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Leading a Virtual Organization: Leadership

Leading a Virtual Organization: Leadership Program Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

CRAIG MARSH: So the next thing that I wanted to discuss with you which clearly is central to this case is leadership. Now as you know the challenge was in the context of a global organization, a virtual organization. And people who are not directly employed by the company, they're contracting employees, I've already mentioned a little bit about engagement. Well, for me, one of the critical challenges was leadership. So this was in a sense one of my biggest challenges, to try and work out for myself what I felt effective leadership was. And then to understand how I would deliver that in the context of this somewhat unique structure that I was managing.

So the first thing I did is I decided that the context of the remote organization, of the remotely contracted people was in some ways only an indirect problem. That actually at the heart of leadership are some very basic ideas which I felt should be effective regardless of the particular situation that the leadership has demonstrated. And I was thinking of leadership in three very particular ways. And those ways are leadership as individual or leadership as personal qualities or characteristics. Leadership as a particular role. And leadership as a structure. Let me take first of all leadership as a role.

I felt that in order to achieve effective engagement of my front line service professionals I really needed to concentrate very had on what I called operational or what might be termed first line of leadership. So in other words, the people who were actually leading the service professionals in their tasks. For me, an absolutely critical level of leadership in the organization. One that is regularly neglected. So one of the things I did was to make sure that I concentrated hard on finding, recruiting, training, and developing a card of operational leaderships on the ratio of about one leader to every 10 service professionals. And what I didn't do was make a classic error of organizations which is to promote people who are simply good at their jobs. Because the qualities of an effective leader at that level are actually very different from the qualities of an expert in a particular discipline or role, which I'm sure you'll appreciate from your own organizations.

The second thing I did was think about leadership as a structure. Now I've already mentioned that I spent some time working on those as individuals. Well, I more or less bypassed the rest of my organizational structure. I had department heads and division heads. But what I did was concentrate on those leaders on recruiting them and treating them as one group or team. So I created structures whereby they could compare notes. They could share resources. And they could develop their own card or feeling of teamwork, remember, across the world. So I didn't worry about where they were located. I didn't worry about necessarily where I recruited them from as long as they were effective in that particular role.

© 2016 Laureate Education, Inc. 1

Leading a Virtual Organization: Leadership

The third aspect was the personal aspect of leadership. And this is the one that's written about most, I think, in leadership studies. So let me spend a little bit of time on that because I think it's critical. So what was I actually looking for in developing amongst those first line leaders? And in a word that skill was coaching. Now coaching is both a process, a method for the way that you go about leading your people, but it's also a principle or a particular style or culture of leadership. And what I mean by that is coaching is about making sure that you're not telling people what to do, making sure that you're not directing or at least you're minimizing the direction. But what you are doing is making sure that your people themselves are the ones who are coming up with the solutions to the challenges and the problems that they're faced with every day. And that's culturally and, from a perspective of principle for me, a really critical aspect of effective leadership.

And I simply decided that everything that I've read about cultures, about virtual organizations, about leadership itself boil down to that as being the most effective style of leadership that I needed. So I spent a lot of time making sure that my leaders were effective coaches. In order, as I've been saying earlier, to make sure the front line people were engaged and indulging in what I described earlier as discretionary effort with our customers.

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