Decision Making in Leadership
Leadership can be best described as the power relationship that exists between leaders and followers. It is the leaders of an organization that helps the organization to succeed and survive in a world where hundreds and thousands of companies emerge every year (What is Leadership?, 2016). Effective leadership and effective leaders are one of the biggest driving forces for the long-term sustainability of any organization.
A leader with strong decision making abilities, by nature is a very sincere, hard-working and modest person. These are some of the credos that can be easily noticed while having a one to one conversation with the leader himself. Some other distinct credos of the leader that need to be present are his creativity, global orientation, importance to quality and safety, and zeal to add value to the society as a result of his work and organization. Only when there is possession of these qualities of a leader, his mode of operation as a leader becomes highly appreciable.
A leader when making decisions should value his employees and believe that the well-spirited and enthusiastic team of people is the backbone of the organization. People working as a team, support unit of ideas with skills, knowledge of modern technology, research and development all contribute equally.
There are certain leadership qualities that should, in general, be possessed by leaders who are at the decision-making level. Especially, when the leader is the founder of any organization, the fate of the company lies entirely in the hands of that leader. If the industry is relatively new for the country, the pressure for the leader becomes even more. With his effective leadership trait and values, a leader should be able to raise the company to a prominent market leader position.
An effective leadership, however, comes from a complex interaction among the leader, the followers, and the situation. The followers anywhere, the employees and team of the whole organization should have a huge respect for the leader and they should be able to believe that it is because of the work discipline and environment set up by the leader, the company has been able to reach its position of success today. There should necessarily be the development of a standard operation system (SOP), and everyone is expected to follow.
The leader who wants a good decision-making system should also be able to set up a sincere enterprise system, which is built in such a way, that everyone understands their respective responsibility and translates into action. From the leader, the sense of responsibility trickles down to the low-level employees. The organization should have a robust HR system, and there should be the intention of the leader to make everyone believe that “I am the leader” and hence it is important to create that motivating environment where employees can grow the leadership skill. Most of the good decision makers have people oriented leadership who believe that it is essential to winning the hearts of followers for successful operation.
Another important approach that should be taken by a leader with good decision-making skills is the belief of conducting the business ethically and morally. Especially when a leader may be involved in the business of manufacturing or distributing basic needs and amenities like medicines, an even single mistake could cost the lives of people, doing ethical business is very important in his industry. These are the same values that a leader needs to pass on to his employees due to whom his employees should look up to him and have faith as well as respect for the employer. Building this faith amongst employees is an important part of leadership success, as a result of which he will be able to motivate, inspire as well as empower his followers to the right direction, for enhancing the decision-making process.
There are many leadership approaches that a leader may take. This approach depends on the type of decision that needs to be taken (Leadership Models/Approaches. 2016). For most of the good decision taking leaders, we can identify a certain leadership approach that is dominant on their side. There can be two aspects in which this leadership approach can be measured: Transactional or transformational leadership style and People oriented or production oriented. In many of the researches, to identify the effectiveness of the leader decision-making, The Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire was used. The interpretation can be made on the basis of the obtained scores.
In most cases, the leaders having the most effective decision-making powers have both the elements of transactional and transformational leadership; however it is the transactional leadership approach that is dominant one for precise decision takers. The leaders are generally scored highest in Management- exception, which shows that as a leader, he expresses clearly the job requirements to followers and that he is happy with the standard performance. The leaders also need to score possible highest in Inspirational motivation. This suggests that a leader is successful to provide vision, use appropriate symbols and images to get followers concentrated and make the followers feel that they are valuable.
Being a transactional leader, a leader is supposed to lead, guide or motivate followers in the direction of established goals by clearing out the roles and task requirements. A leader who believes in working within the system can be concluded that he is more dominated by the transactional leadership style. A leader who has a good decision taking ability will score well in all aspects of Intellectual Stimulation, Inspirational Motivation, Intellectual Stimulation, Contingent Reward and Management-by-exception.
For those leaders who are involved in manufacturing and their decision-making styles can be tested between the concerns for people versus concern for production.
A leader will a supposedly good decision-making ability scores more on concern for people aspect which suggests that he values interpersonal relations, values employees, respects the individual differences and individual needs. This is evident in his belief that the enthusiastic and well-spirited team of people is the life force of any organization. People working in a team puts their support to the ideas with the skills, research, and development, knowledge on the latest technology each contributing equally. .
However, a leader should also not score very less in concern for production. Though he emphasizes on technical or task aspect of the job, still it is his value for his employees that should be the most evident. When plotted these scores on the Managerial Grid developed by Robert Blake and Jane Mouton, we find that leaders may fall into any of the categories. However, most of the leaders fall in the “Middle of the road management”. In this particular area, adequate organization performance is possible through balancing the necessity to get out work with maintaining the morale of followers at a satisfactory level.
