Signature Assignment - Leader Interview and Synthesis

Running head: Week 5 - Signature Assignment 6

Leader Interview and Synthesis. 3

Leader Interview and Synthesis

Marlene Jean Charles

02/25/2020

University of Phoenix

What can leaders do to inspire teams to perform at their best?

Leadership is a person's ability to guide and lead a group of individuals towards a shared goal. Leadership deals with inspiring people, motivating people, and generating followers. Great leaders adopt many leadership skills and styles to manage an organization or a group of individuals. There are traditional leadership styles like the autocratic, democratic, and laissez-faire leadership; however, the healthcare industry demand for contemporary leadership styles. Healthcare is a complex industry that is constantly changing, and contemporary leaders emerged as a result of the modification. Modern leadership styles consist of charismatic, transactional, transformational, servant, shared, and relational leadership. The most utilized contemporary style that I have used to lead my subordinates is servant leadership. The paper will briefly define each of the contemporary leadership styles, and I will provide a series of events in my professional life of my servant leadership. I will also show how versatile the servant leadership style is to one’s personal life. Lastly, I will describe how a servant leader can change the working culture of an organization.

A transforming leader is a leader who has an elevating effect on its followers. Such leader shapes the followers’ behavior by increasing the followers’ motivation and morality through interactions. The leader engaged it followers by sharing the same motives, ideas, and goals. Goertzen (2017) states "Transformational leaders can achieve making followers aware of the importance outcomes, induce followers to transcend personal interest for the sake of the team, and move followers towards higher-order needs” (p. 84).

Servant Leader at Aurora Health Care

Aurora Health Care is an organization that strives to provide the best care for patients. We make sure that our patients are satisfied with our services, we look at the patient satisfaction ranking. The organization uses Press Ganey for health care consultation. Press Ganey is a health care consulting company that provides measurement, performance analytics, and strategic advisory solutions (Press Ganey, 2017). Our patient experiences scores are published monthly, and it provides the organization with a trend analysis of patient experiences. As a servant leader in the organization, I strive to provide innovative ideas to keep our patient satisfaction scores up. My clinic established a Vision Care Team that consists of thirteen members who meet monthly to discuss future goals for the clinic. As a liaison for Aurora SMART team, a patient experience team for the greater Milwaukee North are and Sheboygan area, I provide updates and plan of actions to improve our score overall.

I inspire my co-worker by doing the work first. I show them that slight changes in our attitudes make a huge difference to our patients. Every Monday, I go to each department to change our positive quotes flyers to engage the employees in positive thinking and also to provide patients with something to reflect on while waiting in the lobby area. Since the launched of the positive quotes, many employees and patients have shared positives quotes with each other. I have employees who would email me positive quotes. The quotes are submitted to the Vision Care Team, and the team decides which quotes to post up for each month.

While I aspire others to be positive, I also focus on what makes keeps the department scores up and what causes the scores to decrease. Each month, I meet with people from the department who have the lowest scores in the clinic, and we go over how to improve the scores. In one of the departments that I've met with, the employees mentioned that patients are bored of sitting in the lobby. I offered if a television in the waiting room will help improve patient's mood. Since the television was installed, there has been positive feedback from patients and the staff in the department.

Many know me as a Pollyanna, and I serve my co-workers so that they can believe that it is worth the effort to strive to be good caregivers. There are a few colleagues that I work closely with to help develop leadership. I notice that they had the ability but needed someone to guide them and nurture their skills. I feel if, given the opportunity to take on leadership roles, my co-workers will blossom into great leaders.

Servant Leader at Home

Leadership styles are not only present in the workplace but can be found in all aspect. I am a servant leader at home to my siblings. While listening to my sibling worries and complaints, I empower them to be a leader. As the head of the household, I provide emotional support, financial support, and spiritual support for my family. I help foster positive attributes for my sibling and inspire them to become leaders in the community too.

What challenges do you face in maximizing team performance? What do you do to alleviate these challenges?

Communication is key to any and every relationship we have in our lives whether it comes to communicating with family members, coworkers, employees, and bosses. You do not communicate that same with all these different groups of people. First-time employees have to learn this mostly the hard way. When you are a first-time employee you are just starting in the workforce and must learn how to communicate with you coworkers and boss differently than you would say your sibling and parents. As a result of this things have got to be discussed sometimes the hard way and that is why it would be helpful for an employer to know the best practice when navigating these challenges of communications. The first thing an employer should know is communication and behavioral issues to expect form first time employees. An explanation of the communication and behavioral issues. Then, they should know the best strategy for dealing with their first-time employees. Finally, the best methods of communication with these first-time employees.

