Blog 4: My Development as a Future Leader

Leadership 

Within the time i studied Leading in a Changing World subject, there are 2 definitions of 2 authors about management and leadership that are clearly showing what management and leadership should be to archive the goals in a new world:

• Management : Getting work done through the efforts of other people (Mullins, 2010)
• Leadership: The process of influencing others to understand and agree what needs to be done and how to do it. (Yukl, 2010)

Leadership styles.

In 2000, an author who’s name Daniel Goleman designed a model of 6 different leadership style that compares the different between each types

The kind of leadership styles that i want to be are “Authoritative” and “Coaching”

• Authoritative: 

“the authoritative leader is a visionary and motivates people by making clear to them how their work fits into this vision”

Goleman (2000)

• Coaching:

This is the style that the manager encourages the employees or subordinates to develop their skills. This style has a positive impact on the project team and very good to build a team that can work for the organization in long-term.

• Coercive (Command):

This style was recommended that is will have a negative impact on the overall climate. It may create a lot of stressful for the project team when dealing with close deadline or any crisis situations.

 

For my chosen career, in the future, i want to control my own company with a small number of employees about 50 people. I want to be a leader or a manager who can mobilize people toward my vision as well as coach other employees. Even “democratic” style is a good type of leadership because it makes other feel freely to speak their ideas, opinions or do whatever they want. And this style also is very suitable with developed countries where the labors are trained well and having high working awareness. But i come from a developing country where still having poor training conditions for the workers. Therefore, i would like to be a leader who can encourage subordinates to  award my vision and i want to coach them so they can develop their skills and can work well for me in long-term. Because one of the weakness of coaching style is that it can not run well with a large team (Venkataramani, 2015), so in this case if i expand my organization and increase the number of employees, i will change this leadership style. Finally, after developing my staffs, i wish they often listen to my commands to do what i want, so i can lead them work fit into my vision and also can make sure my business is run without any delay from the laziness of the workers. Overall, the 3 kinds of leadership style that i want to follow has more positive impact on the climate than negative. Although “coercive” style may make the employees get more stressful but it can help me ensure the rate of progress to catch up with the deadline of works.

Feedback on my leadership at class.

After received and analyzed feedbacks from others , there are something to evaluate my self as a leader. First, in a skills developing class which was organized by the university, i received a feedback from the tutor that said i was not often speak out my ideas in group discussion and mostly was listening, but i still have some creative ideas to help the team get through the challenges. Therefore, i may suitable with the laissez-Faire style, which can let others do their work in their best ways and willing to help when needed. Moreover, one of my teammate has feedback on me that i always respond for the questions on the group chat whenever any member have a question, so they can understand what they need to do next . Finally, when other members choose a part of works that they want to do, i never had any opinion and always believe on the works of other.

To sum up, my current strengths are can help other understand what need to do, understand what other members can do best and always listen to other opinions.

 

Development plan

To become a leader or manager in the future, firstly, i have to develop my weaknesses. If i want to coach and command other, i have to become more confident and speak out more opinions if i think they are right instead of only listening. In addition, i need to understand the strengths of other teammates, so i can help them choose the part that they can do well in stead of letting them choosing randomly.

Conclusion

Through “Leading in a Changing World” class, i have learned and understood more about the role of leadership in a model world. With the impacts of globalization and the development in every sections, management become much different than the past that require more types of leadership styles needed to lead the organization archive the goals.

 

References

Doyle, P .(2016) Project Leadership and its 6 Different Styles [Online] Available at:

<https://www.brightwork.com/blog/project-leadership-and-its-6-different-styles#.WlGxoCN968U&gt; [Accessed 30 Dec 2017]

Mullins, L. (2016) Management Organization Behavior.

Venkataramani, S. (2015) 6 Leadership Styles:Strengths, Weaknesses and Examples [Online] Available at:

<https://www.9lenses.com/insights/6-leadership-styles-strengths-weaknesses-examples/&gt; [Accessed 30 Dec 2017]

Yukl, G. (2010) Leadership in Organizations

Blog 3: Change Management.

Recently, “Brexit” has become a very hot issue that takes a lot of attentions from many individuals and organizations in the world. If you search “Brexit” on Google, you will find thousands of discussions and article about it from every famous newspapers or websites such as BBC, Financial and GOV.

What is BREXIT ?

