Category: LDRS500

I interviewed Sarah.
Sarah is a 33-year-old, wife, mother to two toddlers, full time student and employee. She has worked for a large, national, non-profit organization for the past seven years. She is at her best when she works for a cause that she is passionate about. She is a very independent and self-driven enthusiastic leader. She can perform herself the best as a leader when she has the autonomy as the field expert to build a strategic plan and is given trust and flexibility to complete her work. In fact, she was aware that in the past, she really improved herself gained trust as a leader when she engaged in a special role for several years. In five years, she is going to be in an associate director or director level position at some non-profit organization to help building and implement a strategic plan to lead the organization passionately. For that, she thought she needs to finish this MA Leadership to gain the knowledge, skills and recognized degree. She plans to apply the lesson directly to her workplace.

“Andragogy is the art and science of helping adults learn”( Navarro, C.P., 2018, para 1) . For adult learning, they can use their experience to help their learning. According to Malcolm Knowles, the foundational thinker of andragogy, there are six points where adult learners are different from children. (Navarro, 2018)

1. An adult is a self-directing human being, in which point they are different from children who are dependent personalities.
2. An adult can utilize their past experience to learn new things efficiently.
3. Adult learning is enhanced by their social role.
4. When we are a child, mostly our purpose of the study is just to study Children rarely have the real purpose to learn. However, learning is more problem-oriented for an adult.
5. Adults are mostly driven by internal motivation, rather than external motivators.
6. Adults need to know the reason for learning something (Merriam & Bierma, 2014, p. 47).

These concepts remind me of when I started to restudy English. Ten years ago, I thought English is important for my children and would like to put them to English language school because I had no confidence in my English and I didn’t want my children to have the same issue. My husband who is a good English speaker suggested me that I myself go back to study English to teach my children instead of putting my children to English language school. In fact, I had a 6-year experience to study English in the Japanese school system, but I didn’t have any opportunities to use it.

My husband also set a rule that we only used English for our daily conversation with children. For the first day, I found my study in school was totally useless.  I was shocked even I didn’t know how to say, “Let’s change a diaper!” in English. I started to take an English lesson and read a lot of books and used what I learned directly into daily conversation with my kids at home. Actually, to teach my children English is a great opportunity to restart English. It gave me the firm purpose and motivation for the study. At the same time, I was given an environment to apply what I learn.  After 1 month, I started to get feedback, which was that my children started to speak English. Getting feedback encouraged me more. I was such a busy full-time worker that I did not have as much time to study as when I was a student. However, I know how to learn a new thing efficiently in my experience and my motivation was higher.

I was astonished how much faster I learned as a mom than when I was a student. How important it is to have the purpose and the motivation when you learn new things. I understand this experience as a good example of andragogy and fits the condition of Malcolm Knowles’s six rules.

References

Navarro, C.P.. (2018) Unit 6 Notes, Retrieve from https://create.twu.ca/ldrs500/unit-6/unit-6-notes/

According to Northouse (2019), numerous research data show that leader should clearly show the goal for team members for the team effectiveness (p. 376). Page and Wong (2000) state vision and direction must be conceptualized by the leader and given to the followers to embrace and have a concrete image of the purpose, vision, and outcome of the organizational group project, and then the leader invests in and serves the team members to accomplish the mission (p.8). All through entire the process, the key action which a leader must take for a group project is to clear the goal and give a vision of small steps to achieve the goal to steer the team to the right direction. For that, foresight, and conceptualization are the important skills among the ten essential traits of servant leadership defined by Spears. Spears(2010) states conceptualization is “the ability to look at a problem or an organization beyond day-to-day realities” and foresight is “ the ability to foresee the likely outcome of a situation” (p. 28). Unfortunately, leaders can sometimes get involved in the day-to-day operations though, to judge the present situation logically and flexible beyond the day-to-day work is an essential task for leaders. The goal and steps might change depends on difficulties which the team faces, leaders should remain sensitive to aware the change and adjust the small steps towards the goal.

Northouse(2019) also suggests “Teams that can manage conflict, collaborate well together, and build commitment will have good relationships.”(p. 384) which refer to team development, the other factor of team effectiveness. For that, leaders will use awareness, listening, empathy, healing and persuasion skills. First, a team leader has to recognize the situation carefully, interpret what is becoming wrong and decide what kind of action should be performed or just observe(Northouse, 2019, 384). If a leader thinks arguing in the group is a problem, the leader should listen to the team members “what’s wrong”. Listening is one of the most important skills for leaders, which refer to their communication and decision-making skills(Spears, 2010).
When leaders listen, they should be empathetic listeners and heal them. Servant leadership is strong at healing one’s self and one’s relationship to others(Spears, 2010). Our mood and motivation influenced by relationship issues. Relationship issues can reduce team productivity. Leaders should take actions to make the teams accomplish both team performance and development.

References
Northouse. (2019) Team leadership. In Leadership. Thousand Oaks. CA: SAGE Publications
Page, D., & Wong, T. P. (2000). A conceptual framework for measuring servant leadership. The human factor in shaping the course of history and development, 69-110.
Spears, L. C. (2010). Character and servant leadership: Ten characteristics of effective, caring leaders. Journal of Virtues & Leadership, 1(1), 25-30.