Communication and Behavior Issues

Communication is very important when hiring young adults in their first job. Centralized management systems often intimidate new employees who have a fear of being given direction. The premise of the hierarchical management system is sensible, but it often hinders effective communication if certain precautionary measures are not met. An example of measures that should be taken by leadership includes clearly outlining objectives and goals to new employees. This measure will reduce the dependence that new employees have on management because the employee will know what the company’s expectations are for his or her job function. Clarity is also a crucial component of effective communication. The lack of clarity in communication by a leader can cause negative impacts in the workplace. Clarity is needed to ensure that new employees understand what their daily tasks consists of which will reduce the effect they have on the rest of the team. For starters, it is hard to keep “firsters” in the first place, so communication and trust must be built from the beginning. Without communication, there is bound to be some tensions and apathy within the workforce. Other issues that may occur from lack of communication is a lack of trust, an unhappy work environment, reactive thinking, and overall fear amongst the workers.

What are the top 5 leadership skills for successfully building and leading teams?

According to Greenleaf, “the great leader is seen as servant first, and that simple fact is the key to his greatness” (Wren, 1995, p. 19). Servant leadership is focused on building a strong leader-follower relationship. This model is less about power and more about the greater good. Situational leadership takes a deeper look at the leader-follower relationship to include the development levels of followers and readiness levels of leaders. Finally, building upon situational leadership is the model of transformational leadership. This model calls for leaders to work in collaboration with followers, to identify areas in need of change. The following 5 leadership skills for successfully are:

Ability to Lead This skill refers to how clearly a leader sees his or her vision, shares it with employees, and inspires them to support that vision. The ability to lead also entails how well a leader can motivate employees in order to get the desired business results. For example, each employee should understand how his or her job contributes to the company’s overarching goal.

Effective Communication All great leaders are good communicators. They must understand how to get a point across, describe the company vision to their employees, make sure daily tasks are getting done, facilitate office conversations, and know when it’s the right time or the wrong time for a meeting.

Relationship Building Creating and fostering relationships with both employees and clients is one of the marks of a leader who is truly dedicated to his or her position and company. It takes an investment of time, emotion, and effort to maintain business relationships, and this isn’t overlooked by your team members or customers. These relationships will help inspire your team to work harder, possibly even going beyond their job responsibilities.

Perceptive of Team Needs In addition to having important leadership skills, managers must make sure their teams also have the skills they need to succeed.

Trustworthiness The most trusted leaders display integrity and honesty, gaining the trust and respect of their employees and clients. Being trustworthy will increase your team members’ commitment to their goals and inspire their best efforts.

How do excellent leaders develop followership?

A great leader is not restricted to one leadership styles. Instead, a leader possesses many leadership styles and often incorporates the different styles to make one's leadership effective. There are informal and formal leaders, and the differences are its title and how people perceive them. In an organization where there are established leaders, the subordinates are obligated to comply with the leader's directions. However, in the community, many leaders lead people but do not hold any titles. The interactions between the leaders and followers are different and so is the leader and follower exchange. The servant leadership style will represent an informal leader in the community, and the transformational leadership style will represent a formal leader in a healthcare setting. We will look at how the leader and followers in each leadership philosophies interact along with identifying the similarities and differences of each leadership styles.

Grayson and Speckhart (2006) states the roles of the follower are like the leader and are slightly different in the initial stages of a project. The leader "provides direction in the form of scope, objective, expectations, limitations and guidelines" (Grayson and Speckhart, 2006, p. 3). The followers ensure their understanding by asking questions and contributing to the project. Once the project reaches the middle, the interactions between the follower and leader becomes similar and is often the part where work occurs. The followers during this stage move on to leadership by offering their ideas and suggestions. The interactions of the leader and follower diverge at the final stages of a project. The follower's followership minimizes, and the leadership goes back to providing a roadmap for the follower again.

What are some important decision-making strategies that leaders might use? Which of these strategies do you feel is most effective and why?

