Collapse Discussion 2: Water Cooler Discussion on Leadership Styles The water co
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Discussion 2: Water Cooler Discussion on Leadership Styles
The water cooler has become a symbol in business life. Like any common gathering place in an office slightly removed from the cubicles and desks, the water cooler is a place to share information, both casual and vital, and to build networks with colleagues who you do not necessarily see or interact with every day. The water cooler discussion activity this week will help you get into the practice of looking beyond your metaphorical cubicle to seek out topical news stories and ideas and analyze them with your Instructor and colleagues. Familiarity with current trends, topics, and events is an important element of your participation and success in the business world and your MBA program.
For your Discussion this week, research the Business Source Complete database in the Walden Library for interesting and compelling articles on the topic of leadership styles. For assistance on how to use the Walden Library, consult the document Walden University Library Tips and Tricks, which can be located by clicking on the Learning Support Docs link in the course navigation menu in the online classroom. Then, select an article from the library that resonates with you. You need to access the full text of the article, and it should be more than 2 pages in length. Do not worry if the article you select has a complicated research design (e.g., describes complex quantitative research techniques), as usually the introduction and summary conclusion pages have interesting concepts and findings to discuss.
Most of the articles you find in Business Source Complete will provide a PDF of the article. For the water cooler activity, it is preferable to attach the PDF of the article to your post. If the article you find in Business Source Complete only provides the full text as an HTML file, paste the HTML file in a Word document and attach it to your post.
Post by Day 5 the author(s) and title of the article on leadership style(s) that you found interesting. Provide a paraphrased summary, in your own words, of what the article says about leadership style(s), why you chose it, and what you learned from it, relative to what you have studied this week and throughout the course to date about leadership in business settings. Include the article as attachment to your post.
Explanation / Answer
Conversely, a leader can be anyone on the team who has a particular talent, who is creatively thinking out of the box and has a great idea, who has experience in a certain aspect of the business or project that can prove useful to the manager and the team. A leader leads based on strengths, not titles.
The best managers consistently allow different leaders to emerge and inspire their teammates (and themselves!) to the next level.
When you’re dealing with ongoing challenges and changes, and you’re in uncharted territory with no means of knowing what comes next, no one can be expected to have all the answers or rule the team with an iron fist based solely on the title on their business card. It just doesn’t work for day-to-day operations. Sometimes a project is a long series of obstacles and opportunities coming at you at high speed, and you need every ounce of your collective hearts and minds and skill sets to get through it.
This is why the military style of top-down leadership is never effective in the fast-paced world of adventure racing or, for that matter, our daily lives (which is really one big, long adventure, hopefully!). I truly believe in Tom Peters’s observation that the best leaders don’t create followers; they create more leaders. When we share leadership, we’re all a heck of a lot smarter, more nimble and more capable in the long run, especially when that long run is fraught with unknown and unforeseen challenges.
Not only do the greatest teammates allow different leaders to consistently emerge based on their strengths, but also they realize that leadership can and should be situational, depending on the needs of the team. Sometimes a teammate needs a warm hug. Sometimes the team needs a visionary, a new style of coaching, someone to lead the way or even, on occasion, a kick in the bike shorts. For that reason, great leaders choose their leadership style like a golfer chooses his or her club, with a calculated analysis of the matter at hand, the end goal and the best tool for the job.
Here are the six leadership styles Goleman uncovered among the managers he studied, as well as a brief analysis of the effects of each style on the corporate climate:
to summerise this, If you take two cups of authoritative leadership, one cup of democratic, coaching, and affiliative leadership, and a dash of pacesetting and coercive leadership "to taste," and you lead based on need in a way that elevates and inspires your team, you’ve got an excellent recipe for long-term leadership success with every team in your life.
Psychologist Kurt Lewin developed his framework in the 1930s, and it provided the foundation of many of the approaches that followed afterwards. He argued that there are three major styles of leadership:
Lewin's framework is popular and useful, because it encourages managers to be less autocratic than they might instinctively be.