Running head: BMAL 501 DB FORUM 6: INDIVIDUAL 1
BMAL 501 DB FORUM 6: INDIVIDUAL
Henry Bradtke
Liberty University
BMAL 501 DB FORUM 6: INDIVIDUAL 2
BMAL 501 DB Forum 6: Individual
Henry Bradtke has completed reading for this class the book titled Resilient Leaders by
Robert Dees and has viewed the assigned presentations, websites, and articles over the last eight
weeks. This was his first experience participating in a group project in the world of academia
that is quickly coming to an end. He was then asked to write about the group experience with
group four of BMAL 501 and the three most important concepts that he had learned from
Resilient Leaders and relate how those topics relate to the Organizational Management and
Leadership textbook by Anita Satterlee. The three most important concepts that Henry believes
are interrelated between the two books would be servant leadership, team, and employee
development. If done correctly, the servant leader will be looking to develop the talents of those
on the team so that everyone can grow and become cohesive.
Group Experience
This was Henry Bradtke’s first time participating in the group process of a discussion
board. Through this experience, Henry learned that when done right it can be a pleasurable
experience to become a team. It can also be an opportunity to explore other teammates ideas,
opinions, and views in order to reach a successful conclusion on our project for the week.
During his research on one week’s assignment, he learned that academic team assignments are
ideally suited to help students develop essential leadership skills with the assistance of the
instructor (Schiffer, 2017). Henry took away from this experience that good communication,
clear expectations, and assistance by all the teammates helped alleviate the apprehension he and
his teammates had about group assignments through the world of online academia.
BMAL 501 DB FORUM 6: INDIVIDUAL 3
Concept 1
Servant leadership can be described as a people-oriented approach in which servant
leaders are not motivated by the need for power, but by serving followers, acting beyond one’s
self-interest, caring for followers, creating development opportunities, increasing followers’
autonomy and encouraging them to think independently, making room for participative decision
making and using persuasion rather than coercion (Holtzhausen & de Klerk, 2018). In short,
servant leadership looks at leadership as stewardship rather than ownership (Satterlee, 2018).
There are benefits that can found by employing servant leadership. The servant leadership
approach can be a powerful antidote to combat staff burnout, disengagement, and turnover
(Sherman, 2019). Greenleaf is credited with servant leadership in the 1970’s, but one can
actually date it back to the Bible with how Jesus is shown being a servant leader to his followers
as he continued to develop them in his teachings. Some of history’s greatest leaders got their
start as followers (Hyatt, n.d.).
Concept 2
While a leader is helping to serve his followers, he can also be learning about them and
developing their talents for the good of all on the team. A leader can learn about each team
members’ strengths and weaknesses to help build the team. Team building can have lasting,
positive, and measurable effects on the team performance (Land, 2019). Building an effective
team does not normally happen by accident. Creating an effective team is a result of hard work,
careful planning, and good coaching because teams require a thorough understanding of what
must be done, when it needs to be done, and who can get it done (Flaming & Mosca, 2019).
BMAL 501 DB FORUM 6: INDIVIDUAL 4
Concept 3
The leader’s development of the followers should start even before they are hired. When
looking for and hiring potential employees, we should be looking into the ways to develop these
individuals with their own uniqueness and how it can help add to the talent already within the
team. We must be looking to help these followers to learn how to properly do things and explore
new ways to do things. Human Resources development is a set of structured and unstructured
learning and performance-based activities which improve individual and organizational
competencies to address the changes in the business environment (Kareem & Hussein, 2019).
An organizational learning culture strengthens the relationships of team building and employee
empowerment on employee competencies (Potnuru, Sahoo, & Sharma, 2019). There have been a
series of trends shaping the current workplace has changed the nature of human capital
development practice to be more employee driven (Dachner, Ellingson, Noe, & Saxton, 2019).
Conclusion
The world that we live in is constantly changing, but everything does seem to run in
cycles. It is not uncommon for old practices to be rediscovered and used again. As is the case
with servant leadership that had been used by Jesus and has been revitalized with some leaders
using it today. Jesus served his followers and learned to develop his followers so that they could
pass on his teachings so that they could live on well after him. In the process of developing these
followers, he formed a team of apostles from diverse backgrounds recognizing that we need to
build upon each team members’ strengths for us to grow. Leaders nowadays need to look back at
this example and continue to grow themselves as a leader.
BMAL 501 DB FORUM 6: INDIVIDUAL 5
References
Dachner, A., Ellingson, J., Noe, R., & Saxton, B. (2019). The future of employee development.
Human Resource Management Review, 100732.
Flaming, L., & Mosca, J. (2019). Should accounting majors have human resource training in
compliance, coaching, team-building and mentoring skills? Journal of Higher Education
Theory and Practice, 19(5), 73-82. doi:10.33423/jhetp.v19i5.2283
Holtzhausen, N., & de Klerk, J. (2018). Servant leadership and the Scrum team’s effectiveness.
Leadership & Organization Development Journal., 39(7), 873–882.
Hyatt, M., (n.d.). Why the best leaders are great followers. Retrieved from:
https://michaelhyatt.com/why-the-best-leaders-are-great-followers/.
Kareem, M. A., & Hussein, I. J. (2019). The impact of human resource development on
employee performance and organizational effectiveness. Management Dynamics in the
Knowledge Economy, 7(3), 307-322.
Potnuru, R., Sahoo, C., & Sharma, R. (2019). Team building, employee empowerment and
employee competencies. European Journal of Training and Development., 43(1/2), 39–
60.
Satterlee, A. (2018). Organizational management and leadership (3rd edition). Raleigh, N.C.:
Synergistics international Incorporated.
Sherman, R. O. (2019). The case for servant leadership. Nurse Leader, 17(2), 86-87.
doi:10.1016/j.mnl.2018.12.001
