This is an awakening paper that comes handy at a time when there is too much crisis in the field of leadership. The paper acknowledges that leadership, for a very long time, has been done so badly that hardly people do differentiate good leadership and leaders from poorly done leadership. By integrating an interview based model of writing where questions are asked to the interviewee and answers sought from them, the paper shall essentially enumerate ideas and concepts from the chosen leader. After that, the paper shall use those ideas drawn from the answers to build to the case for good leadership. Some of the leadership elements desired to come out of the interview include motivation, ethical leadership, and good performance. From the interviewee perspective, the paper shall explore how these elements can be integrated into any organization.
There are several instances of ethical loopholes prevalent within organizations, educational institutions, companies and even government institutions. Leadership is no leadership if ethical matters are not well addressed and solve. This propelled me to start an intriguing question-answer conversation with one of the managers, Mr. Smith (a leader) in a company within my locality. Mr. Smith is an ardent leader who holds a master’s degree in leadership from one of the Ivy-league universities, and one who mans a big office in one of the Fortune-500 organizations. I approached this manager because I figured out that he embodies many of the leadership qualities admirable in a current leader. I stumbled on the truth that, there are various critical characteristics that embody a leader, including honesty, respect, must be team-oriented and making value-driven decisions, people-encourager, and awareness, among many others. Nevertheless, all these are categorized under ethical leadership. It is always important that every leader is driven by ethics since it enables someone to build trust among other teammates. The subjects of a particular leader are bound to listen and even follow you if they realize that such a leader has right moralistic values (Biggerstaff, Cicero & Puckett, 2014).
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The first question I asked Mr. Smith is that, what he normally does when he learns that his team members are not taking responsibility in their assigned roles, duties, and responsibilities. He replied by stating that he normally takes a proactive stance with his employees and ensures that he is open and candid with all of them but taking caution not to hurt the own feelings as well. He always makes them find practical solutions as a means of being accountable. To this day, he admits that he constantly reminds his team members to adhere to the code of conduct of the organization. Above all, he mentioned that he desires his team members to operate as though as thy own the organization and not working for the organization. Once they own the organization, they would strive hard to ensure that they work towards realizing efficiency, productivity, and consistency in production and service delivery.
The second question I asked him was the issue of handling firing and laying off of workers within his organization. He told me that the move to fire some of the workers had remained a big concern for his organization, since most of the times, the organization’s board of directors decides to size down some of its employees. He told me that has always feared a lot the manner in which he is to decide the people to lay off and the ones to allow work. Together with his committed HR department, he asserted that he has been able to handle the issues by applying the principle of fairness. Sometimes, he admitted that the organization might direct the management to retrench off a certain number of workers. Thanks to performance appraisals done annually, Mr. Smith acknowledges that often, staff members with low-performance appraisals are the ones that are laid off first before proceeding to others (Mayer et al., 2009).
The third question I sought to know touched on how employees within the organization are helped to uphold moral standards. He told me that most of the employees are never keen to observe moral standards. He specified that there are certain actions which when an employee does, they speak volumes of the ethics of such an employee. Various departments differ in their mode of operation and approachability to ethics. All the same, employees are not supposed to misbehave by acting contrary to the set rules and regulations. This implies that, as a manager, Mr. Smith can know if an employee has ethical manners based on their track record and consistency in avoiding by the organizational code of conduct. The relationship between one employee to another should remain confidential, professional, and never at any one time should some employees bring casualness in the workplace (Treviño, Brown & Hartman, 2003). Mr. Smith further insisted on the dressing code of employees as a way of showing that they are respectful, courteous and show mannerism in their way of operation.
The fourth hard question I sought to know from Mr. Smith was how he handles the emerging challenges in his organization. Part B of this question was intended to know some of the most challenging and painful experiences he encounters in his course of management. He mentioned many challenges- most of them arise due to the present nature of emerging trends in organizations. The issue of government interference which is majorly tied to political instability prevalent in a country. The economic situation has greatly changed. This has affected the way the organization organizes, runs, and manages its employees on a daily and monthly basis. Employees still expect to get favorable remunerations, payment, and pension schemes, but do not deserve to be affected by the prevalent situations of inflation. At present, Mr. Smith told me that virtually organizations and governments, on the whole, are grappling with the issue of inflation and unemployment (Brown & Mitchell, 2010).
I proceeded to ask the final question to Mr. Smith was how his management style dealt with the issue of discipline to all the staff members and other mid-managers. He told me that discipline is a touch area that if not well managed, can fuel problems and chaos. At this, he said that he always leaves the area of discipline to be handled by the disciplinary committee. However, that, any staff member commits certain acts that deserve disciplinary measures are normally summoned with the disciplinary committee.
From this discussion, I noted and learnt that management and leadership should be done with professionalism. A leader and a manager must always be armed with some of the potential issues that are likely to arise cause a manager to have problems. A manager is one person who encounters most problems on a daily basis but is under propulsion to maintain and ensure that ethical standards are maintained. In my introspective, I determined that it is important that every organization has a laid-out ethical standards.
Reference List
Biggerstaff, L. Cicero D, & Puckett, A. (2014). Suspect CEOs, unethical culture, and corporate misbehavior. Journal of Financial Economics , 20-86
Brown, M. E. & Mitchell, M. S. (2010). Ethical and unethical leadership: Exploring new avenues for future research. Business Ethics Quarterly , 20, 583–616.
Mayer, D. M., Kuenzi, M., Greenbaum, R., Bardes, M., & Salvador, R. (2009). How low does ethical leadership flow? Test of a trickle down model. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes , 108, 1–13.
Treviño, L. K., Brown, M., & Hartman, L. P. (2003). A qualitative investigation of perceived executive ethical leadership: Perceptions from inside and outside the executive suite. Human Relations , 56, 5–37.
