Understanding And Applying Leadership Functions And Skills

Leadership Styles

The leader is considered, as a head who is responsible for a group of people that is his or her team. There are various leaders like a political leader, or an executive in an organization. In this report, the discussion included on the leader in an organization, more specifically the leadership will be understood with the help of my learning as a leader of a project, within the organization. Leaders are responsible for their act of action and their team as well. They are responsible for creating a vision for them and their team to set a direction to work. Moreover, they use management skills to help people in accomplishing their respective task with the more effective and efficient way  (Hill, 2016).

Leadership is a very vital aspect to study, which has been researched on a large scale in past by a number of researchers. From the leadership theories, some believe that leaders are born, which means leadership traits are inherent and cannot be developed. On the other hand, some theorist believes that the leadership qualities can be adapted with practice and experience.  There are various self-development tools, techniques, and training program that can be helpful in enhancing leadership skills, and develop better competencies to become a successful leader, which will be discussed in the report further (Davis, et al., 2016).

A leader is someone who is managing and taking decision for a team, and while taking a decision, the aspect he considers is important, which leads the report to study ethical leadership and cross-cultural leadership. The most important aspect is leadership style, which reflects in an individual practice as a leader, for this the various leadership style; moreover, my leadership style in the organization will be discussed in the report. Leadership plays important role in the success of a project or a company, it is the leader, who brings innovation, set a clear direction, and makes others understand that as well (D’Innocenzo, 2016).

Leadership styles are characteristics behavior of an individual while motivating, directing, guiding, and management of the team. In the organization, some people seem to be an effective leadership style and the way they apply leadership in the organization. I believed that I was a great and successful leader while leading the last project in the organization. The leadership style I have is “transformational leadership style.” Some of the various leadership styles are as follows:

1. Authoritarian leadership – This type of leadership style usually follows a hierarchy, which means the top leaders take a decision, and inform team members and subordinates. This is a bit restrictive or rigid way of performing leadership in an organization (O’Neil, 2014)
2. Democratic leadership – this is the most common and popular leadership style. According to this style, a leader discusses everything with his team and take the suggestion, before making any decision, it can be said that the team collectively take a decision, and with mutual understanding.
3. Laissez-faire leadership – this style includes delegating authority to the subordinates, which means the decision power is given in hands of subordinate to take quick decision making and increase the speed of the process of work.
4. Transactional leadership – under this leadership style follower-leader relationship is considered. The major advantage of this style is the clear and defined role of every individual, which leads to timely completion of the task.
5. Situational leadership – this leadership type is adaptive and change in characteristics depending upon situation and environment. This leadership style is helpful when an individual is working in a very dynamic environment, and changing very frequently. Moreover, it can be said that this involves a various style of leadership all together like telling style, selling style, participating style, and delegating style (Megginson, 2017).
6. Transformational leadership – this is the leadership style that I prefer the most, as this leadership style is most effective. According to this leadership style, major characteristics include motivation to the team members and inspiration to the followers, and creating positive changes in the team. This type of leader is considered energetic, emotionally intelligent, and passionate. I being this type of leader was committed to help my project team members in the organization to accomplish and reach our goals, moreover helping team members to understand and use full potential. Through this, I was able to get better performance from the team and enhanced satisfaction than other styles of leadership (Jacobsen, 2015).

Pros:

• Quick vision formulation – this leadership style is responsible for creating a vision for the team considering the current situation, which will be helpful to the team to get a direction, in which they will work.
• Promote enthusiasm – when the team members will observe their leader be energetic, enthusiastic, they would like to follow their leader and desire to have that success which will eventually increase enthusiasm among all members
• Use of inspiration for motivation – the motivational tools in this leadership style is inspiring people, that is sharing experiences, success story, to influence them to perform according to that and follow their leader
• Lowering turnover cost – the employees and customer retention is more likely to have according to this type of leadership style
• Change management – bringing innovation and change becomes easier when this style of leadership is adopted, as there are a mutual understanding and inspiring individual to adopt change easily
• Encourages rapid learning – the learning is ongoing with this type of leaders, which is beneficial for a team in the future as well
• Effective communicators – this leadership style individuals, are very effective communicators and good in communication and disseminating information in a team effectively
• Change situations of low morale – the low morale continuous can be easily handled by the transformational leader, as they motivate and inspire others
• Relationship building – as per this type of style, relationship building becomes easy because of interpersonal communication with the team members (Jing, 2016)

Cons:

• Continual communication – the communication need to take place continuously to keep the members motivated. In case of deviation, the outcome could be negative instead of positive
• Constant feedback – the feedback by the leader need to be provided constantly and consistently so that the mistakes are immediately deviated and improved, this could be time-consuming for leaders and members as well.
• Disruptive risk – since innovation and change is the key factor for this leadership style, the risk involved is disruptive in nature
• Not detailed oriented – this type of leaders are concentrating over innovative ideas, big picture, and the end result, which could lead to fixated leaders and do not focus on detailing in any aspect (leadershipcenter, 2018)

Cross-cultural Leadership and Decision Making

Globalization is the major reason for cross-culture. Culture plays important role in working place in the organization, especially if people from different cultures are working as a team because there are many cultural differences. Since the company is working internationally, and consist of employees from different cultural backgrounds and nation, the cluster or a group of people may be different from each other in terms of culture, behavior, and way of thinking. This will enhance challenges for a leader to manage a team effectively.

