Table of Contents
Introduction
Leadership is an important aspect of management that helps the top executives of an organization to control, influence, and provide direction to the subordinate employees (Yukl 66). Leaders are known for shaping the behavioral aspects of employees, which influence the effective accomplishment of organizational objectives and goals largely.
The following paper discusses the leadership concepts in details by identifying an individual’s need to analyze the skills, capabilities and efficiency. It focuses on identifying strengths and weaknesses of the leader as well as recommending solutions to deal with them. It describes the potential outcome of the implementation strategies of the identified solutions.
Leadership
Leadership is the ability of an individual to provide correct and meaningful direction to employees in an organization. Leaders are responsible for developing innovative ideas and concepts followed by proper communication towards the organizational workforce (67). A leader is looked upon as a person, who provides solutions and ideas to the subordinates that help them to proceed further in their career (68). Effective leadership focuses on an individual with a strong personality, high degree of intelligence, managerial power and good communication and coordination skills (70).
Identification of Individual Developmental Needs
Individual development is the process that helps an individual to identify one’s skills and capabilities by highlighting the relative strengths and weaknesses that in turn influence the one in setting life goals and objectives (Crayford et al. 189).
Strengths
Versatile: The Leadership Versatility Index (LVI) tool has helped the supervisors to identify the hardworking and responsible nature of the individual. The hardworking nature of the individual is reflected in one’s zeal to enhance one’s present skills and knowledge with the help of the latest technological tools and skills (Johansen 77). The individual acts responsibly in dealing with one’s subordinates by establishing a noble and affectionate relationship with them.
Excellent Team Management: The FIRO-B individual assessment tool has identified the leader to have an extraordinary team management skill. The individual has an exceptional and proficient outlook towards accomplishing the tasks and objectives, by applying one’s creative and innovative knowledge (45). The leader develops challenging organizational goals for the employees and provides them with adequate knowledge and direction to achieve them (48).
Positive Attitude: According to the LVI performance assessment tool, the individual has a positive attitude, which helps the one largely in motivating one’s subordinates to enhance their performance level. Thus, the positive attitude of the leader helps in showing the right direction to the employees (Cameron 10). It also helps the individual to effectively deal with any form of criticism raised by the superiors in the one’s leadership style or dealing with organizational tasks.
Weaknesses
Low confidence: According to the LVI personality assessment tool, the immediate supervisor of the individual has identified that the person is low on confidence. The lack of self-confidence among the individual is highly reflected in one’s ability to take and implement appropriate business decisions. Low confidence hinders the ability of the individual to motivate and inspire the employees towards high performance standards (Fransen, 92).
Reactive attitude: The LVI tool has identified the leader to be highly reactive in dealing with the problems and issues arising while dealing with his subordinates. The individual reacts even at the occurrence of a very minute incident in the organization. The reactive nature of the person is extremely stressful, since it hinders the leader’s ability to motivate the workforce in severe and critical organizational situations effectively (Hörnqvist and Leffler 555). This is because, the leader himself gets oversensitive on such critical situations.
Introvert: According to the MBTI Interpretative Report, the leader prefers to keep his friends circle close and interacts with a very few number of people and maintains safe distance from one’s acquaintances. An introvert person is widely known to keep safe distance from people and has a professional attitude towards them (Farrell 439). The leader prefers individuality and has a very professional attitude towards one’s team members. The person is uncomfortable to express affection towards one’s employees and prefers to observe rather than participate in personal discussions (442).
Propose Solutions
Strategies to Overcome Weaknesses
Low confidence: The leader can improve his level of confidence regarding decision making by having a clear understanding of all the factors involved in the process by analyzing the present situation and various processes to deal with them. A good communicative and interactive relationship with the team members can help in boosting the leader’s confidence level (Fransen 95).
Reactive attitude: The reactive nature can be overcome by improving the leader’s listening skills, which will help him in dealing with the problems in a much more efficient and convenient manner. The leader should focus on distracting himself in high challenging situations and consulting with his peers and team members to deal with the issue (Hörnqvist and Leffler 557).
Introvert: The leader should focus on improving his relationship with his team members by increasing the level of interaction. The leader should take active participation in discussions with his team members as well as try to build relationship of trust and friendship (Farrell 442).
Strategies to Enhance Strengths
Versatile: The leader can improve his strength by furnishing himself with the latest technological innovations and enhancing his capability to transfer the knowledge gained to his subordinates (Johansen 78). The leader should also have a thorough understanding of the skills and capabilities of his team members to confirm successful accomplishment of the tasks.
Excellent Team Management: The leader’s strength of effective team management can be enhanced if the leader has a clear understanding of the company’s mission and vision, and thus have passionate attitude towards achieving them in the future (48). It can also be improved by setting up conclusive team goals, and developing concrete and convenient ways to achieve them.
Positive Attitude: The positive leadership attitude of the leader can be enhanced if the person focusses more on identifying his strengths in his present role as well as on developing strategies to enhance them. This attitude is also enlightened by the leader’s ability to have a positive outlook towards his way of perceiving things in the organizational context (Cameron 11).
