M005 – Blog 5- My Own Vision of Leadership

                           Blog 5 – Vision of Leadership

            Who are leaders? One thousand people have one thousand opinions. Some people say Beyoncé and Lady Gaga are leaders; some say Cameron and Obama are leaders; some regard Jack Ma and Elon Musk as Leaders. I think they are all correct, because a good leader explains, a superior leader demonstrates and a great leader inspires others (Rlochner 2013).

My Vision of Leadership

“Leadership is the process of facilitating other to understand and consent with what needs to be done and how to do it (Yukl 2010:26).”

My vision of leadership is to be an emotional intelligence leader that can motivate others and build good relationship with them. I think good leaders should know what they want to be, focus attention on what matters most, then inspire themselves and others to take action to make constructive change towards their target. Leaders have compelling personal visions and visions of their teams, which can motivate both leaders and followers to achieve their purpose.

Emotional Intelligence Model

Emotional Intelligence (EI) is considered as a key component of effective leadership, which is the capability of understanding and managing your emotions, and people around you. According to Goleman (2004) EI for leadership is consisted of five attributes:

• Self-awareness: the ability to recognize one’s own emotions, strengths, weaknesses, values and drivers and understanding their impact on others.
• Self-regulation: controlling or redirecting our disruptive emotions and adapting to change circumstances in order to keep the team moving in a positive direction.
• Motivation: Self-motivated leaders work consistently toward their goals, and they have extremely high standards for the quality of their work.
• Empathy: the ability to communicate effectively and properly manage relationships in order to move a team of people in a desired direction.
• Social skills: effective communication and good at managing change and resolving conflicts diplomatically. Misunderstandings and lack of communication are usually the basis of problems between most people.

Jack Ma
From a normal English teacher to the richest man in China, the business experience of Jack Ma is legendary. The CEO of Alibaba has inspired my understanding the meaning of effective leadership. Not only his characteristics but also unique leadership style has inspired me. I have learnt a lot from him how to become a successful people or leader, for instance, keeping your dream alive, getting inspired and inspiring others, having passion. He even taught me that how to face failure. Don’t complain and look for opportunities to success. He is also an ethical leader, he always say：”employees are the most important for a company, then consumers are second most important and shareholders are the last important, because when your team exist, your consumers will exist”.

Intelligence is an important factor in leadership and He owns almost all the elements of EI. He is self-regulated and good at recognized the strength and weakness of markets and people. He has been the model of many entrepreneurs and his employees admire him for his motivation and enthusiasm. Under his leadership, Alibaba has been the world’s largest ecommerce firm.

Feedback and Personal Reflection

I think people are not born to be a leader but learning how to be leaders. Through the learning of Leadership in Changing World, I realized that people are the core strategic resource for organisations; I also understand the relationship among ethics, culture, diversity and change, as well as the most effective approach of management. Team work and virtual team are important for improving the leadership skills. I think working with diverse teams is really hard because they have different culture, background and characteristics. They have different attitudes and opinions to the same problem, to make an agreement, find the most suitable solution and motivate other to implement the team work.

I think I got the following leadership skills from this module, such as decision making skills for supporting of organizational vision, motivating and inspiring others are the important skills for leadership. Leaders have the ability of connecting with the people they need, telling them what to do and inspiring them to do it.

After the study of MBA, I found my strength and weakness which are essential for personal development in leadership. My strengths are team working skills, flexibility, self-motivation and determination. My weaknesses are language skill, critical thinking and self-confidence. Learning how to utilize personal strengths and overcome your weaknesses is important for being a good leader.

Reference

1. Business Insider (2014) 5 types of emotional intelligence all great leaders has mastered [online] available from

<http://www.businessinsider.com/types-of-emotional-intelligence-leaders-master-2015-6?utm_content=bufferf449c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer&IR=T&gt; [11 June 2015]

2. Goleman, D (2004) Emotional Intelligence & Working with Emotional Intelligence. London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
3. Rlochner (2013) a mediocre leader tells [online] available from < http://ricklochner.com/a-mediocre-leader-tells/> [16 June 2015]

M005- Blog 4- Leadership and Change

       Blog 4- Leadership- