No arms, no legs - No worries!

This video demonstrates how a person can motivate others by sharing his/her experiences. Nick Vujicic's way of living has helped people overcome challenges and see a new perspective in life, dream big and never give up. That's what real leaders do!

Leadership Reflection

As soon as I started learning more about the leadership theories I started applying all my knowledge at work and I could easily identify the different types of leaders and how they change in each situation. I was able to recognize who were the effective leaders and who only wanted to be noticed or had an authoritative attitude with the employees. With all the different actions I observed from each person with a high position, I realized that not all of them should be having the title of leader since they only perform as a manager or director of a department, but they don’t necessarily act as a leader in the company. To my surprise I noticed that leaders are not only on manager positions, a good leader can be any employee from any department.  The employees that I considered leaders are the ones that are always paying attention to their coworkers, making sure everyone is feeling ok, trying to find new ways to make things easier for everyone, helping them reach their goals and supporting the co-workers that are going through a difficult situation. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of managers that take the time to do all of that.

Moreover, I feel like now I have a clearer idea of the leader that I would like to be in the future, I have been able to recognize what followers appreciate from their leader and what attitudes or actions discourage them at work. As time passes by, people want more from a leader and not only to be telling everyone what to do. The concept of leadership is constantly evolving; therefore we have to be aware that we need to be continuously updating our leadership strategies depending on the followers’ attitude and circumstances. At the beginning of the semester I posted that three of the most important values a leader should have are to be honest, enthusiastic, and well oriented and I still believe that every leader should have this values to create more leaders. These values will keep everyone in the group with their feet on the ground and optimistic at the same time.

What did I learn from leadership theories?

After taking the midterm, I realized that my concept of leadership changed due to all the things that I have learned in this class. I have learned from different theories that there different types of leaders. However, some of these theories have limited our opinions because they tend to categorize people in groups without realizing that leaders don’t act the same way all the time. I believe that one of the most significant things I have learned this semester is that a leader is constantly changing. I used to think that a person needed to have a number of specific characteristics in order to be a leader, but fortunately that is not true. After all the leadership theories that I have studied, I learned that theories such as the trait based leadership theory and the archetype theory are a good reference for people that is looking for specific skills or traits in a person for a specific position in a group, organization or company, but we should not let those theories label people with a permanent tag.

Furthermore, taking the PMAI assessment proved me that a person changes depending on the situation they are facing. My results in the PMAI said that I was a sage, but I know that I'm not a sage all the time because I tend to be a jester and magician in some circumstances and I am sure that the same happen with the rest of the people that took this test. Therefore, I believe that we have certain traits that stand out among the rest, but as I mentioned before, that is not a reason to label people. On the contrary, it should be a way to learn from the people we are working with in order to find the best way to communicate with them and have a better relationship. Another test that made me learn new things about my leadership skills is Leadership Practices Inventory test because it showed me that the perspective that people have from you as a leader might not be the same as the one you have from yourself. And that is the reason why a leader needs to communicate with its followers with the intention of finding out what they think and what they expect from their leaders.

Besides learning the new theories and learning about myself by taking the assessments, I learned how to apply all my knowledge to fictitious and real life situations. First, by identifying the different phases of the LMX theory in the serie LOST and then by figuring out what leadership theory fitted each character in the movie A Knight’s Tale. I’m proud to say that now I am able to identify the different types of leaders by their actions, attitudes, and skills, but I also learned that leaders change constantly so I have to be open minded all the time and not fall in the tramp of locking up someone in a category that they don’t belong to.

A Knight's Tale and Leadership Theories

We were witnesses of this transformation

One of my favorite movies

This movie is a great example of transformational leadership. In this part you will see how Patch Adams challenges the process and confronts old assumptions, traditions and processes. Patch Adams stimulates followers to be innovative and not fall in the group of doctors who just care about their career. As he says “A doctor’s mission should not be just to prevent death, but also to improve the quality of life.”  He is engaging all the students and promoting followers thinking things out of their own and engaging in careful problem solving.

Life and contributions of James McGregor Burns

James McGregor Burns was born on August 3^rd , 1918. In 1943-1948 Burns served as combat historian in the Pacific Theater and was awarded the Bronze Star and four Battle Stars. Moreover in 1952 he co-wrote "Government by the People: The Dynamics of American National Government" and "Government by the People: The Dynamics of American State and Local Government". As you can see, Burns specialized in the study of leadership in American history and political life, but one of his most important contributions was that in 1978 he coined the theory of "transformational leadership" – leadership that delivers true value, integrity, and trust– to describe the ideal situation between leaders and followers. His book, Leadership, is still considered the seminal work in the field of leadership studies. Burns has shifted the focus of leadership studies from the traits and actions of great men to the interaction of leaders and their constituencies as collaborators working toward mutual benefit. 

Contingency Theory / Situational Leadership Theory

As we learn more about leadership theories, we realize that as time passes by we have more types of leaders. We have moved on from saying he is a “good” or “bad” leader, now we can describe their behavior, interaction with followers and be able to say why we think he is good or not.

The situational leadership theory tells us that in order to be a successful leader; the manager should not only use his/her natural management style, but use one that fits the situation. My question is: is a leader able to change his/her management style when they face certain situation? For example, if a front desk manager is in a stressful circumstance where the guest is extremely rude to an employee, will he/she be able to hold his/her natural reaction and think “This is X type of situation, so I need to use Y type of management style”? I honestly think that doing this is really hard because when we are under pressure we usually use our instinct and don’t have time to choose a management style to solve the problem. However, I found useful the way this theory divides the behavior styles in different situations because followers can use them as a reference to describe their leaders in certain circumstances and they can even rate themselves by figuring out if they have low, some or high readiness to have more responsibilities in their job.

The second theory I will talk about is the contingency model which states that the leader’s effectiveness is based on ‘situational contingency’ which is a result of interaction of: leadership style and situational favorableness. Once you answer a few questions about your least preferred co-worker, the results will tell you if you are a leader with human relations or task orientation. I believe this model forces people to fit in one or the other category, so it doesn’t give us a lot of options. Furthermore, it doesn’t have a category for the intermediate favorability; it just tells us it is "human or task oriented" even if the person is not a 100% human or task oriented. In my case, I consider myself a task oriented person at work, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have interaction with my coworkers. I believe people just act according the situation they face.

As you can see both theories relate the manager style and the situation to select a type of behavior for each case. Yet, I still believe that the theories are forcing us to label people, which is not good because we change all the time due to more factors than just situation and style.

Sometimes we need to be more directive

When I just started working in the front desk I used to be a coaching leader. I always talked to the housekeepers and had a good time with them. I had an extremely high supportive behavior, but then I realized that the behavior I used didn’t work when we got all the check-ins at the same time and we didn’t have rooms ready. Therefore, I knew I had to be more directive in that type of situation. So I started telling the housekeepers what rooms we exactly needed first and stopped trying to convince them or explain them why was it important to have those rooms ready. At the beginning they didn’t like how I changed my attitude; they even acted kind of hostile when I said hi to them. One day I decided to bring one of the housekeepers to the front desk when were at 100% occupancy so she could see what we were going through with all the guests and how they complaint about their room not being ready. After that, everything changed and I had a great relationship with them again. They understood I didn’t do it to bother them or because I wanted to take the “manager role”. I had to be directive, otherwise we were not going to complete the task and we would have guests waiting forever to have their room ready.