This impact the major decision taken by the leader, as the action taken by the leader can be taken differently in every culture. Like asking subordinates advice, some people like to be kind to one another and in another culture; people are more professional instead of building relationships.

There are nine cultural dimensions, which are held responsible; those are uncertainty avoidance, institutional collectivism, and power distance, in group collectivism, assertiveness, gender egalitarianism, human orientation, performance orientation, and future orientation  (Koryak, 2015).

• Understanding the political, business and cultural environment globally
• Learning, that is learned different taste, perspective, technologies, and trends of various cultures
• Working Simultaneously with different culture’s people
• Adapting living and communicating in various cultures
• Ability to relate people from different cultures

The leadership style selected was a transformational leadership style, which seems to be successful and it will be successful in the cross-cultural team as well  (Groh, 2016).

• Diverse workforce management – the workforce in a team is very diverse, which makes a leader in a difficult position while managing things among the team, as this can affect coordination among the group members to complete the project effectively and in scheduled time.
• The barrier to communication – since one of the major aspect is language, which can be the biggest barrier while working with the cross-cultural team. For example to motivate others, or to make them understand the vision created for the team, the leader has to learn their respective languages. This can lead to delay in project completion
• The original style of leadership can be destroyed – while trying to manage a cross-cultural team, it can be possible that the original leadership style can be distracted and lost. For example, while handing cross-cultural teams, the main objective of innovation, motivation, and inspiring others can become secondary, which is the destruction of my transformational leadership style (Li, 2018).

Ethics play an important role in decision making of a leader in an organization. Ethical leadership consists of respect, rights, dignity, values, and ethical behavior in the team and organization. This leadership is related to honesty, trust, fairness, and charisma. Ethical theories provide a system of principles and rules as a base or direction for making decisions regarding what is bad or good and what is wrong or right in the particular situation. On an individual perspective, an ethical theory provides a relevance for the understanding of morally decent individual behavior. There are two major positions explained by Richard De George, those are ethical absolutism, according to which there are various universal moral principles, which tells wrong or right, and consist of objective qualities, which are determined rationally. Another position is ethical relativism, where morality is subjective and context-dependent, which says there are no universal wrong or right that can be determined rationally and depend on the decision making of an individual and the culture in which they are existing  (Ghaderi, 2016)

• Respectfulness and dignity – a leader who shows respect to other and there believes and maintain dignity while making any critical decision, considering believes and ethics, values, personal and organizational goals. Moreover, this includes listening to others and considering their point of view before making any decisions and just imposing on others (Hanson & Casey, 2017).
• Serving others – this trait includes that a leader who is putting others point of view, feelings, and request above his own interest and act in a manner that the decision taken is fruitful for his team members or followers.
• Justice – the leader to be ethical is being just and fair. Moreover, treating all the members equally, and not partial towards the members you have a better bond. The personal biases must not exist with the leader. However, in case of any different treatment with any particular individual must be based on morality, clear, and fair (Gould, 2017)
• Honesty – the leader must be honest and loyal towards their organization and team. Honesty is important in every aspect of living life, and in this context, it is essential for an effective leader and to earn members respect for yourself. This type of leader presents the circumstances and fact completely and truly, it doesn’t matter how harmful or critical the fact could be
• Community building – an ethical leader is responsible to develop the community and considers his followers and purpose the efforts of an individual in the team.   He considers the individual goal of members and organization goal and tries to achieve both the goals and work hard to achieve community goals (elcompanies, 2018).

The decision-making by the leader depends on various influences. One the influence is an individual influence, it includes many factors such as the way a leader feel, think, perceive situations, and activities that are significant to ethical decision making. This influence depends upon gender, age, cultural characteristics, psychological factors, employment, personal integrity, personal values, moral imagination, and education. Another influence is a situational influence; according to this, some leaders make an ethical decision according to the external factors and situations, they have “multiple ethical selves.” The two main factors to influence is context related and issue related factors  (forbes, 2018).

According to various theories of leadership, it was believed that the leadership skills can be observed from birth, but on the contrary, it can be said that these skills can be learned and adapted by an individual to turn into a great leader. To make leaders learn different skills, or to enhance their skills according to the change in environment, role, duties, and work. The training program of leadership is helpful in providing concrete tools for leadership, which may be useful in productivity increment. Through the leadership training, leaders can learn new skills, retain existing skill and use that drives performance efficiency on the job and share the appreciation for enjoyment and achievement in own lives and employees lives (D’Innocenzo, 2016).

