Leadership One of the Most

Leadership

One of the most challenging leadership situations in which I have found myself involved processing military documents for over 6500 military personnel. This task stretched my leadership abilities, allowing me to learn a lot about my leadership skills. The task at first seemed overwhelming, so I had to motivate the staff immediately and keep spirits raised throughout the entire process. I needed to demonstrate over the course of this process transactional, transformational and situational leadership. The task came from head office with a set due date and this only heightened the necessity of top leadership skills. This report will outline the contributions that I made to this project as leader. I will demonstrate the steps that I undertook to achieve set and achieve the group's goals, some of the obstacles that were overcome, and what I learned about my own leadership skills as a result of this process. I believe that this one large, complex task illustrates clearly the leadership qualities that I possess, and makes a good case example of the high standard of my leadership in multiple situations.

Background

I was working as a Human Resource Supervisor when my superiors charged me with a complex task. I was instructed to process documents for 6500 military personnel, and given a tight timeline with which to work. I had some resources at my disposal, in particular a number of junior personnel. Few of these personnel had ever seen a task this substantial so I immediately knew that there were going to be difficulties. The standards for time and accuracy were strict, and it would take a lot of work and organization in order to succeed. However, I knew my team could do it and I began immediately determining how that was going to happen.

I first made a determination with respect to the amount of resources I needed for the job. In my view, we had enough people, but I needed to assess the capabilities of the staff members. I was uncertain about the motivation of some members of the team that I was able to put together in the face of such a difficult but tedious task. I very quickly had to come up with an approach that would allow the team to succeed. The major goals were already determined by my superiors so I knew that I needed to set smaller goals that my team members would find easier to digest. Only I would be responsible for monitoring progress towards the final goal.

I also designed a system that would allow the team to check the quality of the work. I also wanted to rally the team around the task, and focused on intrinsic motivation as a means to achieve our goals. From there, the largest element of my task was ensuring that the team stayed on schedule, so that we would be in a position to deliver the results without any panicking or rushing at the end, as I felt that rushing would lead to errors. I set out a training program and began with the task of organizing and motivating the group.

Ultimately, I started with this task using a team of twelve HR assistants and myself as the leader. We were not given a large budget, but were expected to conduct this project within the constraints of our standard operating budget. I took stock of the project and then broke it down to manageable pieces. In this initial organizing phase I believe that my personality traits played a key role in my success. Being a natural organizer who sees the big picture, I was able to quickly and easily see how the different tasks could be broken down in an organized and efficient fashion. This allowed me to design a miniature organization for the team that would support our ability to get the job done. When the team was coming together, I did not have many options with respect to personnel, so I took the time to understand each of the assistants I was going to use, so that I would be able to utilize his or her respective talents better. I chose three leaders to head up teams of four. I chose the three assistants that I thought were best suited to leading a team because of their personalities. I do not always believe in trait theory, but there are times when certain personality styles are well-suited to an operation. In this case I knew I needed the most dogmatic employees who were also good motivators and communicators to lead the three teams. The former trait is important for the accuracy component and the latter for morale. Although I also wanted to play a role as a motivator, I also knew that I needed somebody to support the workers in the event that I had to be hard on them.

Transformational Leadership

There were two instances where I needed to be a transformational leader. The first was immediately after the teams were formed. I realized that I needed to motivate the group -- motivating the team leaders was not going to be enough. I was excited about the challenge, even though I knew that the work was going to be tedious and seem neverending. I also knew that I had to take HR assistants with only limited amount of motivation and turn them into processing dynamos. This required empowerment of the employees. They need to be able to take initiative, especially the team leaders. I also tapped into the intrinsic motivation for the team members. Most of them had not undertaken such a large project and I wanted to them to feel as though this was a challenge that represented an opportunity to prove themselves. For those who have no ambition to move further, this required focusing their motivation on how they would help the organization and by extension the country. This tactic appeared to work and everybody was excited to get the project underway.