According to GOV.UK (n.d), Brexit is the name of the event in 23 June 2016 that the UK voted to exit the EU (European Union). Therefore, with the vote of the UK’s citizens and the successful of the election, the government is preparing to exit the EU in the best possible way.

Until now, the consequences that caused by Brexit still are discussed with a lot of suppositions. Although the decision that UK leaving EU has been decided but it has not happened yet, which will create unsure influences (may be good or bad) on the businesses in UK. And one in those companies dealing with the uncertain of Brexit that i want to discuss here is a very popular company in UK – LLOYDS BANK.

About Lloyds Bank.

Lloyds bank is very long-standing bank which has been found since 1765 and has served the households, businesses and communities of Britain for more than 250 years.

Lloyds Bank’s issues caused by Brexit.

According to The Guardian (n,d) , when UK exits the EU, Lloyd’s of London firm will move European base to Dublin (Ireland) over Brexit. They provide a Reuters survey which found that about 10000 finance jobs will be moved out of Britain if UK is refused to enter Europe’s single market. Therefore, Lloyd’s Bank may deal with a strongly lack of personnel when Brixit happens.

In addition, Brexit can cause many uncertain things that may affect a lot to the decision of the investors or the potential customers from EU. Because Lloyds Bank is the largest bank in United Kingdom and has worked since UK and EU still were one, so they are having a huge number of customers from EU. If Brexit happens, there is nothing to make sure that their properties at Lloyds will not be affected, as a result, they may change the bank to secure their money.

Solution for Lloyds Bank.

• Davies, A (2017) stated that Lloyds Bank is closing to chose Berlin as their European base to secure EU access. German has the bank’s main European hub, which already has full management team that include different positions such as finance , risk and HR staff. As a result, in term of employee, the branch in Berlin only need to make the status of those roles different to adapt with the new policy after UK leaves EU.
• Moreover, there were some sources from people working closely with Lloyds stated that the branch in EU will be licensed a year after that is a sight to show that they can retain their EU clients and also maintain access to the EU’s payments system. It was stated that Lloyds has acquired Bank of Scotland brand since 2008 and used it to operates there subsidiary in Berlin.

Action plan.

To prepare for Brexit, UBS and HSBC (2 biggest banks in EU) stated a warning that both of them could move about 2000 out of London. That means until 2019 when Brexit happen, there will be lack of finance staffs that may cause the situation that some banks may work slower due to the lack of resources and lead to the delay in transaction which will cause a lot of problems in short time.  Lloyds bank should prepare to recruitment employees who have UK nationality, but it may costly, show other solution is supporting their employees who do not come from UK can get the Visa Tier 1 (Visa for working), so when UK leave the bloc, their employees may not be influenced and their business still can run well under stress time.

During this stress period that many things may be changed in close future, leader role is important by keeping others calm in changing time. Kotter and Cohen (2002) provided 8 actions for leaders to secure effective change :

“1.Create a sense of urgency among relevant people

2.Build a guiding team which has credibility

3.Create visions that are sensible, clear and uplifting

4.Communicate the vision and strategy to induce understanding and commitment

5.Empower action and remove obstacles

6.Produce short term wins

7.Do not let up but maintain momentum

8.Make change stick by nurturing a new culture”

‘Kotter & Cohen (2002)’

Learning outcome.

Management change is not easy for the business even it is direct or indirect. Brexit has shown out a clear example of Lloyds Bank at how they change their organization such as moving some subsidiaries out side the UK to adapt with new policies or changing internal factors such as human resources to prepare for the cutdown of jobs. And leadership also plays an important role in management change when it can raise the potential to run the business normally in hard period.

 

References

 

Carroll, L. (2017) Lloyd’s of London firm moves European base to Dublin over Brexit [Online] Available at:

<https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/sep/19/lloyds-of-london-dublin-brexit-xl-group-eu-single-market&gt;

Davies, A. (2017) Brexit: Lloyds bank close to choose Berlin as European base to secure EU access [Online] Available at:

<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/brexit-latest-news-lloyds-bank-berlin-choose-european-hq-base-eu-access-a7578886.html&gt;

GOV.UK (n,d) Brexit [Online] Available at:

<https://www.gov.uk/government/policies/brexit&gt; [Accessed 27 Dec 2017]

Kotter & Cohen. (2002) The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations

Blog 2: Contemporary Leadership Styles: How relevant are they in today’s changing world?

“Leadership styles” is a interested topic for people who working in office environments and also for who studying or caring about management. Leadership styles in the part was more tough for both employees and companies, but it has been changed to adapt with the new changing world.