Charismatic leadership is also one of the aspects that people take into consideration regarding the decision taking abilities nowadays. There can be plenty of examples taken. One of the instances could be the case of Astro Airlines (Charismatic Leadership, 2016). The case deals with how charismatic leadership approach in decision-making could lead to both success and failure when the way it is executed is not adjusted accordingly. The Same approach, which the company used at initial stage, led them to success but then the same approach, in the long run, could not be effective enough for the company to sustain. These two sides of charismatic leadership can be portrayed in two stages of Astro Airlines; where the first stage pictures how the company became successful despite the dismal conditions of widespread operating losses in the airlines industry. The second stage is about how company continued to do what they were doing from beginning even while continuing to expand bigger and how there was the change in attitude in the CEO. This all led the company getting into both internal and external problems and hence to bankruptcy. The issue related in this context is how good of a charismatic decision maker Burton was and how the inability to decide in time resulted in the failure of the Company even when huge success potentials lay ahead.
A good decision maker or an effective leader is concerned both regarding the Task as well as People when it comes to the work. Being concerned regarding the employees working in the organization, a leader needs to create a novel type of organization providing the proper working environment, where the employees can unleash their creativity and improve productivity. A leader also needs to possess the characteristics of inspiring people to work by making them believe that they could do anything, and he should always use a good way to convey the message and direction of his vision to the employees and gain their trust and support. All this needs to create an exciting, enthusiastic and optimistic environment in the company. There should be ample importance given to flat organization structure by effective decision makers, where everyone is doing his/ her work of choice showing equality, participating environment and informality. Employees need to be given generous fringe benefits, profit sharing and stock dividend options by the company so as to make them feel the part of the company and hence to increase their motivation and dedication towards the work (A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making, 2007). So the way an effective leader handles employees being concerned to them, the way he communicates his vision to the employees of the manager to gain their support and the way he inspires his employees are all signs of a good decision maker. Also, the influence he has on his employees shows his ability to inspire the trust and the way he deals with them clearly shows his masterful communication skill. He also needs to possess the characteristics to make the employees feel capable. So overall he was also seen to be a good charismatic leader.
The main problem that can arouse for a favorable situation to any leader is the change in the attitude of the leader, and also, the lack of long-term vision and strategic planning done. Looking at the initial success of the company, there becomes a different attitude that arouses on a leader, and sometimes he starts becoming aggressive and self-proud. The leaders start being the result and task oriented rather than people oriented. They leave employees with facing the intense workload and not take any action to solve this issue. Communication problems arise, and there is a long time taken for decisions to carry out (Leadership: Communication Approaches. 2016). Managers don’t have support personnel to carry out their daily routine responsibilities. This leads to giving least time in important decision-making tasks and other strategy-making task. These problems are found to be because of the informality and the absence of structure, which is a good way of running a start-up but creates a problem when the company is running in expansion stage.
Also sometimes, the leaders may tend to neglect the change in the external market situation in the industry and what could be the step that the rivals could take in the future to counterfeit their actions. They keep continuing with what they used to do and how they use to work in the start-up even though the company expands to a much larger extent. The leaders seem to be unwilling to take steps to transform the company from a start-up to an established organization. There is a long-term visionary planning that becomes lacking in the leaders (Larina Kase, 2016). Also after the expansion of the company, it very freely works on the environment which was previously set up, so there becomes no proper work delegation and target set up, which results in confusion and the unstoppable problems.
There can be many forms of ineffective decisions taken by a leader. One of them could be that instead of bringing in experienced managers from outside, the already existing employees being promoted in the area where they initially lack sufficient expertise. Though new service employees are added, they are not given proper training required to carry out their work and that results in unsatisfied customers. The conflict between the leader and the third parties further deteriorates the situation since it creates distrust between employees and the leader. A leader who focuses on new growth plans rather than concentrating on making up things that are already deteriorated, more expansion plans, not a concern with changes that are occurring in external environment leads to more problems. Employees become mistreated, and subsequent employee turnover starts occurring. The authoritarian style that some leaders start to embrace, the way they hire and fire the people according to their own judgment, these activities start snatching the trust the leaders built up in employees and starts causing problems and the failure in the business.
Though having a good charismatic leadership approach existing in the company, with the change in scale, structure of the company, the leadership style already existing should be adjusted accordingly. A company should have a proper assignment of a task to each individual and also, the work delegation should be done in a proper way so that top managers focus more on long-term strategy rather than working on routine processes. Similarly, a leader and a Company should focus on the changes in external market structure and also the overall industry and competitors before finalizing any particular changes that are bought in the organization so that the new strategy does not backfire. A leader should make the long-term vision, and this needs to be adjusted and refined with the other changes that need to be considered in the business. Proper structure of the company should be set up so that work is divided and scheduled well and hence least confusion and delay of work occur. Finally, it is important that leaders consider hiring experienced managers from outside the organization rather than promoting employees in the organization who lack expertise in the related field. All these can improve his quality of decision-making.
References
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