1. What is leadership?
Leadership is usually defined according to the area of usage. In most cases, leadership is considered in social sphere thus the definition is mostly from this area. From sociology perspective, leadership is the ability to have great social influence on people or a group of people to a point that they can pay attention to you and allow you to monitor and control their reactions or mode of operation. This is mostly exhibited by people called leaders. These people are special in that they assume the leadership responsibility and since leadership is in a person, they perform excellently without hurting others at the expense of others. Often, many of the people in leadership positions are not leaders since leadership is inborn and not professional as it is the case with many of the people.
2. Main roles of leadership
Leadership has very many roles in an organization. One of the main roles of leadership is directorship. In this role, the leadership makes decisions and implements them. Decision making forms the main role of directorship thus leadership is mainly decision making. After making decision and implementing them, monitoring and control sets in as the second bunch of leadership roles. In this role, the leadership closely monitors the whole process of plan implementation and controls the flow of work and resources in the organization. Control also calls for analysis which seeks to identify some weaknesses present in the plan and try to combat them using the best methods present. This means that the whole implementation process is evaluated time after time to ensure the plan keeps in the correct track.
The other role of leadership is mentoring. This role involves the leadership taking initiative to encourage the employees or the group being led. This mainly comes due to the fact that leadership is what makes organizations work thus it should be the last to lose hope in any situation.
3. Which decision making methods suites you best as a leader?
Decision making forms one of the main roles of management and leadership thus should be treated with utmost importance. As a leader, I would always base my decision on the mature of problem at hand. This would mean that I would use a hybrid of situational and group consensus.
4. Factors facilitating my decision making procedure.
In situations requiring group discussion, I would call for a management meeting and as a unit; we discuss the whole issue and give our respective issues and views. After airing of our views, I would the request the team to propose the best to our problem and from there, a group consensus.
In some situations, it requires special decisions to be made which are structurally adapted to the specific problem. This would call for situational decision making process which in most cases leaves no room for an alternative. However, most of my decisions would be depending on urgency of the decision and the sensitivity of the situation. This would mean that in cases that a decision would not have high sensitivity, I would result to use group consensus. This is because sensitive decisions like decisions on finance require high confidentiality thus exposing the status of the organization financially would not be in accordance to leadership ethics even to the fellow workmates. Situations like development project would require consensus decisions thus I would opt to use group consensus.
5. Differentiate between situational and contingency leadership.
Situational leadership style is a style that takes leadership to depend on the situation of the leader. It explains leadership in terms of maturity level and task behavior. This means that the leadership depends on the acceptance of responsibility by the leader and the willingness to accomplish a task. Contingency model is closely related to situations affecting the leadership traits. The theory argues that situations interact with leadership qualities to influence the leadership effectiveness and efficiency.
6. Reasons why I would be a leader that the VP will be pleased with.
Looking into many American businesses, it is true that they are over managed but for I to be an effective leader, I would implement all leadership principles without being overshadowing. To accomplish this, I would do the following for the different principles.
On control, this is one of the areas that experience great overshadowing. To ensure that I will not fall victim to this leadership trap, I would control everything from a perspective best suited. For example, elements in the organization requiring direct control will have direct control. Some of these elements are: finance and development projects. In some areas like internal communication, I will instill indirect control to ensure that the other employees will not feel overruled. This would help me best accomplish the control principle.
Looking into planning, I would base all my planning decisions on some concrete evidence. This would enable me make effective plans with a lot of consultations from the necessary people. In return, I would implement my strategic plans with a lot of control and monitoring to ensure that my planned schedule of implementation is adhered to. This would make my planning aspect very impressive and efficient.
For organizing principle, I would adopt team based organizational structure. This would mean that my whole team will be sub-divided into smaller production units. With this structure, monitoring and control is easy since the main people to delegate duties to the team leaders. Collection of group grievances would also be easy and effective making the whole organization to work the best.
Lastly, motivation or influence is the other duty of the management. To achieve this, I would adopt some traits in the book ‘encouraging the heart: heart of leadership’ which contains information vital to leaders on how to motivate their employees. The main traits I would employ include: setting clear standards, paying attention to the standards and my employees, lead by example, tell the story of leadership and encourage the workers, personalize recognition to make the employees feel recognized and celebrate as a family in times of success.
