A good leader is not one thing. To be a good leader a person must be capable of being many things as the situation calls for it. In question is the decisions made by a particularly manager I once had when I worked as a waiter in a Mexican restaurant. This is an example of a bad leader, but by identifying the flaws in a particular manager’s leadership style, it is possible to use this as a counterexample to understanding what good leadership is.
One of the allures of the Mexican restaurant was the fact that patrons could get unlimited chips and salsa. On an average table, a waiter or waitress might fill up a basket of chips and a dish of salsa 3 times. Management, realizing that they were spending $100,000s a year on chips and salsa, saw this as a way to cut costs of the business. One manager decided that the waiting staff was filling the chip baskets too high. The new rule she implemented was to have level baskets. This was out of good intentions, to save costs of the business. Profitability is a big concern for managers of a business since they are the ones who are responsible for making sure that a business is profitable. However, this decision left the wait staff feeling resentful and made us feel that management was out of step with our needs. The level baskets in no way caused table to eat less chips. So now, instead of taking 3 trips to refill the baskets, most were taking 6 trips. Since on average we had four tables at a time and maybe 30 tables total in a good night, this represented taking an additional 90 trips to the kitchen and not a single wait staff member found it to lead to its goal of reducing costs.
I brought up this subject to the manager and was told, “It does not matter if you do not agree with the policy, I better not see any one walking out of the kitchen with an overflowing basket of chips. If I do, measures will be taken.”
There are a number of things that are in violation of what a good manager should do when this situation is seen from the Path Goal Theory. Under the path goal theory, the goal must be a shared vision that management shares with the employees. Since none of the waiters thought that level baskets were actually leading to less chip consumption, no one bought into the goal, so the path to the goal seemed irrelevant and arbitrary.
Management did not make the waiter’s opinion feel valued by simply dismissing the employees concern with saying, “You will obey this rule because we are the management and we make this decisions.” Even if management was dead-set on not changing the rule, there would have been a better way to communicate this to employees. There are four leader behaviors in the Path-Goal Theory of leadership. There is directive leadership, supportive leadership, participative leadership and achievement-oriented leadership. Each one is used for different occasions and for different reasons.
Directive leadership is what governed the code of conduct for the waiters at this restaurant. Waiter staff members knew what was expected of them and attempted to execute it for different motivations. Management had to recognized that as service workers, everyone was there to make money. Yet they could have still fostered an environment where employees felt appreciated. This was not the case with this particular management, who had a totalitarian style of leadership—do as I say because I said so.
Supportive leadership is leadership that explains patiently when its decision is questioned. It is true that employees without power cannot do anything to change management’s mind, but this fact should not be flaunted in a person’s face. Good leaders make the people that they are leading feel valued, not controlled. By not being open to revisiting the issue of the chip baskets, management was making a statement that the wait staff’s opinions do not matter and are not taken into account when deciding the policies of the business.
This was not a participatory leadership environment, since managers did not consult the waiters about their idea to serve fewer chips. The employees would have felt part of a team if they had been part of the discussion that led to the policy. Even if they disagreed with the policy it would have at least seemed like our opinion mattered. The new policy interfered with the ability of the wait staff to achieve their goals of keeping on the needs of their tables.
While this is an example of bad leadership, recognizing the failings of leadership is helping for a person desiring to be a good leader. We can learn from both positive and negative leaders, since it is the ability to have a specific definition of a good leader in order to evaluate if a particular leader fits within this understanding.
