Discuss About The Change Management On The Operational Excellence

Research and Observation

Leadership is one of the most critical aspect about the success of any organization. Organizational performance is largely dependent of the kind of leadership that rests at the top. A leader is bestowed upon with the responsibility to motivate team members, ensure fulfilment of organizational goals and build a positive working culture (Fairhurst & Connaughton, 2014). Certain leadership traits are present within an individual by the virtue of their personality while certain traits can be acquired with time. However, there are some attributes that a leader must possess in order to improve their efficacy as a leader.

Through this course, I have been able to reflect upon my own leadership qualities as well as work closely with my role model and identify the traits that make her a great leader. Following this reflection, I have developed a leadership development plan wherein I have tried to address and devise strategies to improve upon my weaknesses. I have also gained feedback towards the same from my leader. There are several aspects of my personality that make me a great leader but there are certain areas that I need to work upon. This course has helped me in effectively identifying both. Being an effective leader is essential for my longer term success and retention in my career and I surely hope to work towards improving the same.

Leadership is a very important trait of an individual’s personality. From the organization’s perspective too, leadership is critical for the growth and development of the organization and its members (Antonakis & Day, 2017). Having a role model as a leader is essential as it inspires people to work towards self-improvement. I have been fortunate enough to encounter a leader who is also my role model. My friend Dhivya Leeladharan has been working and studying in close association with me for the last 6 years. She is from India and pursued her BBA (Bachelors of Business Administration) from a reputed university in the country. She started working even before she graduated. She has been associated with Amazon India wherein she started her career in the business development department and was soon promoted as a team leader.

I had the privilege of being associated with her on a personal as well as professional front. I did my summer internship under her leadership wherein I developed a deeper understanding about her leadership abilities. Despite being my friend and knowing me from a long time, our relationship at work was truly professional. In fact, as my team leader, I have found her to be one of the most fair and impartial people I have ever worked with. There are several attributes of her personality that make her a great leader. She adopts a servant leadership style which is very rare. In the team of 8 people, she had a personal connect with everyone. She always tries to know all her team members better so that she can devise a proper course of future action. It is her compassion towards her people that helps people to trust her immediately. Her team members depict that they can rely on her and she whole-heartedly fulfils her responsibilities in an effective manner and proves to be a wonderful leader for the team time and again.

Leadership Development Plan

As a leader, she encourages everyone to take part in team discussions and fosters creativity by encouraging people to share new thoughts, ideas and opinions. What I admire the most about her is that she does not believe in giving orders and getting work done. Rather, she leads by example and gives people the freedom to take a few decisions. As long as the work is being done on time, she does not interfere about how people are spending their time in the office. She believes that everyone has a different style of working and no leader should impose a particular working style on all team members. For example, some of us prefer to listen to music while doing data entry. While other managers have raised their concern regarding this attitude, she allows us to take any steps as we may deem necessary for our concentrated efforts.  

Communication is very critical to the success of any team’s coordination (Men, 2014). Dhivya has always encouraged us to transparently communicate about all our issues in order to ensure clarity within the team. She encourages us to be critical and share our opinions regarding her leadership or the overall team’s performance. Since she is a team leader, she has authority over us by the virtue of her designation. However, she has a really flamboyant personality and has some excellent convincing skills owing to her personality. People just tend to listen to her and respect her even when they are working with her for the first time. Her charisma and strong personality make her a great leader which adds on to her effectiveness. Charismatic leadership is that form of leadership wherein the leader has a strong charismatic personality and followers tend to follow the leader owing to this personality attribute (Gebert et. al., 2016). She is an orator. Every Monday we have a weekly meeting wherein we plan the entire week. She motivates us a lot during these meetings which really encourages us to start the week on a great note and work hard throughout the week.

Decision making is a highly critical aspect of every leader (Muenjohn & McMurray, 2018). Dhivya’s decision making skills are highly prompt and effective. This makes her an ace leader. A major part of her job is to coordinate and guide the interns. Every day she needs to make several decisions regarding department allocation and work given to interns based on the intern’s abilities and goals. She consistently strives to ensure that the organization gets the best out of every intern and that all the interns have a fantastic learning experience. It is her ability to trust in her team, motivate team members and ensure fulfilment of organizational goals through mutual coordination among many people that makes her a great leader and my role model.

Self-Reflection

Leadership has always been an important part of my life too. I have always felt that I possess good leadership abilities. Through this course, I have been able to deeply reflect upon my own leadership abilities and identify my strengths as well as weaknesses. My biggest strength continues to be my ability to communicate effectively with people. I believe in honest communications and practice the same with those around me. This helps me build and maintain positive long term relationships. In my office also, I try to reach out to people if I need help and try to make a positive foundation for a long term relationship.

As a team leader, I need to improve upon my ability to work in a team which is a critical aspect of an effective leader. Every time I am given a job which is critical to the organization, I tend to take complete responsibility rather than trusting the team to do the work as a group. This only goes to show that I have difficulty in trusting people easily making me a bad team person. Another weakness that I believe I have is my inability to control my emotions. Great leaders can take important decisions and conduct their responsibilities without a hint of any emotional burden that they may be feeling. However, I have a difficult time in keeping my emotions in control and they often tend to guide my decisions too. My lack of team working ability and skill to keep emotions in control are important aspects of my personality that I need to work upon.

