All entries for February 2013

Some difficulties to exercise effective leadership

We have been through many practical exercises where all of us had equal opportunities to act as a leader in different teams to experience different kind of followership and working environment. It was a good exercise but there are some points that were always highlighted to be adopted in order to lead effectively. The points are:

Did you identify the skills of individuals?

Did you motivate the individuals?

How did you re energize them?

Identifying skills of someone is not an easy job. How can you identify someone's skills? This is something vague to me. Yes we can delegate tasks to different team members and then we can observe that which person is doing it in what manner and can make better decisions the next time. Going to new teams and working with different members made this experience less understandable. Or there is one more option that a leader asks his/her followers to tell him if they have some expertise, but even in this scenario most of the followers will try to have the easiest task possible. So, I think observation can actually enable a leader to identify skills in his/her team and that observation needs time and same team members.

Developing inspiration or motivating your employees by some appreciable words is not enough when they know that they are not doing good. Results are the actual motivators. When you are not performing good and your team know that they are not meeting the ojectives, then how would you re energize them to work actively? I think in this situation, a change in leadership style can help. Leadership style depends upon situations and in this situation being an autocrat and making decisions on your own to meet the goals would be an appropriate option.

These are my thoughts and my learning from the team exercises and some questions being raised in the class. I would appreciate your comments and suitable answers to the above questions.

Muhammad Khan : 15 Feb 2013 22:15 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Are there any Bad effective leaders?

I was of this perception that effective leaders are not always good leaders because by this term of "effective leaders", we mean that wheter they were successful in achieving their goals and targets and there are some evil or bad effective leaders, who managed to achieve their targets but did not have all the traits of a good effective leader. Here comes the factor of "SITUATION" which determines the characteristics, that a leader adopts in that particular environment to achieve the goals.

Lincoln Abraham was an effective leader and as mentioned by Fabrice, he did not follow all those values which are practiced now but at that time and situation, they were not considered socially or morally wrong. So in order to be an effective leader, it is not compulsory that he has to adopt all the attributes, rather a combination of them best suited in that environment can result in an effective leadership.

Muhammad Khan : 11 Feb 2013 18:09 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Does Leadership Styles effect lead times in Manufacturing Organizations?

Now a days a biggest constraint to any manufacturing organization is "time". Taking less time to market the products is a competitive advantage to manufacturing organizations. We have studied that dictatorship style of leadership enables fast implementation of procedures as compared to democratic leadership, where consensus of majority of the people are taken before coming to a final conclusion. In today's exercise, we observd that the group following autocratic leadership style completed the task in the minimum time where as the more democratic style followers finished it quiet late. In this case ignoring all other aspects of creativity and innovation, assume a manufacturing organization making similar simple products and their main task is to reach the market in the most earlier time possible then automatically, they will move to autocratic leadership style.

I have come to a conclusion that democratic style is slow and time consuming. No doubt the results are better in terms of creativity and innovation but if we talk about "time" factor only then a clear direction from one authority would help in making that task possible. After practically experiencing in the class exercise.

Muhammad Khan : 11 Feb 2013 18:00 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Corporate Social Responsibility A term used to make money

Zoe Chilton had a wonderful talk about Corporate Social responsibility but could not defend the argument that organizations use such tactics of doing good for society just to sell their brand image and make money out of it. There are no pure intentions of just doing good to the society without earning some monetary benefits in return. The defended argument by her side was that each organization has three components to sustain and they are 1) environment 2) Social and 3) economic. So organizations have to think in terms of economic gains in order to sustain but if they are making money by doing something good for the society then that is a good thing.

Examples of companies like TATA who donates 50% of their generated profits to charities is worth mentioning here as they might not be getting any monetary benefits out of it but this deed makes the environment better and more and more people would like to work for such a company who is doing such a good job for society and eventually their recruitment would become easier and they will save money.

So Corporate social responsibility is a process of doing good to society which ultimately leads company to attract benefits from social, environmental and economic point of view. This is my definition of Corporate social responsibility.

Muhammad Khan : 07 Feb 2013 11:39 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem