Employee Engagement and Leadership

Leadership Crucible Experience

Leadership is a practice that is learnt from the experiences of the leaders. According to Bennis and Thomas (2002), a crucible is delineated as a changing experience through which a person ends up having a new sense of self and character. In particular, the capacity to mine knowledge from such challenging and difficult experiences is what differentiates and tells apart successful leaders from their counterparts (Bennis and Thomas, 2002). The purpose of this essay is to ascertain, define and justify a crucible experience that one can have in life and delineate how that experience can have an effect on the personal style of leadership, behaviors, outlooks and viewpoint and shed light on how it will impact one as a leader in the organization.

So what can happen to make an individual go through a crucible experience? Leadership ability can be tested when one is abruptly and quickly promoted and positioned in a senior or managerial position, without any anticipation. In particular, take into consideration if a person had initially applied for an assistant manager position in a new company and thereafter promoted just a month to the manager position of the department, owing to the departure of the manager to another organization. This implies that within four weeks, an individual would have to perform the appropriate functions of a manager, a position that one was not ready for at the time. As a result, this crucible experience necessitates swift reaction to offer direction to the department in devising a plan on how to cope with any organizational problems at hand.

Without doubt, the immediate reaction to such an experience can be shocking and alarming at the same time. It can cause panic for an individual with the worry of causing failure for the department. However, what is key is to understand that building proper relationships with the staff within the department as well as with managers of other departments are essential for the operations and undertakings to be successful. Being a newly promoted manager, a position that one has never served before can be testing owing to immediate tasks. However, it brings an understanding that working together with other members of the department can bring about success and achievement of the objectives set. In addition, engagement with other members of staff makes organizational learning easier and much faster. Therefore, not only does one build cohesion with the members, but also at the same time eases the challenges at hand. Such participative and transactional style of leadership enhances the achievement of the objectives set. In a matter of time, the crucible challenges forces one to transform through growth and become a leader by offering guidance to the rest of the team members.

In this particular instance, the immediate reaction of others would be to consider the promotion to be undeserving since one is simply a few weeks old within the organization. However, the main way to change these perceptions is simply building relationships with personnel and other managers. Incessantly participating in duties to see whether they need any clarification can easily make the personnel to decide to fully cooperate with the manager. In particular, employee engagement is one way that can show an individual the importance and benefits of building personal relationships with subordinates and other managers within the organization. Over time, the department staff and the rest of the organization will be able to perceive one's substantial contributions, capacity to learn, guidance, effective planning, and assimilation of employee operations (Markos and Sridevi, 2010).

What can individuals learn about themselves based on what they do in response and how they felt? Without doubt, by going through such crucible experiences, a person comes out transformed and changed. A significant lesson one can learn about him/herself is that he or she has more potential and capability to achieve objectives set. Once cooperation with other members of the department begins to flow and goals are being achieved, one comes to the realization that such challenging experiences only make one better and stronger. It makes you perceive the organization from a different light and ultimately discerning that in the course of such a crucible experience, leadership is not fundamentally about individual success or about getting followers. Rather, it is understanding that the principle of leadership is bringing teammates into line around a mutual mission, vision, sharing values and engaging them to advance and offer guidance (Thomas and Cheese, 2005).