Although leadership is often viewed from a personal point of view, it is a process that involves a group of people or an organization, which defines the possibility of failure or success. However, the inability for a leader to exercise leadership among their team acts as a key contributor to the. Personally, I have experienced failure in leadership, which has had a significant impact on my motivation to take leadership opportunities presented to me. My story of leadership arises from an experience where I showed bias, which is one of the fundamental leadership factors that many leaders ignore; thus, setting themselves up for an overall possibility of failure. As a leader, one is expected to uphold integrity, especially when dealing with other members of the team. In other words, that means that a leader should always avoid taking actions likely to expose others to some form of bias or discrimination.
Back in 2018, I was working for one of the local financial institutions where I was assigned to the loans department. The department had a total of eight employees, including me, who were responsible for evaluating loan requests to determine whether an applicant qualified for a loan. After I had worked for three months, my then supervisor resigned from her position, as she was moving to another financial institution out of state. The human resource manager selected me as the supervisor, which meant that I would be holding a leadership position in my department. As a supervisor, my main role was assigning tasks to my team members in an equal and fair manner, which would give the employees an opportunity to evaluate the individual loan requests. I must admit that this was a significant achievement for me considering that I always envisioned myself in a position where I would lead others towards a specific goal or objective.
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Initially, the assignment of tasks, which were commonly referred to as leads, was somewhat easy for me considering that I believed in equality for all irrespective of their race or gender. I held the view that my method of assigning leads would define the successes that my team achieved as part of advancing towards the set-out goals. During the entire time I was working in the department, I had not interacted with any of the other employees personally, as I often found myself amerced in my duties. Moving into a leadership position meant that I needed to learn the importance of interacting with the employees personally, which would give me a better understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. Effective leaders are better placed to make decisions regarding their followers based on the extent to which they understand their capabilities and capacities to perform.
After serving as a supervisor for six months, I had become somewhat closer to some of the employees compared to others, which I believe may have set me up for the failure that I was about to experience. Based on the close relationships I had developed, I began giving these employees some of the more quality leads that would increase their success rates. The average success rate for a leader was approximately 20%, depending on an applicant’s credit rating, but the success rate often increased to approximately 50% for quality leads. My main goal was to ensure that each employee remains motivated to perform, which would increase his or her approach towards achieving best outcomes. My underhanded actions of selecting quality leads for specific employees created a situation where some of the other employees began showing frustration in my leadership. They believed that I was not an effective leader attributed to my inclusion of bias in how I managed my team’s activities.
Personally, I did not view my actions as having any negative effects on my team, which meant that I continued with my actions where I would give the more quality leads to specific persons while distributing the rest to the other members. One of the team members that I gave quality leads was later promoted attributed to her success rate in selling loans. To some extent, I viewed this as an outcome of my actions but did not take any notice on the toll that it would later have on my team. The confidence level among my team reduced significantly, as some of the other members believed that they were not in any position to achieve set objectives due to the biasness that I showed to specific persons. That all became clear in a meeting that I held with the team to discuss dwindling performance among specific members.
The meeting, which has been attended by my immediate supervisor and the chief operating officer of the financial institution, exposed a significant disconnect between my leadership approach and the performance of specific individuals. During the meeting, one of the members pointed out that he did not trust my capacity as a leader considering that I had adopted a strategy that sought to favor specific persons while ignoring others. Another member of the team pointed out that my actions created a situation where it was somewhat challenging for me to motivate the team towards performance. The member gave an example of the employee that had been promoted due to my actions of always selecting quality leads, which I would give her as part of my role as a leader. From the outcome of the meeting, it was clear that I had failed in my position as a leader.
The meeting showed that I had failed to uphold some of the essential qualities that define my position in leadership, such as honesty, accountability, and fair treatment, in dealing with individual members of my team. Additionally, it also exposed the fact that my position as a leader was affected by the fact that I had let my personal relations interfere with what I was expected to do as a leader. Leaders are always expected to remain impartial in their actions irrespective of the relationships that they develop with those closest to them. The main issue of concern, from this case, is the fact that I used my personal relationships to define how I expected to perform. Basically, this meant that I would favor some members of the team while ignoring the fact that I was expected to maintain a sense of connection with each member of my team to help build their motivation.
I held a meeting with my supervisor and the financial institution’s Chief Operating Officer (COO) from where it was clear that the dwindling performance of the team was as a direct result of my actions as a leader. I was placed on probation for a three month period during which time I was expected to undergo leadership training to help equip me with the knowledge and skills that I would utilize as a leader. Personally, I consider this as a failure that resulted from my inability to exercise effective leadership. Instead of showing leadership, I used my position as a leader to influence how I would want the department to perform, which, in turn, paved the way for failure. Before this experience, I held the view that leaders’ actions do not have any major influence on how a team performs. However, this quickly changed after I had failed as a leader, as it became clear that my actions had a direct impact on how other members of my team performed.