In order to reflect upon my leadership style better, I took three important tools and tests which helped me analyse my confidence, leadership and emotional intelligence. The first test that I took was for confidence. The tests results depicted a score of 65. The result shows a high level of confidence but is also borderline arrogance. I have taken up several leadership roles since my childhood. Confidence as a leader helps team members in trusting the leader (Glauser & Holland, 2016). These roles have developed a sense of confidence in me. I have also always been very comfortable on stage and while performing in front of an audience. I do not even shy away from communicating with stranger. This confidence helps me in presenting my thoughts in an effective manner and have faith on my decisions. Nevertheless I need to be careful about drawing the line between confidence and overconfidence.

Results from Diagnostic Tools

In the team leadership tool, I score 10 out of 15. The score is fairly decent but there is surely a room for improvement. This test helped me reflect on my inability to trust others while performing a critical job. I prefer to take complete responsibility rather than working as a team. I prefer doing things my own way and in my own time and space. However, this attitude does not frequently work well while working with a team. Therefore I need to enhance my participation with the team in order to trust them better.

The last tool helped me gain a deeper insight regarding my level of emotional intelligence. The test judged me on four important criteria including self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management. I scored high on self and social awareness but I scored badly on self-management. This is because my emotions tend to play an important role in my decision making. I am frequently guided by my emotions that make me take biased decisions. I also need to work upon my relationship building ability. Emotional intelligence and the ability to have control over emotions is essential to be an effective leader (Gnambs, 2017).

Based on my self-analysis, I have identified three key areas that I need to work upon in order to improve my leadership skills. There are certain strategies that I can take in order improve these skills. The development plan for the same is as below:

Through this course, I have also been able to seek feedback from my role model and my leader. The leader had strong and clear opinions about me. I also showed the development plan to my leader and the feedback she gave me helped me improve upon the plan. I had only entered two goals but it was my leader who mentioned that as a future leader, I need to be a good orator too as it helps in keeping the team motivated and having a strong influence among team members. Therefore I understood the importance of this skill and decided to incorporate this in my leadership development plan.

From the leader’s feedback on a regular basis, I have understood that I need to improve my ability to work in effective coordination with a team. Owing to this feedback I have decided to know my team members better in order to coordinate with them in an efficient manner. The feedback on my leadership development plan helped in having faith on the effectiveness of my plan. Now I feel more motivated towards improving my leadership abilities. Feedback often helps in seeing that aspect of the personality that is difficult to understand or that remains hidden. A critical feedback is important for the growth and development of any individual (Hodge, 2015).

Conclusion

 Leadership in organizations has always played a critical role in the success of the organization. Since a young child, I have understood the importance of effective leadership as I have always taken up small leadership roles. Through this course, I have been able to identify my own strengths and weaknesses and device strategies to work upon the same in order to improve my leadership skills.

A leader has various responsibilities including team coordination, team motivation, and clarity of goals and accomplishment of the same (Brasfield, 2015). In fact building a strong and positive team culture is also the responsibility of the team’s leader. Over a period of the last few years, leadership has changed shape. Leaders are becoming more participative and democratic in nature as opposed to being autocratic (Storey, 2016). New age leaders need to work upon their skills and contribute to the team through consistent efforts.

This course helped me understand my weaknesses and based on the same I have built a leadership development plan. In order to become an effective leader, I need to improve my team working skills and have a deeper control on my emotions. There are steps that I will take to achieve the desired state of being a highly effective leader. More than the success of a designation, I wish to contribute as a team leader by ensuring that people associated with me can learn and grow. A leader is not just a designation but it is a huge responsibility and I hope to fulfil the same by consistently improving myself and being open to learning

References

Antonakis, J. and Day, D.V. eds., 2017. The nature of leadership. Sage publications. United Kingdom.

Brasfield, D.A., 2015. The effects of leadership traits in change management on operational excellence (Doctoral dissertation, Capella University). United States.

Fairhurst, G.T. and Connaughton, S.L., 2014. Leadership: A communicative perspective. Leadership, 10(1), pp.7-35.

Gebert, D., Heinitz, K. and Buengeler, C., 2016. Leaders’ charismatic leadership and followers’ commitment—The moderating dynamics of value erosion at the societal level. The Leadership Quarterly, 27(1), pp.98-108.

Glauser, M. and Holland, D., 2016. The Leadership Traits Shared by Successful Entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur & Innovation Exchange. Pp.87-89. United Kingdom.

Gnambs, T., 2017. Opinion leadership types or continuous opinion leadership traits?. International Journal of Psychology. Pp. 85

Hodge, M.E., 2015. Performance feedback in organizations (Doctoral dissertation, uga). Pp.85-86. United States.

Men, L.R., 2014. Why leadership matters to internal communication: Linking transformational leadership, symmetrical communication, and employee outcomes. Journal of Public Relations Research, 26(3), pp.256-279.

Muenjohn, N. and McMurray, A., 2018. LEADERSHIP AND DECISION MAKING. Leadership, p.379.

Storey, J., 2016. Changing theories of leadership and leadership development. In Leadership in Organizations (pp. 33-58). Routledge. United Kingdom.

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