Determining Perfect Position

My Perfect Position at Good Shepherd Inc.

Chuks P. Ihezue

LDR/531

October 30, 2011

Shari Lane

Introduction

(Yukl, 2010), puts it this way, "Leading change is one of the most important and difficult leadership responsibilities...it is the essence of leadership and everything else is secondary", and insists that for a leader to be effective, s/he needs to resuscitate the organization and be quick to adapt to this ever changing socio-economic environment we're living in.

As the founder of Good Shepherd Internationale, Inc. (GSI), I am committed more than anybody to see that the organization gets to the pinnacle of the Non-profit organizations. For the purpose of this paper, I will focus on the expansion and restructuring of this organization since an opportunity has been presented to me to determine the position that best suits me. From the perspective of my leadership style, this serves as a self assessment time which aims to benefit my organization immensely. Based on that, I will explore the strengths and weaknesses of my leadership style. Further, I am expected to compare and contrast my leadership approach with the leadership theories in our textbooks to enable me have a better understanding of the relevance of the theories to my leadership style.

Robbins and Judge, 2011, states that no company operating in this present time would claim to be sailing on a stable business environment, not even for those that dominate their industry's market share- all must dance to this new music of change that's toping the world chart. They simply put it this way, "change or die"

(Referenceforbusiness, Para.4) As the leader of GSI, my paramount objective is to change the culture and corporate climate. By corporate climate, I mean how the employees view the mission and vision of the company, while the organizational culture is the employees' perceptions of the beliefs and value systems of the leadership. Both variables functions to determine how we will perform to achieve our individual and corporate objectives. My decisions-making process, communication style in the organization, as well as accountability and responsibility are clearly affected by the two factors.

Irrespective of the type and goal of an organization, the leadership style we choose is directly linked to our boom or doom. Covertly or overtly, every individual must exhibit one style of leadership or the other at various occasions of our lives. After a conscious and painstaking analysis of my leadership style over time, it dawned on me that I am a charismatic leader who anchors on participative leadership style to carry on my followers to achieve our set goals. (Robbins, 2010). Participative leadership style is that type ropes in every member of the team towards the formulation of essential objectives of the organization and at same time initiating strategies to attain those objectives. It could be succinctly put that participative leadership thrives on the functionality of the leader as a facilitator and pace-setter, instead of being an authoritarian that issues orders and demands it carried out without questions asked. This leadership style essentially benefits business settings, volunteer or non-profit, and even functions well at homes (Wisegeek, Para. 1).

Strength and Weaknesses

This leadership style of mine has not been that cozy, it's got the ups and downs, or the strengths and weaknesses. I have therefore enumerated the various benefits I have enjoyed applying the participative leadership style and they include:

* Being goal-driven to achieve set goals and same time encouraging follower growth.

* Helped to improve the decision making skills of followers, thus, putting them in shape for future leadership positions.

* The input of all team members with relevant knowledge and skills of subject matter, helps produce a more creative and innovative ideas.

* It has helped employees demonstrate their ability in leadership which prompted promotion.

* It greatly aids in shifting leadership responsibilities from the team leader to the rest of the members, so that power is shared among them.

* Participative leadership is clearly beneficial when team efforts are expedient and when quality of output is preferred above productivity.

* It promotes trusts from the leader to the subordinates, which yields collaboration, groupthink, motivation and job satisfaction.

* This leadership style helps a leader to fashion out and sustain improved production over a protracted period of time.

Like I hinted, there's always the flip side of every coin, and this implies looking out for possible weaknesses which include:

* It wastes a lot of time to resolve a problem from the identification stage to the resolution, a bottleneck towards the making of time sensitive