The Heart Of Leadership Essay Examples

Efficient leadership is vitally important for quality functioning of a company, regardless of its ownership, tasks and organizational form. Quality leadership helps a company act in an efficient way and successfully increases its competitive advantage by comparison with other companies that operate within the market. One of the prerequisites of modern organization\s successful functioning is a delegation of tasks and team work. The need for these functions is determined by ever more profound diversification and differentiation of tasks that are performed by modern companies.
This thesis can be easily substantiated by the example of managerial work. While in the 20th century it was still possible that a medium-sized company was managed by one person, nowadays vast majority of enterprises are managed by a team, whose members concentrate on different tasks, such as financials, HR, marketing etc. Similar thesis applies to other types of work that is more and more frequently implemented by teams.
According to the meta-analysis by Morgeson, De Rue and Caram (2010), modern teamwork-related researchers tend to concentrate on such topics as coaching activities in companies, the way team leader addresses events that take place within a team, team boundaries and team leaders role in defining them, as well the way leadership roles are shared in teams (p.6). Significant proliferation of research on teamwork actualizes researching into situations to which team approach to leadership can be applicable.
Team approach to leadership aims at reaching characteristics of a successfully performing team. Firstly, team members of a successful team fully integrate their individual actions (they have unique and specific roles, where the performance of each role is capable of contributing to common success). Secondly, a successful team is able to act a whole under the circumstances of complicated and dynamic environment. Thirdly, processes that take place within a team need to be led in an effective way (Zaccaro et al., 2001, pp.451-452). Thus, teamwork and team leadership are capable of making significant contribution to an efficiency of a company, promoting its successful functioning against the background of a dynamic and complicated environment.
Team approach to leadership is a good tool to deal with any task that requires to be completed quickly and efficiently, where it is necessary to avoid any possible mistake. I would like to apply this situation to a medium-sized company that faces a threat of not meeting a deadline for completing a project. If I were a leader, I would depict a project in the form of various subprojects and assign small teams to work on each of these subprojects. Then, I would provide teams with the opportunity of choosing a leader, who will guide and direct performance of each of the groups. Finally, using LMX approach I will address teams’ leaders and provide them with some coaching, so that they get aware about the way the total projects goes, and how it was distributed among groups. This approach will allow coordinating teamwork, but letting team members stay concentrated on their own part of a project without thinking about the way the whole project needs to be realized.
Team approach to leadership is useful by providing a basis to utilize the whole potential of coaching in order to provide for effective leadership of teams, working on different aspects of the same large-scale project. Usage of team leadership allows using flat organization structure and provides for cooperation between management and staff, not being excessively influenced by a hierarchy, governing the relationships within an organization,
Apart from continuous need to implement complicated and multifaceted tasks against the background of highly dynamic environmental factors, modern organizations need to stay flexible in order to meet abovementioned changes. The field of organizational change is one of most popular directions of organizational studies. While sometimes episodic change might be enough to get the functioning of the organization adopted to challenges, resulting from external environment influences, continuous change is most frequently required to secure adaptation to changes. Transformational leadership is a concept that is strongly interrelated with the one of continuous organizational change. This concept addresses a situation, where a leader is charged with the task of defining the scope of the necessary change, creating a vision of the way the change can be implemented, as well as creating an in-detail plan for change and implementing it in cooperation with committed team members. Challenging nature of transformational leadership lies in the fact that it requires not only leading the process of change, but combating possible opposition to change that might occur among staff members. Taking into account that the process of organizational change can be both lengthy and concerned with difficulties, it is important that a leader can clearly convey his vision of the way a change needs to proceed and motivate others to take part in the implementation of this vision.
Transformational leadership is of high importance for managing organizations under the circumstances of crisis, regardless of the organization’s size and ownership. Outer economic crisis is one of most frequent challenges that act as drivers for organizational change. Failure to react to a crisis directly after its outburst can lead to the fact that it may be almost impossible to secure continuous functioning of an organization if a crisis deepens. That is why, I would like to use the methods of transformational leadership in order to help a company get adapted to the functioning against the background of a crisis and get ready to possible worsening of economic circumstances.
Taking into account economic prognoses of the way a crisis is going to develop, I would elaborate on the general vision of the way the company can change the mode of its activities to avoid losses. Then, it is important to get all management and staff members included into discussion of exact steps that may be taken in order to prevent crisis# strong influence on a company. Inclusion of staff members and management is necessary in order to get them feel included and prevent possible opposition to changes. General support of the planned change is one of crucial prerequisites for its success. Finally, implementation plans will be designed for each of company’s departments, so that responsibility is shared. In order to become an effective transformational leader, I will emphasize key functions of transformational leadership, such as stressing motivation of followers, highlighting key areas of priorities, as well as providing individual couching and support for followers. Furthermore, specific attention needs to be paid to the development of the atmosphere of cooperation and trust in the company, so that problems that will occur during the change do not lead to its falsified perceptions among management and staff.

References

Morgeson, F. P., De Rue, D. S., & Karam, E. P. (2010). Leadership in teams: A functional approach to understanding leadership structures and processes. Journal of Management, 36, pp.5-39
Zaccaro, S.J., Ritman, A.L., Marks, M.A. (2001). Team leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 12, pp.451-483