Leadership Development

Question 1

According to Exhibit 1.1, leadership refers to an influence relationship between leaders and subordinates to develop changes that mirror their common goals.  Leadership involves six elements: intention, influence, integrity, personal responsibility, shared purpose, and followers. Exploring the case study presented, Terrill’s leadership style suits leadership explained in Exhibit 1.1.  In this case, leadership involves influencing people (followers) to bring about change towards a common (the leaders and followers) desired future.  Terrill showed the top management that the occasional reports that sales engineers are supposed to give are a waste of time. For example, when the reports stayed in his office, no one asked for them. Such shows that the reports were not being read.

 When coming to the organization, he was briefed about the main challenge, and after having a meeting with the engineers, Terrill truly understood the issue. He later allied with sales engineers to change reporting procedures. By building a better relationship with the followers (sales engineers), he established trust and a good working relationship. Terrill seems to have made a good decision based on his operations in the team’s best interest.  A team (Terrill and sales engineers) can focus on a shared purpose of increasing sales in the Sales Engineers Division. Hopefully, his actions will bring about increased productivity that the upper management desires. 

Question 2

Exploring exhibit 1.4, Terrill fits in leadership Era 4, also known as agile leadership. Era 4 is the digital information age where things are shifting fast. Leaders in this era tend to emphasize relationships with the followers and networks and influence others through division of values and vision. Organizations that have embraced agile leadership perform well through a shared vision, alignment, and culture and facilitate change and adaptation. According to a study by Gren and Lindman (2020), agile leadership emphasizes communication and strongly focuses on people (followers). Such is what Terrill did in the Sales Engineers Division. Exploring the headquarters and upper management’s behavior, they seem to be in era 2, also known as rational leadership. According to rational leadership, followers and, in this case, employees are required to follow organization rules and procedures to accomplish various tasks without questioning. The top management’s triplicate reports represent a control approach that ensures stability and uniformity. 

Question 3

In this case, I would have taken a less confrontational approach similar to Terrill. Through his approach to the productivity issue, he built a good connection with both the engineers and the upper management. Exploring Terrill’s approach to the situation, pilling the reports, and later delivering them to DGL International seems a smart move. From his decisions, the upper management understood the complex and unnecessary work they were giving the sales engineers and hence their underperformance.  Since the paperwork was never requested, which created a pile, the senior executives will realize that they were the main cause of the low productivity in the Sales Engineers Division. In addition, Terrill was open and keenly listened to the sales engineers’ complaints. He also respected their decision to work directly with the organization’s customers. In today’s economy, human skills are increasingly necessary for organizational leaders. As per Era 4 or agile leadership, leaders are expected to build relationships with subordinates among other organizational members for maximum productivity.

Reference

Gren, L., & Lindman, M. (2020). What an Agile Leader Does: The Group Dynamics Perspective. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 178–194. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49392-9_12