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Discussion Question - Leadership:

Greatness lies not in being strong, but in the right use of strength.

- Henry Ward Beecher

I have two leaders in our company who I would like to discuss, our CEO Shane and our Director of Operations Warren. I admire both of these men but as far as leaders go, Warren is the better of the two.

Warren vs Shane:

As previously discussed Shane is an entrepreneur who has built a successful business by surrounding himself with good people. One of those people is Warren. His style of leadership definitely lends itself to transformational leadership vs Shane who has a more transactional style of leadership. For Shane it is very simple, if you work hard and don't make any mistakes that cost the company money you will get a bonus or an increase. Warren understands that there is an element of human error in all aspects of business and it is more important to learn from these mistakes so as to avoid them in the future, than to lay blame and punish employees. People in our organization all respect him as his "credibility gap" is very small. What he preaches is generally what he practices. On the other hand there is Shane, he manages by fear, fear of demotion, fear of a verbal dressing down and fear of a character attack. His power stems from REWARD power, he has the power to reward desired behaviour and by the same tok

en take those rewards away. Shane also lends himself to creating and encouraging petty office politics, whether knowingly or by accident. He is easily influenced by others and will easily listen to a one-sided version of a story. There was an occasion where he employed a Managing Director over his two department heads, instead of introducing this person as the MD, he task them with finding "problem areas" and highlighting them. In a company that has grown as quickly as ours there are bound to be problems and pointing fingers at staff that are putting in long hours and doing their best is no way to handle the situation. The person employed went in like a bull in a china shop and attacked everyone. This made everyone unhappy. Many systems changed instantly by the MD have now failed as the MD 1. did not have their support and 2. the systems were applied to an importing company and these systems that the MD put in place were based on a manufacturing company. Shane gave this new MD Legitimate power to chan

ge company procedure. As a result one of our fundamental QA systems which enables to claim repairs and rejects from our suppliers has now fallen down.

In an article on the wikipedia website on "What makes effective Leadership" there is an metaphor for leadership which I found quite interesting:

An effective leader resembles an orchestra conductor in some ways. He/she has to somehow get a group of potentially diverse and talented people - many of whom have strong personalities - to work together toward a common output. (wikipedia 2006). A good situational leader is one who can quickly change leadership styles as the situation changes. Warren posses this ability. He has the ability to channel the energy of the people around him into a focus on company goals. He is also a flexible leader, one who can read situations. Hersey and Blanchard proposed that there is no one model for an ideal leader but that a leader should be able to change to fit the situation. All people are not the the same and dont always respond to authority in the same way. The