According to Yukl (2010), leadership is defined as “the process of influencing others to understand and agree about what need to be done and how to do it”. We can understand that leadership now has become more satisfaction for employees, which means from now, leader or manager will have more challenges when they have more thing to care about at work.

The challenges that leadership most deal with

Following Center for Creative Leadership (CCL.org), their research team has sent a surveys for more than 700 leaders in many countries and has pointed out top 6 challenges that leaders are experiencing in 21 Century.

1. Developing relevant skills about management. (For example, it requires how you can organize effectively time, decisions, strategic thinking and also can speed up the work.)
2. Inspiring employees: Leader need to care about the works of other employees and should motivate them to make sure that the employees are satisfied with their jobs.
3. Developing employees: Leader can able to help the employees deal with some problems of their jobs, which require a leader having wide knowledge to mentor and coach their workers.
4. Team leading: A leader will be challenged at different sections such as team building and team development.
5. Guiding change: Leader should able to mitigate the consequences as well as deal with the reactions of the employees.
6. Managing internal stakeholders and Politics: Managing relationships and politics, and image of the company

Moreover, Fayol (n,d) has provided a manager roles in Henry Fayol’s 14 principles of management. The manager roles included 5 stages.

Stage 1: Understand what need to be done (Forecasting & Planning)

Stage 2: Gather together all your recourses (Organizing)

Stage 3: Put the recourse into action (commanding & implementing)

Stage 4: Check efficient process and motivation (Coordinating)

Stage 5: Evaluate and Adjust for performance (Controlling & monitoring)

 

An article from Alliance for Leadership Acceleration of Silsbee (2015) has provided top 7 challenges facing leaders today. (Figure 1).

(Figure 1: The Top 7 Challenges Facing Leaders Today – #1 Isolation, #2 Honest Feedback, #3 Emotional Intelligence, #4 Authority vs influence, #5 Leading Change, #6 Breaking Silos, #7 Thinking big Picture. )

 

The article firstly mentioned that being a leader may experience with the isolation because leader is the person having higher authority than the other, which mean other employees may take less contact with you than their colleges. In addition, when the leaders or managers are isolated, they will have less opportunities to take honest feedbacks from their employees, which also lead to lack of emotional intelligence.

In Asian, where conducting almost the developing countries in the world, there are some challenges for the leader. In developing countries, leader or manager may have less advance class for management because of the poor of training systems. As can be seen, there are many managers or leaders in a company located in Asia who are still young. As a result, they may lack of skill to lead as well as wide knowledge to guide or coach their under position workers. They will mostly use their authority or position to command other employees do tasks. As a consequences, employees only do the require tasks that mean they just make sure the minimum gets done instead of using time efficiency.

How should leadership should be developed in the future.

To deal with these challenges, Silsbee (2015) suggested 4 key things to help managers or leader can develop themselves to become more effectiveness.

(Figure 2: 4 key things leaders around the world can do to develop managerial effectiveness).

1. Set goals: you as a leader should alway need to active in setting goals and also should manage time effectively to set a deadline to meet those goals.
2. Delegate more: delegate to other colleges can make them feel more empower to take more ownership.
3. Maximize the unique value: You have higher authority than other employees that means there are works that only for you and only you can do. You should focus on developing your unique value to adapt with the given important tasks of the company.
4. Gain some role clarity: as a manager, you should know your important role in your company, which means you should know what your job does or does not. If you meet some tasks over your authority or your employees ask for helping for trash stuffs, you can be comfortable to say “no”.

 

 

References

Silsbee, L. (2015) The Top 7 Challenges Facing Leaders Today [Online] Available at:<http://www.leadership-acceleration.com/leadership-matters-blog/-the-7-top-challenges-facing-leaders-today&gt;

Centet for Creative Leadership. (n.d) The Top 6 Leadership challenges Around the World [Online] Available at: <https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/top-6-leadership-challenges/&gt;

Ratanjee, V. (2013) Making Leadership More Effective in Asia [Online] Available at:<http://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/165224/making-leadership-effective-asia.aspx&gt;

Bersin, J. (2014)  Leadership and Talent Challenges in Asia. It’s Different [Online] Available at : <https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2014/11/21/talent-strategies-in-asia-leadership-retention-growth/3/#465defe82f59&gt;

Rees, L (n.d) 5 Leadership Styles for the 21 st Century Organisation [Online] Available at: <https://www.sycol.com/5-leadership-styles-21st-century-organisation/&gt;

 

 

 

Blog 1: Organizational culture of Google Company.