Northouse (2019) states the two critical functions of team effectiveness are performance (task accomplishment) and development (team maintenance) (p. 375). “Performance”, shows how much the team can get the job done and “development” shows how the team keep their cohesiveness. For demonstrating these functions of team excellent effectiveness, Hackman (2012) suggested the team should have compelling purpose, right people, real team, clear norms of conduct, supportive organizational context, and team-focused coaching. Larson and LaFasto (1989) demonstrate there are eight universal characteristics related to team excellence. 1. Clear, elevating goal, 2. Results-driven structure, 3. Competent team members 4. Unified commitment, 5. Collaborative climate, 6. Standards of excellence 7. External support and recognition 8. Principal Leadership.

This theory reminds me of the story when I had to build a new medical team in my hospital. When I was work as a chief plastic surgeon, I needed to build a new medical team for limb salvage, which is the new concept of helping diabetic people who face on the situation of risk of amputation to preserve their own feet. For limb salvage, we need to organize a medical team which consist of a lot of medical members from many backgrounds who will help diagnosis, examination, nutrition control, take care of patient’s condition, rehabilitation and so on. This concept and treatment were quite new and unfamiliar for most of the people working in the hospital. First what I did was giving a big meeting whose target was all the people working in the hospital. I found some sponsors and prepared some free food and beverage which attracted people. At the meeting, I gave a lecture about limb salvage followed by a presentation about the importance to do limb salvage, the advantage for the hospital with doing limb salvage, what kind of and how many people will I need to make a new medical team. The reason which I did this meeting with everybody was that I knew a new medical team would need support in many ways from outside of the team. (External support and recognition) Also, this meeting was very efficient to build a new team in many ways. As I stated what kinds of members I needed for the team, what is the goal for the team in the presentation, some of the medical staffs who were willing to help me with passion came to me to offer to be in the team (Competent team members), also we could share the same clear goal at the same time from the beginning. (Clear, Elevating goal).

As Larson and LaFasto defined principled leadership as the eighth component of characteristics of team excellence, team effectiveness is influenced by a leader positively and negatively.  Zaccaro et al. state “leadership is the central driver of team effectiveness” and influence the team through four steps: cognitive, motivational, affective, and coordination (Northouse, 2019). Among these four processes, I always carefully worked for coordination of my medical team. In the medical team, each team members has different backgrounds such as a nurse, a physical therapy, a cardiologist, a radiologist, a dietitian and so on. Each member works for the same patient, the same goal which is getting the patient better, but the small goal for each of the members according to their profession is totally different. So, it is easy to cause conflict between members. I tried to facilitate and connect each paramedical staff knowledge and roles towards the same goal and made the team work more efficiently.

Servant leadership is first originated by Greenleaf in his essay in 1970.

“The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that           one wants to serve, to serve first.” -Robert K. Greenleaf  (Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, 2016)

In traditional leadership, leaders use his “power” to influence their followers, whereas  in servant leadership,  leaders share his power and put the followers first, empower them, and help their full personal capacities as high as possible (Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, 2016; Northouse, 2019, p. 225) For that, servant leadership is more focus on leader’s behaviors rather than their traits.

Many scholars tried to conceptualized servant leadership in many ways. Spears(2002) identified 10 special behaviors which are the essential components of servant leadership from Greenleaf writings.
1. Listening
2. Empathy
3. Healing
4. Awareness
5. Persuasion
6. Conceptualization
7. Foresight
8. Stewardship
9. Commitment to the growth of people
10. Building community

Awareness in servant leadership is different from emotional intelligence or self-awareness concept because it is more followers- oriented. With awareness in servant leadership, leaders are able to step aside and reflect themselves and their situations in the big picture.

The model of servant leadership created by Liden, Panaccio, et al. consists of three components: antecedent conditions, servant leadership behaviors and out come.  As same as Spear’s definition, the 7  behaviors of leaders are the center of this model : conceptualizing, emotional healing, putting followers first, helping followers grow and succeed, behaving ethically, empowering, and creating value for the community. These behaviors are influenced by antecedent conditions such as context and culture, leader attribute and follower receptivity. Also The result of servant leader’s behaviors is shown as outcome such as create healthy organizations that nature individual growth, strengthen organizational performance, and  finally it produce a positive impact on society.

Servant leadership improve an organization over the long term, however its weakness is it takes time to show outcomes.

Reference

Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership. (2016). What is servant leadership? Retrieved from https://www.greenleaf.org/what-is-servant-leadership/

Northouse, P. G. (2019). Leadership: Theory and practice (7th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Transformational leadership is the  part of the “New Leadership” concept which put more emphasis on intrinsic motivation and follower development emerged by Burns. (Northouse, 2019). Before transformational leadership concept emerged up, we have often used traditional style of leadership which is called as transactional leadership. Transactional leadership focuses on the exchanges between leaders and their followers.  Leaders use rewards to make followers do something for them(Northouse, 2019). Transactional is very basic leadership style and still now we can see it in everywhere at any level.

Whereas transformational leadership is the next level of leadership, which inspire followers to share the vision, motivate them, and “help followers reach their fullest potential”(Northouse, 2019).   There are seven components of leader’s behavior which are thought to be consist of transformational leadership; Idealized Influence (II), inspirational motivation (IM), intellectual stimulation (IS), individualized consideration (IC), contingent rewards(CR), management-by-exception(MBE), and laissez-faire(LF). They can be evaluated with Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire(MLQ).

Because transformational leadership demands leaders to be a good role model for followers and appeal ideal and morals to raise the level of morality in followers, transformational leaders often connected with charismatic personal traits. In the past,  Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Ghandi are known as famous transformational leaders. All of these great leaders inspired people by their ideal belief, words and actions to move people’s to bring new concepts.