Question

Must be 500+ words

Describe in detail 2 experiments you have or would like to complete to make progress on your leadership challenge (describe Who, what, where, when, why, what was the outcome).

1. Indicate how you think it went, what you learned from it. Indicate which competency it might support. For example, "giving the work back" is a sub-competency. Another sub-competency is “meeting people where they are at.” What do you know about a stakeholder’s values, concerns, and priorities to meet them where they are at?

2. Next, describe at least 1 new experiment to complete before the end of the semester. This information is an important DB and will be used in your final paper.

The design of the experiment is totally up to you but would benefit from linking the competencies to it. You may feel that your challenge needs to address 1 or more sub-competencies so that is what your experiment is based on. This week's lesson is on "Ensuring a Trustworthy Process." That would be a good one to consider. You say why you designed this, what happened, what you learned, if you would modify or what will you do next?

Answer 1

Leadership Challenge - Implementing Situational Leadership in my organisation to arrest attrition.

I intended to implement situational leadership in my organisation to arrest attrition. Situational leadership is all about adopting leadership style as per the maturity levels and skill levels of the subordinates. Its well known that different situations requires different leadership styles. The situation is required to be analysed and apply the best decision as per the requirement.

Background :- Just like every organisation, our resort also had a situation wherein the employees possessed different skill levels and maturity levels. We had a competent training department headed by a training manager who had a wide experience in many sectors. The training department put in their best efforts to train our staff and upskill them as per the training needs. This ensured that our staff were constantly upskilled and their trainings were taken care of. Although the staff were trained, the middle and top level managers were not given the leadership training and exposure on handling these well trainied staff. This lead to daily issues in team management. This is when situational leadership concept was introduced and implemented.

Implementation Ice breaker :- Concept of situational leadership was expalined to the middle level and top level managers. The importance and the benefits of situational leadership were explained to them. As this was widely implemented in many similar organisation as ours, it was well received.

Concept :- The concept of situational leadership revolves around application of ideal leadership styles for different maturity levels/skill levels was explained which is as follows :-

Subordinates Leadership style

Low maturity/Skill Directing

Medium maturity/skill Coaching

Average Maturity/skill Supporting

High Maturity/skill Delegating

In our organisation we had situations where we had a subordinte with high skill levels and high maturity levels was subjected to a directing leadership. This brought down the morale of the subordinate leading to attrition.

Example - The restaurant manager would treat all his staff equally irrespective of their maturity and skill levels. The team comprised Junior stewards, stewards, Senior stewards, room service order takers, restaurant captain, Banquet coordinator Senior captain. All possessed different skills levels and needed to be treated in different leadership stlyes mentioned above.

This was piloted in the restaurant and extended to all other department like Front office team, Housekeeping team, Engineering team, Food & Beverage production.

Learnings / Findings :-

Situational leadership concept should be a training module given to every employee who has put in more than 5 years in the organisation and to all who are in the supervisory role.

Some managers have inherited a certain leadership style and hence there is a resistance to change or adopt a new leadership stlye.

The managers do not implent this in full vigor. They try to cut short the implementation.

Best suited in large organisations. Need a committed training department. Trainings to be calendared and executed without fail. The training module to be freezed in line with the organisation needs.

Adopting different styles of leadership stlye meant that the subordinates were given their due respect. It had a positive outcome of reducing low morale and disgruntlment among the employees. This also lead to impemention of trustworthy process in the organisation. Hence number of attrition came down to under 10%. The hotel industry has a attrition in the range of 30%.

Another new experiment which I want to impment is to improve my skills of persuation. In this ciritical skill, I intend to improve certain areas of the skill like improving my oratory skills, vocabulory and also my presentation skills. This skill is important in persuading my customers and most importantly motivating my team, which is critcal to the success of my team and its achievement of the set goals and objectives of the organisation.