Evaluation of Potential Strategies
Weaknesses
The impact on the decision-making ability of the leader due to lack of sufficient confidence and its influence on the performance level of the employees can be overcome by improving his communication skills and abilities. A communicative work environment will encourage the employees to interact with the leader to discuss on the issues of concern and seek help when required (Fransen 98). This will influence the employee productivity and help the leader in setting up performance standards for the employees. The ability of the leader to implement proper strategic decisions can be improved by ensuring that the person takes all the relevant factors as well as valuable feedback from all his team members into consideration (Lombardo and Eichinger 95).
The good listening skill of the leader will help him discuss with his team members regarding the critical issues and listen to the solutions shared by them before deciding how to deal with it. The reactive nature of the leader can be minimized, as the entire team will help him to deal with the identified issue (Hörnqvist and Leffler 555). The leader’s ability to distract himself will help in communicating with others in a better way and discussing the issues.
The professional attitude of the leader and his inefficiency to communicate freely with his team members may sometimes result in ineffective leadership. The leader must focus on establishing a friendly and cordial relationship with his subordinates by communicating with them (Farrell, 440). It would help in bridging the gap and help the employees to directly approach the leader on any critical situation and thus influence their productivity (Farrell 439).
Strengths
The leader should be well aware of the latest technical skills as well as profound knowledge about the capabilities of the individual team member. It will help him to enhance his knowledge base as well as educate his team members to apply the same in accomplishing their organizational goals (Lombardo and Eichinger 150). Deep understanding of the employees’ capabilities will help the leader to act responsibly and to assign them with tasks according to their knowledge and skills. It will directly influence the organizational performance of the entire team.
The leader’s clear knowledge of the company’s strategic vision and mission will help him in identifying appropriate goals as well as developing a transparent and concrete idea to obtain solutions to the critical organizational tasks (123). The leader’s ability to formulate successful strategies is considered to be of prime significance to organizational success.
A positive leadership style is considered as the most important aspect in an organizational context. The leader’s positive attitude helps in reinforcing a positive outlook and approach among the employees, which in turn influence their creativity and application of knowledge towards their goals and objectives (Cameron 11).
Implementation Plan
The possible solutions to the strengths and weakness should be identified initially followed by implementing the identified solutions according to the following action plan
| Strategy Implementation Plan | |||
| Strategy | Time | Method | |
| Strengths | Clear understanding of mission and vision | 1 week | Understanding company’s strategic business objectives |
| Developing concrete and convenient subordinate goals | 2 weeks | Applying creative and innovative knowledge set | |
| Technical skill enhancement | 12 weeks | Taking necessary technical course training | |
| Understanding employee capabilities | 3 weeks | Monitoring employee performance | |
| Positive attitude | 3 weeks | Positive perception towards organization and its resources. | |
| Weaknesses | Thorough understanding of business problems | 6 weeks | Understanding present business scenario |
| Relationship building, trust development, active participation in discussions and make friendship. | 6 weeks | Interacting with the team members | |
| Listening skills | 3 weeks | By listening each and every team member’s point of view | |
Potential Outcomes
The strategies adopted to enhance the identified strengths and weakness of the leader were not fully accomplished, as the leader lacks in certain qualities that are hindering his way of becoming a highly efficient leader. The leader still suffers from the weakness of being an introvert and is having problem in communicating with his team members freely and developing a relationship of trust and friendship. It is affecting him to transform himself to a proactive individual. Therefore, the leader has to work on these two qualities in the future to transform himself to a highly efficient leader.
Conclusion
Leadership is an important concept, influencing the success of an organization. The leaders are responsible for ensuring that the workforce is motivated enough to accomplish the organizational goals and objectives. The strengths and weaknesses of a leader are largely responsible for ensuring the success rate of achieving the strategic goals set by the company. It is essential for the leader to identify them as well as develop strategies to enhance the strengths and overcome the weakness to ensure high degree of leadership quality. The solutions should be adopted keeping in mind the root cause of the problem as well as its conclusive impact on the organizational success according to the implementation plan.
- Cameron, Kim. Positive leadership: Strategies for extraordinary performance. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2012.
- Crayford, Judith, et al. “Affirming Entrepreneurial Education: Learning, Employability and Personal Development.” Industrial and Commercial Training, vol. 44, no. 4, 2012, pp. 187-193.
- Farrell, Maggie. “Leadership Reflections: Extrovert and Introvert Leaders.” Journal of Library Administration, vol. 57, no. 4, 2017, pp. 436-443.
- Fransen, Katrien, et al. “Believing in “Us”: Exploring Leaders’ Capacity to Enhance Team Confidence and Performance by Building a Sense of Shared Social Identity.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, vol. 21, no. 1, 2015, pp. 89-100.
- Hörnqvist, Maj-Lis, and Eva Leffler. “Fostering an Entrepreneurial Attitude–Challenging in Principal Leadership.” Education+ Training, vol. 56, no. 6, 2014, pp. 551-561.
- Johansen, Robert. Leaders Make The Future: Ten New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2012.
- Lombardo, Michael M., and Robert W. Eichinger. “FYI.” For Your Improvement. A Guide for Development and Coaching. Korn/Ferry International, 2009.
- Yukl, Gary. “Effective Leadership Behavior: What We Know and What Questions Need More Attention.” The Academy of Management Perspectives, vol. 26, no. 4, 2012, pp. 66-85.