The second instance were transformational leadership was required was around the mid-point of the project. The team was functioning well, but was beginning to burn out. Old habits were creeping back into the work and the pace was becoming sluggish. I renewed my efforts to motivate the team, and this included some rewards for the job done to that point. It was nothing much -- an extended pizza lunch -- but it brought the team together and reminded them of the common mission. The sense of unique organizational culture that I had formed when we first started the project was renewed and this time carried through to the end of the project.

I learned through this process that transformational leadership is a process, not just for the organization but for myself as the leader as well. Transformation takes time and there will be setbacks. These setbacks need to be addressed and sometimes even the leader needs to be renewed with respect to the reasons for the original transformation. I have applied this understanding of the nature of transformational leadership to my subsequent activities, and have found that I have become a much better transformational leader as the result of the learning about this leadership style that I experienced over the course of this particular project.

Transactional Leadership

Processing the records of 6500 military personnel is a massive task, and the accuracy standards were set very high (no more than 1% error rate). This meant that no matter how motivated the assistants needed to be, they had to be accurate. For me, the transactional leadership element of this task was largely about planning and training. I first went through what my superiors wanted, so that I knew it inside and out. Then I trained the team leaders. Then I trained the teams. The training process was relatively extensive. I knew it cut out time for processing, but I knew from calculations how long I had to prepare the team. With proper planning, I was able to get the training I needed to the teams, and they in turn were able to perform the task with accuracy that exceeded the performance standards, and on time. What I learned about transactional leadership was the importance of making perfection instinctive. The more naturally perfection comes to the employees, the more easily it can be achieved. Training is essential, as is supervision during the early stages of the process.

Elements of Complexity

The description I have given of the task is relatively straightforward, but there were a number of complicating factors that I needed to work through. There were several stakeholders, and as a leader it is my duty to design the work in such a way that the needs of all stakeholders are met. The key stakeholders were myself, the employees, the program manager (my superiors' representative), the personnel office and the union representative). There were times, especially in negotiating between the program manager and the union representative, that I had to find compromises that would allow the work to be done and all stakeholders to be satisfied. Thankfully, in my role I have become experienced in dealing with multiple stakeholders. I utilized my transformational leadership skills to have all stakeholders buy into my vision of the project, allowing me to shape the project in a manner that would allow me to deliver satisfactory results to all of the stakeholders.

Leadership Lessons

I knew that I was going to demand a lot from all of the different stakeholders, and therefore I needed to lead by example. I took this as the core of my vision for my leadership. I was a situational leader, moving between transformational and transactional as the situation required. I was tough when necessary, in particular with respect to ethics, but I was also able to make contributions that improved the positivity surrounding the project. I worked with the union representative to build a set of disciplinary actions based on my code of ethics, which goes beyond our organization's. This was difficult, but these were the records of our military personnel, so I knew that the standard of ethics needed to be greater than for our typical jobs. I made ethics a part of the training process as well, because I knew that everybody needed to have the same view of the ethical standards involved in this project.

I also fostered a high degree of communication. I recognized at the outset that this project was going to entail two main challenges to communication. The first is that the workers were going to largely be independent, each with a substantial amount of work each day. I also knew that communication plays an important role in the task because it is a control mechanism for management and also to keep up morale among the workers. To that end I made communication a part of the training as well, and spend extra time training the team leaders with respect to communication. I emphasized the problem-solving role that communication plays, and the value that high levels of communication would bring to the team leaders in their assessments at the end of the project.

I had a strict timeline, and measured our progress daily by way of completed sets of paperwork. The sets took different times, so the pace varied slightly, which meant that over the life of the project I paid more attention to weekly data, which smoothed out some of the day-to-day volatility in volume. I set an example by knowing as much about the project as the employees did -- I trained them so they would know that I was an expert and therefore was the right person to lead, and a good person to listen to with advice about the project.