Reflecting on Management
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The new managerial skills that I learned about were related to the importance and value of managing an environment (not just workers) so as to cultivate a workplace culture that promotes the vision and goals of the organization (Daft, 2015). To this end, I learned about how crucial it is to have a sense of duty and ethics and have the ability to communicate this sense to workers. As Schyns and Schilling (2013) show, when leaders and managers fail to lead by example, they create a divide between employees and management that can quickly lead to a sour culture and a collapse in productivity and morale. An ethical perspective and skill set helps to provide the organization with the right type of values that all workers can embrace. When a manager lacks an ethical framework for approaching the job of management, it opens the door to a great many abuses both by managers and by workers. Enron is a company that comes to mind when one considers what can happen when an organization fails to operate according to a standard of ethics embodied and communicated by management.
I also learned that to facilitate the development of close connections and positive communications, managers should develop emotional and social intelligence skills—and these are two areas that I learned more about: how to use knowledge of the ways people express themselves in situations to reduce the risk of conflict and bring people together as a team (Northouse, 2018). Developing one’s emotional and social intelligence helps a manager to understand individual behavior more fully and gives the leader the opportunity to bridge divides, overcome resistance, and empower workers to “buy into” the vision of the organization (Daft, 2015). These intelligence skills are essential for boosting morale in the workplace as they show workers that their managers...
In reality, the manager is simply using emotional and social intelligence skills to better understand each individual worker and see how best to communicate with that worker and supply support for that person. These are skills I would like to develop more fully as I feel they are two of the best ways to really bring workers together and get everyone moving in the right direction as a team.
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The type of manager that I would be would be the servant leader type. For me, this is the best way a manager can be because it provides the support and devotion that workers really value in the workplace—a manager who demonstrates confidence in the abilities of the worker who has been hired to do a job. No worker likes a micromanager and no worker wants to be totally ignored either. A manager who is a servant leader is a happy medium between those two extremes, getting to know the worker and help satisfy the worker’s needs while at the same time getting out of the way so the worker can do the job he was hired to do. This type of leadership makes places like Virgin Group one of the most attractive places to work in the world (Gallo, 2013). Someone like Richard Branson, who combines a variety of leadership styles—such as innovative leadership, charismatic leadership and transformational leadership, ultimately has as his core leadership value the style of servant leadership (De Vries, 1998). He consistently puts people first and recognizes what they need and how he can best help. That is the type of manager I would like to be. I would not want to distance myself from my workers nor hover over them to the point that they are distressed every time I come around. I would want them to know that I am there to support them so that they can do their jobs effectively.…