• Team communication method and techniques
• Effective delegating task learning and follow up skills
• Execution of the project on time
• Enhance the productivity of team members
• Better planning skills, and organizing abilities
• Increased concentration, in case of disruption  
• Retaining employees skills
• Change management skills
• Conflict handling skills
• Motivational skills (fosteredu.pennfoster.edu, 2018)

From leadership training I gain during my role as a leader in the project, I observed various benefits that I gained due to the program:

• Increased productivity – one of the improvement observed after the program was conducted and I implemented the learned skills in the project as a leader. It was observed that team members and mine have increased productivity as well. This increase in productivity was due to better management by me, and changes in my skills, which was helpful in making the clearer and better vision for the team, which make planning better and better evaluation. These activities along with enhanced organizing of team results in better productivity of the team (Carvalho & Junior, 2015)
• Retaining members – since the motivational skills were learned through the program, the ability to retain members and make them work for the team, and do not quit from the project becomes possible through the training program.
• Increased engagement of employees- various things were learned by me in the program, which also included the incentive system or rewarding system. Through these activities, employees are motivated to achieve above target and keep them engage in activities, through the reward and recognition techniques. Moreover, through follow up and regular feedback will make employees and leader engaged in work ( Ipsen & Nielsen, 2017)
• Implementing effective leadership styles – since the most appropriate styles were learned during the leadership program, and according to the situation, I was aware which leadership style I should use to enhance the teamwork and productivity. The style used was a transformational leadership style, which previously discussed. The implementation of this style of leadership was enhanced after the learning through the program (Van & Berends, 2018).
• Making better decisions – through a training program, and learning of new skills, the decisions are taken by me was better due to enhanced thinking and evaluating skills. I was able to observe and analyze situations with a better approach, which leads to better decision making (Zepeda, 2013)
• Nurturing leaders for future – leadership training is helpful in fostering future leaders (creativechange, 2018)

Being a leader, I realized that while attempting a new project and leadership role, one should be using major tools for self-development and its effectiveness, these include:

1. Strategic thinking – to become a better strategic leader, this aspect is very important, as the ability to or a skill to think strategically is relevant for business leaders, which I needed to have. This included the way of thinking and planning and identifying the way to respond to various situations like many movements in team, opportunity rise, rising concern, handling new entries to the market.
2. Decision-making skills – these are most relevant skills, as a leader is not taking a decision only for himself but for a team a whole, which cannot be wrong in any case, and if it was then it could result into negative outcomes. Therefore, one of the major tools to have is a correct decision-making tool. This can be done by exercising brain activities, getting a sound sleep for this skill to enhance yourself. For this, various applications are also available like Lumosity, which could be helpful in improving decision making
3. Conflict resolution skills – conflicts are the major problem in a team. People are working in a group because every individual has a different perspective than from another, which increase the chances of conflict amongst the group. Leaders are responsible to handle such conflicts, for this, a leader can attend workshops related to conflict resolution, which would provide experience and more control over the environment to handle uncomfortable and difficult situations (Gibb, 2014).
4. Team building activities – collaboration and teamwork are important for the timely and effective completion of the project. For this, team-building activities are essential that is to be performed by leaders, which can be done by recognizing good people around and building a team to work together.
5. Delegation skills – delegating task is also a very crucial step for the leader to conduct, for effective work done. For this, a leader must be able to recognize the abilities of each member of the team to delegate accordingly (Pandey, 2015)
6. Innovation – innovation is important in any project, I being a transformational leader, a major aspect is an innovation, for which skills can be learned. Innovation can be enhanced through brainstorming, trial and error, and collaboration (Qu, 2015).

Conclusion 

From this report, it can be concluded that the discussion was regarding the leadership and its effectiveness, for which my own experience as a project leader in the organization was taken into consider. The leader is an individual who has the traits to plan, manage, organize a group of people effectively, and influence them to perform well and to accomplish set vision and goals. There are various leadership styles, like the authoritarian style, where leaders take every decision in their hands. Democratic style is where leaders consider every member of the team to take any decision. I used transformational leadership style, where the leaders motivate their team members, create a clear vision and direction for them, and become an inspiration for members.

Moreover, it was observed that culture also plays an important role while applying leadership to the team. This is due to globalization, and various culture’s people working in a team. There are various challenges for the leader to manage cross-cultural teams like diverse workforce management, the original style of leadership can be destroyed, and the barrier to communication. While making decisions for a leader, ethics are essential and various characteristics of ethical leadership, which include respectfulness and dignity, serving others, justice, honesty, and community building. The leadership-training program can be helpful in enhancing and retaining skills of the leaders. Moreover, there are some self-development tools, which can be helpful for the leaders to use to become a better leader now, and in the future.

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