Good Management and Leadership Skills

Reflecting on Management
1
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 truly care about them and understand their needs—almost as though they intuit everything. 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.
2
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. I am not there to “manage” them as though they were puppets and all I had to do was pull their strings. I would be there to help them and to guide them if necessary—but ultimately I would want to make sure they have everything they need to do their jobs well. That would be my focus as a manager and that would be the type of manager I would like to be: one who makes others look good, whose sole focus is to make sure his employees (not himself) look great.
I view managers who distance themselves from workers as problematic because while workers may appreciate the space, the manager is not really doing his job if he is not interacting with his employees. The manager is not just there to crunch numbers and make decisions. Plus, the fact that the manager does need to make decisions is all the more reason he should be interacting with workers and getting to know them and what they need. Good decision-making is based on having all the inputs needed to make the best decision at the best time. A manager who is separated from his workers and is not engaged with them will not be one who is able to make good decisions because he will have no idea what is actually going on among his workers.
3
The type of manager I most enjoy working for is a transformational type of manager. I like this type because it encompasses so many different styles of leadership. There is a bit of the charismatic leader in the transformational type of manager: after all, it is necessary to drive workers and inspire them with a vision, and this tends to require a certain amount of charisma. There is also the need for the transformational leader to be a servant and to serve his workers. I like it when the manager puts himself at the service of his workers: it shows that he fully understands that he looks good when we look good and that we look good when we feel that our manager has our back and is going to support us all at the end of the day. I like knowing that we are all on the same page and on the same team. The transformational leader also has to be one who embraces innovation and is willing to think outside the box to overcome a challenge or reduce resistance among workers.
I would, therefore, enjoy being under a manager who demonstrates transformational leadership style. I like to be challenged and I like to be motivated by cognitive motivations—i.e., I like the opportunity of getting to learn a new skill so I can grow and develop professionally and personally. A transformational leader uses approaches like these to get workers on board when it comes time to implementing a change, and in any organization change is a constant: a company has to constantly be engaging in change, especially in today’s world where so many business innovations and revolutions are occurring all the time. Workers have to be on board with change and managers have to make sure they are on board with it. A transformational leader for a manager is exactly what I would want: someone who knows what is coming, knows how to prepare workers for it, goes out and personally delivers the message and communicates the vision, offers personal support for workers for anything they need, and provides workers with the reasons for why they should embrace this change. I would hate working for a manager who is indecisive, detached, and unwilling to get to know his workers. I like the idea of being part of an organization where everyone respects everyone else, everything is organized towards achieving the goal of the company, and everyone is supportive.
References
Daft, R. (2015). Management, 12th ed. Cengage.
De Vries, M. F. K. (1998). Charisma in action: The transformational abilities of Virgin's
Richard Branson and ABB's Percy Barnevik. Organizational Dynamics, 26(3), 7-21.
Gallo, C. (2013). How Southwest and Virgin America Win by Putting People Before
Profit. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/carminegallo/2013/09/10/how-southwest-and-virgin-america-win-by-putting-people-before-profit/
Northouse, P. G. (2018). Interactive: Leadership: Theory and Practice Interactive eBook,
8th Edition. SAGE Publications, Inc.
Schyns, B. & Schilling, J. (2013). How bad are the effects of bad leaders? A meta-
analysis of destructive leadership and its outcomes. The Leadership Quarterly, 24, 138-158.