Leadership and communication are two intertwined concepts. Leadership requires an individual to possess great communication skills. Effective communication is possible only when the sender and receiver perceive the exact same message. Faulty communication and leadership styles can lead to conflicts and dissatisfaction on the part of leader and the follower both.
The movie, “The Nanny Diaries”, was released in 2007 and was based on the novel written by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus. This movie is a good example of faulty leadership and lack of communication between employer and the employee and how it led to disastrous results. The main characters in the movie are Annie and Mrs. X. The movie reflects on the lifestyle of rich and unhappy women of the Upper East Side in Manhattan. The movie revolves around Annie, who is a recent Anthropology graduate and wants to start her career in the corporate world. Her first interview at a prestigious firm in New York City doesn’t go well and she takes up the job of a nanny at Mrs. X’s, to pay her bills. She initially thought that her employer was offering her a great job with a good pay and decent place to live but she was highly mistaken. Annie was one of the many nannies that Mrs. X had hired for her little son. The relationship between Annie and her boss is a great example of a bad employer and employee relationship. Her boss belittles her every chance she gets and uses a very condescending tone with her.
A leader can be described as an individual who would be a role model to his followers and support a team towards achieving a common goal. We expect our leader to be knowledgeable, compassionate, and supportive and understanding. We also expect them to have good communication skills. The leadership style of Mrs. X is very authoritarian and she comes across as a control freak. She wants to control every day of Annie’s life and wants her to work even on her days off. She also cuts off Annie while she is talking and does take any of her suggestions into consideration. Communication between Annie and her employer is very limited and she cannot reach her employer even in case of an emergency. Mrs. X never listens to Annie and always called her “nanny” instead of calling her by her name. She gave Annie an extensive list of rules that she was supposed to follow and doesn’t allow her to ask any questions or make any suggestions. Mrs. X curses Annie at times and calls her inappropriate names. She treats Annie like a commodity who worked for her for a low pay check.
A leader should be honest with his followers and should be approachable as well, so that the followers can reach him or her if they need any advice. Mrs. X was just the opposite of a true leader. She was full of pretensions and always maintained an aura of grandeur around her. Mrs. X portrayed herself as a confident leader in front of the world but the reality lies far from that. She is the trophy wife of a wealthy businessman who proves to be a self-centered high maintenance socialite who gives top priority to shopping and spas over her son’s well-being. As the leader of the household, she is actually very poor at running the show. She does not understand the needs of the members of her household including Annie. She always expected Annie to cater to his sons needs which results in his son getting more affectionate towards Annie than her.
Communication consists of three main parts, thoughts, encoding and decoding. Once the sender has thoughts in his or her mind, he encodes them and conveys it to the receiver. The receiver on the other hand decodes the message received from the sender. Effective communication is possible only if receiver and sender have exactly the same message, at the end of the process. Effective communication is very important for a leader to be successful. In the movie, due to lack of instructions and communications, Annie fails to be adequate for the job of a nanny at several occasions. She did not have an idea what to do when Grayer falls really sick in the absence of his mother. Also her rebellious behavior in the end and at several occasions in between can be attributed to the tyrant like leadership style of her boss. Mrs. X was condescending, indifferent and passive aggressive towards Annie. They don’t treat her like a person and most of the time they don’t even look at her while they are having a conversation. They just give her orders and expect her to do exactly as told. This is a great example of bad management where employer does not convey proper instructions to the employees and expect high quality results from them. There are several barriers to communication in this case it is bias about nannies that they are stupid and are not supposed to mingle with the employers or communicate much with them.
One of the biggest reasons employees feel cheated and betrayed is if they get fired on no strong grounds. In the movie, Mr. X made a pass at Annie and Mrs. X saw it. She fired Annie and gave her an envelope which consisted her final settlement. Annie opens the envelope on her way home, only to find that Mrs. X. had given her forty dollars in that envelope. It was more than a slap in the face for Annie and she finally decides to do something about it. Mrs. X in this case fired Annie for no reason whatsoever and also deprived her of her right to a fair final settlement which turned Annie into a disgruntled employee.
I could relate with the incidences in the movie because I have first-hand experience at working for a boss whose leadership style resembled Mrs. Xs’. I worked for a traditional organization where bosses expected their employees not to think or make suggestions but do exactly as they were told. The employees felt suppressed, unappreciated and were afraid to say anything if they found a fault with anything. They knew that the safety of their livelihood was up to their bosses and they would not want to offend anyone senior in the organization. There was a lot of favoritism in the organization too. They current leaders in the organization set a bad example for the future leaders of the company and it became a vicious cycle. Young people who joined the organization and came up with new ideas for improvement were always discouraged. There were a lot of barriers to clear communication. The receiver and the sender didn’t always perceive the same message because the instructions were not clear most of the time and the subordinates were not comfortable enough to ask questions. My team leader was actually a great example of a bad leader. He did not trust his team members and was very authoritative. He did not care about his team members and always gave them deadlines that were very hard or impossible to meet. He was the reason why three of the team members quit the job. The popular belief is that employees work for their boss and not the company.
In conclusion, I believe that Mrs. X’s leadership style was very inappropriate and inadequate which resulted in hiring and firing of many nannies. She was also very unfair when it came to coaching, communicating or paying her employees which led to the “nanny cam fiasco” at the end of the movie. She refused to communicate with her staff even if it meant it could help them do their job better and serve her better in turn. Mrs. X. showed compassion at some instances in the movie but that did not make up for how unfair and rude she was towards her employee and definitely lacked leadership and communication skills to handle her staff well.
Works Cited
Shari, Springer Berman, dir. The Nanny Diaries. Metro Goldwyn Mayer, 2007. Film.
Stephen, Holden. "The Nanny Diaries (2007)." NY Times. NY times, 24 Aug 2007. Web. 9 Mar 2012.
Jacobs, Deborah L. "Seven Ways to Tame an Office Tyrant." Forbes. Forbes.com, 10 Mar 2012. Web. 10 Mar 2012.
