Leadership: Ethical Leadership Ethical Leadership: Leadership

Leadership is crucial for organizational success. It can be defined simply as the ability to motivate and inspire others to identify with one's vision. In this assignment, I interviewed a selected leader to determine how their actions and behaviour influence the ethical culture of the organization. This text presents the responses given by the leader during the interview.

Leadership and Organizational Performance

In a competitive marketplace, the success of any organization depends in part on the effectiveness of its leaders. Effective leadership is crucial for the smooth running of the organization -- an effective leader guides, inspires and motivates his subordinates to achieve the organization's goals. Depending on how a leader interacts with his employees, resolves conflicts, and delegates responsibility, they can influence employee absenteeism, retention, morale and overall productivity. Thus, leadership is a crucial determinant of organizational performance and success. The dean of students at my university is one of the leaders that I admire most -- I admire the way he interacts with his subordinates and students and the manner in which he deals with issues and conflict arising between students and the administration. For these reasons, I selected him as the subject for this particular assignment. I set up an interview with him to obtain his perspectives about leadership, motivation and organizational performance. I based the interview on the five questions presented in the subsequent sections. The summarized versions of the responses he gave are presented below each question.

How would you define leadership?

Leadership can be defined as the ability to inspire and motivate others to identify with one's vision and work towards its realization. A leader's effectiveness can be assessed based their ability to set and achieve challenging goals, to take calculated risk, to take swift and decisive action in difficult situations, and to keep their followers motivated. Leadership is more than just management -- a manager focuses on enhancing efficiency...

A leader, on the other hand, is a visionary; they are more focused on inspiring others to achieve their highest potential than on ensuring that things are done the right way. This they do by providing learning environments that enable people to grow and develop their professional capabilities.
As a leader, what do you do when people on your team are not pulling their weight? I personally organize a one-on-one meeting with the uncooperative member and ask them what the issue is; whether they are blocked by anything in their personal lives, at home or at work. At times we judge people as being uncooperative when in reality, they are just dealing with difficult situations in their personal lives. I attempt to find out whether any such issues exist, and what, in their view, needs to be done to ensure that they excel in their respective roles. At times, mentorship, education or training is all one needs to perform better in their role. Moreover, sometimes, one just is not the right fit for a particular job -- applying this kind of personal touch when dealing with issues helps a leader realize this. In addition, incentives and rewards also help to make members more cooperative.

How would you describe your communication style?

I would describe myself as a personal communicator; I care not just about what my employees think, but also how they feel. I tend to focus on listening to others and building deep interpersonal relationships than on sticking to rules and standards. However, some situations call for a different communication style. People tend to take advantage when the leader focuses too much on the maintenance of relationships; at times, therefore, I am forced to complement my personal communication style with the functional style, where communication is based on timelines, process and detail, especially when people intentionally fail to do what is expected of them.

Describe your personal actions by which you convey to your staff that ethics/ethical behaviour is a high priority to you.

First, I am always keen to balance between doing…