Why do you think the shift in leadership is occurring?
Many
organizations are growing by leaps and bounds. Therefore, other managers are
asking themselves, “what are those companies doing to be so successful?” Leaders are seeing the need for a shift in management style. Without change, a
company will continue until oblivion. Companies that are growing by leaps and
bounds utilize all their employees.
Employees
are no longer the lesser people who can’t read and write. With the even higher
standards of high schools, everyone has a better understanding of the world
around them. Employees are now educated and have higher education’s past high
school. Everyone and anyone can now be a leader without being a boss or manager.
With
all the employees being more educated, diverse leaders are being challenged
with what’s next. What is the next big thing. People continue to want new and
better. Leaders are challenged with providing new and better but don’t always
know where to go with new and better. Workers can now be relied upon for ideas
and self-reliance because of education.
Do you think this is indicative of what is happening in
your organization?
My organization is slowly changing leadership rolls but
is having a hard time. My company is moving toward utilizing their employees
more. Unfortunately, employees are still not being used for large scale
decisions.
Employees are being used for improvements to current
productions. Employees are expected to improve their working environments like
routers, processes, and tooling. We are not being asked about the larger scale decision
such as what projects to evolve. Some of the reason that my organization
doesn’t fully utilize their employees is because of a high turnover rate,
seeing workers as equals, more of some middle up ideas.
The turn over rate at my organization is higher than
normal. With a large amount of locally competing aviation facilities, there are
a lot of employees coming and going. With high turnover and my company always
growing, it is hard to establish who needs to be involved in progressive
projects. There are also 7 different shifts for employees to be on. With
positions needing filled or trying to train new people, managers and leaders
have a hard time trying to utilize employees for leaders.
Oligarchy is a trend of clinging to the past hierarchy of
top down leadership
(Obolensky,2014). Getting into a polyarchy
style of leadership takes “humility to grasp the fact that you do not yet
understand enough to have the answers and then to ask the right questions….” (Obolensky,2014). Leaders need to know
when to stop making assumptions and start asking employees questions. However,
asking questions about someone that a leader doesn’t know is uncomfortable. How
does one ask for advice from an employee that you are supposed to be leading?
“Subordinates need to challenge in order to be able
to follow, and superiors must listen in order to lead” (Obolensky,2014).
The growth of my organization is coming more from the
middle up. The sales managers and R&D engineers are dictating where the
company is going. Sales is leading most
of the meetings without consulting anyone else. The acquisition for growth in
my organization is mainly bidding on contracts or trying to impress customers
to give us their business. Sales will not bend on the current way my
organization does things. For example, inspection tried to get the customer to
fill out a standard workorder form. Sales refused to have the meeting to
discuss the ideas because it’s too much of a hassle for them to convince
customers to use the form. Every single customer has a different work order and
some of them have multiple types of work orders. It makes training new
inspectors difficult when all the customers do something different. With this type of dictatorship towards the
growth of the company, it is hard to utilize employees for ideas.
How would leadership dynamics have to be altered to
accommodate and promote these types of changes?
Leadership would have to open up
discussion and listen to floor leaders. This could be implemented through cell
leads. The leads can be a hand- picked group of leaders who can take in all the
suggestion from employees and take the ideas to management. This type of change
also promotes leads to be the example. This type of strategy is a step toward
utilizing all the employees, leads are
floor employees, trusted by other employees, but have a large voice in the
direction for growth for management.
References:
Obolensky, N.
(2014). Complex adaptive leadership:
Embracing paradox and uncertainty. Farnham: Gower.
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