Dominance and social sensitivity leadership traits have personality, mood, and style that influence activities in military, educational, and religious organizations (Wren, 1995). Understanding why Hitler and Gandhi adopted different behavioral approaches in management is critical. The behavioral approaches observed in this study were autocratic and democratic styles. Analyzing the differences in traits and styles of the contemporary view leads to ideas for personal leadership development. Adolf Hitler was as an autocratic leader. Armies followed him. Gandhi was a democratic leader. Hindus followed him. Both men had an impact on historical contemporary views. Both men influenced followers.

Hitler’s’ and Gandhi’s’ leadership approaches are considered in the analysis since contemporary views analyze leadership characteristics, styles, and behaviors. Adolf Hitler had a direct, cold personality. His behavior was selfish, which caused him to initiate structure (Wren, 1995). He was a powerful military commander and a German politician. He used autocrative style as a dictator. Dictatorship is when a leader controls all activities and decisions. This once made traditional leadership style negative. Current theory contingency approaches understand the effects of a task- oriented behavior. Low control situations required Hitler’s’ direct autocratic leadership. The autocratic leadership approach in the context of moderate control situations creates conflict, low emotion, and punishment. The situational characteristics that apply to Hitler are autocratic decisions are less time consuming and efficient. In theory, Hitler should have consulted with subordinates. He used direct and delegating decision styles. Gandhi had an indirect, friendly, concerned, and warm personality. His traits caused his behavior to be considerate. He was a kind, simple, wise man who influenced social movements in India. He used democratic style and lead civil rights protest. Democratic style is when a leader has a positive influence on participation and majority rule. This makes traditional leadership style positively impact businesses. Current theory contingency approaches know the positive impact of transformational leadership during moderate control situations. Consideration is needed to solve moral problems in context of moderate controls. Gandhi used participative, group-oriented, consulting decision styles when support was lacking. Gandhi’s’ consideration had a good effect on his followers suffering from lack of growth.

What are some ethical concerns faced by leaders? How might you deal with these ethical concerns?

An effective leadership plan will include strategies for personal growth and professional improvement and will enhance the possibility of achievement through dialogue and discussion (Lloyd-Walker et al. 2011). To be effective, leaders must understand the mission of their organization, and must have a clear vision of the place they intend to lead their followers. The effective leader will also embrace actionable and measurable goals, and carefully execute a plan to achieve these targets (Leonard & Leonard, 1999). In times of uncertainty and change, the thoughtful leader will demonstrate flexibility and adapt to changing conditions by developing a plan for success without losing sight of the vision. The need for such flexibility is becoming increasingly important in the healthcare industry as reform continues to restructure traditional models of care (Holmes, 2010). However, the effective leader will develop an effective plan to create opportunity out of change which will also serve to balance flexibility and avoid compromise of the vision and mission of the organization. The effective leader will appreciate the need for change but will also demonstrate care through preparation and execution of a carefully drafted and disciplined plan of action (Holmes, 2010).

Impact of Servant Leader in an Organization

I feel that a servant leadership will foster a positive working culture where each caregiver cooperates to complete the goals. A health care setting is intricate, and it takes many people working together. For example, when its patient checks into an appointment, it is not only the doctor that provided the care. The initial contact the patient have is with the receptionist or patient service representatives. They are often the front line and makes sure patient's information is accurate before the nurse or medical assistant prep the patient for an evaluation by the doctor. The servant leadership model will maximize performance for Aurora Health Care because it is people oriented. The servant leadership attitudes create a ripple effect. When a positive experience is given to others, others pass it on. It empowers people to be honest and supportive and can protect employees from depending on a reward and penalty system to perform well.

Conclusion

There are many leadership styles utilized in the health care settings and at different levels of management. I feel that a servant leadership style is best suited for leaders who fall into the middle category of the Directorate. Middle management tends to interact more with caregivers and patients. It gives leaders in this category many opportunities to build rapport with employees and foster growth. However, in upper management, one may find that there is a dominant leadership style or a preferred style like transactional. Leadership is not restricted to work but is applicable in one's personal live as well. Whichever leadership styles that one chooses it will always make an impact in wherever one uses.

References

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Grayson, D., & Speckhart, R. (2006). The Leader-Follower Relationship: Practitioner Observations. Journal of Leadership Studies Retrieved from http://www.regent.edu/acad/global/publications/lao/issue_6/pdf/grayson_speckhart.pdf

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