As everyone know, Google is belonging to the top most recognition brand in the world because of the best thing that they have provided for human – “Google Searching Tool”. Therefore, this company also very well-known as the company having very high requirements for recruitment. Despite of that, the company is still receiving more than 2 million applications each year from people at everywhere in the world because of many cool elements that the company provides for their employees. One of the reason that make Google become the top working place is because of the company’s culture management. I will provide some ways that Google has done to create a great organizational culture.

1) Google recruitment

With over 2 million applications every year but only about 7000 of them are hired, Google is seemed as a very tough company to hire a job. The company also has different ways to choose the worth candidates. For example, Google will provide some tricky questions for the candidates, but they will not follow with only 1 way to answer. The company claimed that the answers are not totally important, the things they are looking at first are how the candidates thoughts were processed and how they could think under pressure. But Google is a big company that also demand for great employees, therefore they will priority for the candidates who are brighten than the other. But beside the quality of the answers for the interview questions, Google also search for people who are thoughtful, having sense of humor and fill comfortable when taking unknown works. As a result, beside caring about the IQs or the skills of the candidates, Google also hires employees base on their characteristics.

2) How Google take care for their staffs?.

Google stated that their employees well-being are very important with the company because it also can influence to the outcomes or the productivity of the company. There are many great things that Google provides for their staffs. Firstly, employees can live a healthy life with free access to gym, massage, free meals and a lot of other free things. Secondly, their family also are supported at different stages of life. For instance, the company will support money for the parents who have new baby, or retirement saving plans and death benefits. Finally, Google will provide their staffs with financial advisor and planning services to help the employees can manage their finance well, and the company also will invest for their employees to do what they love such as cooking class or guitar lessons. 

3) Making HR become a science, using data to built culture.

The Human Resource department will use the data and analytics to create the most accurate people management decision. According to some statistic analyzes, there are double rate of women who quit their job mostly because of becoming new mother. Google found that the 12 weeks off for pregnant women is not enough for them, so they have change it into 5 months off with fully payment as well as benefits within those times for the women who are in pregnant period. As a result, the drop rate of women has been decrease about 50%.

4) Fantastic working place.

There are a lot of articles and newspapers that are describe the great working place of Google company. Google has made their company look like an adult playing areas with a lot of creativity designs that make the employees always feel comfortable when staying at workplace. Moreover, in some offices of Google, they also allow staffs to bring canine family members or even their dogs to work, so that they can feel less worry about the external elements when going to work. Last but not least, the company also has many areas for sport activities such as ping-pong, football or even video games.

5) Recognize every distribution of employees no matter that is big or small.

Google is not so serious about the outcome of every distributions, no matter it can create big or small distribution for the company, employees will always receive the support from the company, sometime they event celebrate for some failures. This will not only make the employees become fearless with office cultures, but also make them become more willing to take risk, which mean more risky and fresh ideas will be created.

How organizational culture and management and leadership related.

According to definition of (Mullins, 2016) and (Yukl, 2016), management is getting work done through the efforts of other people, and leadership is the process of influencing others to understand and agree about what needs to be done and how to do it. As can be seen in the case of Google, their employees are treated very well that make them always want to contribute for the firm. Moreover, because Google has chosen very good employees in million of applications, so the more they work for Google, the more benefits that the company can gain.

Conclusion

This blog has present how Google can organize culture in their company that make them become one of the best company in the world with many talent people working for. I hope this blog can help you understand more about the relationship between culture and management as well as leadership.

 

References

Blackiston, M. (2017) What Every Company Can Learn from Google’s Company Culture [Online] Available at :<http://www.successagency.com/growth/2017/01/19/google-company-culture/> [Accessed 12 November 2017]

 

Bulygo, Z. (2013) Inside Google’s Culture of Success and Employee Happiness [Online] Available at: <https://blog.kissmetrics.com/googles-culture-of-success/> [Accessed 12 November 2017]

 

Google Careers (n.d). [Online] Available at: <https://careers.google.com/how-we-care-for-googlers/> [Accessed 11 November 2017]

 

Mullins, L. (2016) Management Organization Behavior.

 

Noviantoro, T. (2014) Organiseational Culture in Google INC [Online] Available at: <https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140904061228-154884582-organizational-culture-in-google-inc > [Accessed 10 November 2017]