After reading chapter 10, I’ve quickly realized the type of leadership style that I regularly refer to. Furthermore, I’ve been able to reflect on the last six week and noticed a couple of small tidbits that I will likely take with me with my future leadership goals. The three things I’ll be reflecting on are the leadership style I naturally fall to, how to get followers to change, and finally a reflection on this chapter and content learned in a previous course.
Taking the quiz, my answers regularly fell under strategy 3: involve. The involve strategy is used “either when the leader does not know or chooses to hold back to allow others to discover the solution.” (Obolensky, 2010, p. 172) The biggest aspect to this is that it assumes there are no major time requirements (for example an emergency). Another aspect is that it’s great for educational purposes when trying to develop a follower. But as the quote mentions, this is a strategy often used when the leader doesn’t know the answer. For most of the questions, I didn’t know the right answer. If a subordinate is having problems, I’ll often come to them and ask what they think they could do to solve the problem. If no solution can be found is when I might chime in with my own ideas.
Chapter 10 builds off of chapter 9, which is about the development and shaping of a follower. This chapter I found fascinating because a basic and simple framework was given that shows the roadmap from a level 1 follower to level 5. When trying to build and maintain an upward style of leadership, it’s important to have followers with high skill and high will. To slowly get them to where they need to be, one must follow the chart shown in Figure 9.4. (Obolensky, 2010, p. 161) This chart is something that I can easily follow in my primary duty as a fighter aircraft avionics maintainer. When I’m working with a subordinate, I can slowly shape them to become self-sufficient work machine without having to seek my approval.
Finally, a quick reflection on chapter 10 as a whole: what I learned was that there are many different leadership styles and that we need to be able to balance our style with the situation that we’re in. This requires being incredibly mindful of our surroundings, how we behave, and how others react. This is a fine balance between everything and I noticed that this falls very well in line with Boyatzis and McKee’s book, Resonant Leadership. (Boyatzis & McKee, 2005) To simply what resonant leadership is, “resonant leaders are in tune with those around them. This results in people working in sync with each other, in tune with each other’s thoughts and emotions. Leaders who can create resonance are people who either intuitively understand or have worked hard to develop emotional intelligence, namely, the competencies of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. They act with mental clarity, not simply following a whim or an impulse.” (Boyatzis & McKee, 2005) In order to fully grasp chapter 10 to its full advantage, we need to be in tune with what’s around us. Hence why I find these two topics so closely related and synergistic.
Discussed were the main leadership style that I use, a reflection on my thoughts with chapter 9, and finally my connection of chapter 10 with another book written by Boyatzis and McKee. This has been an interesting six weeks and incredibly insightful. Everything that I’ve learned in this class has been incredibly worthwhile and I will regularly be finding myself finding quotes from our materials.
References
Boyatzis, R., & McKee, A. (2005). Resonant Leadership. Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing.
Obolensky, N. (2010). Complex Adaptive Leadership. London, UK: Gower/Ashgate.
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