baseballs behind the umpire in my son’s most recent Little League baseball game. I started thinking about coaching kids in terms of leadership styles as it relates to the Situational Approach. Practices and games have provided a great setting to see how leadership does or doesn’t work, and it truly emphasizes that the situation is a very strong, and often ambiguous, component behind the definition of leadership (which is defined as “a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal (Northouse, 2013, p. 5).”).

Leadership styles can be defined by the Situational Approach. Specifically, I believe the coaching of kids can be described by the Situational Leadership II (SLII) model. The SLII model defines four leadership styles: Delegating, supporting, coaching, and directing. These styles lie on a continuum under which lies a quadrant that defines the level of supporting behavior and directive behavior. Underneath this lie four boxes that define the development level of the individual being led. The following diagram (Meier, 2007) sums this up…

Let’s first define the development level of the kids using the four boxes on the bottom of the diagram. I would surmise that most of the kids (in the age range already mentioned) playing sports would land in the D1 range. They have much to learn about the fundamentals of the sport (low competence), but they are (for the most part) highly motivated to do well (high commitment; I will not get into what motivates them to do well however). Because of the nature of the SLII model, there is a one-to-one relationship between the development level of the kids and the type of leadership style that should be used (Northouse, 2013, p. 103). So if the development level is to be considered D1, then the leadership style must be that of S1, or a directing style. This seems a little counterintuitive; why use a directing style when a style called “coaching” exists? Shouldn’t a coach be both directing and supporting, as the coaching style proposes? Shouldn’t a coach be highly supportive of the kids, praising their accomplishments and lending advice to help with disappointments, while also defining clear goals and prescribing specific instructions on how to do certain things within the sport?

From a practical and experienced-based standpoint, I would say that a coaching style is more what the kids need; a directing style may be to “cold” to be used with kids (it may be fine for adults in organizational settings however). This illustrates one of the limitations of the SLII model – it does not clearly take into account demographics (mostly age in this case). Additionally, the compartmentalization of development levels and their associated levels of commitment and motivation are not clearly and definitively defined. What solid scientific proof exists that states that the levels D1 through D4 are absolutely correct (Northouse, 2013, pp. 106-108)? The variability in the levels of commitment from D1 through D4 does not make intuitive sense; commitment should be described along a continuum from low to high. Regardless of the shortcomings, the SLII model does provide a leader with some guidance on what type of leadership style would be most effective. One interesting item of note; there is a kids’ sports organization called “i9 Sports.” Their primary goal is to provide an environment where every kid, regardless of ability, is treated equally with respect to playing time and playing opportunity. Because of this, they emphatically instruct their coaches (of which I am one, for the first time I may add) to be extremely supportive and to not be overly competitive. Competitiveness is encouraged, but not to the detriment of the child. The leadership style they encourage is the supporting style. What’s really interesting is actually seeing what coaching styles are employed by the coaches on the field at game time -for some, a very high directing style is used, and you can see the results on the kids’ faces after a play doesn’t work out. This is exactly what “i9 Sports” is trying to prevent – they have empirical evidence that such coaching styles can cause a child to become turned off from playing the game and potentially abandon the playing of sports altogether.

So if you are ever out at the field watching your child play a sport, think about the leadership style being used by the coaches. It can be quite interesting to find out which style is the most predominant. I’d also like to note that I am not an employee of “i9 Sports” – I only volunteer to coach, and I just recently attended a coaches meeting that went over their main philosophy.

References

Meier, J. (2007, December 25). Situational Leadership 2. Retrieved December 3, 2012, from Sources of Insight: http://sourcesofinsight.com/situational-leadership-ii/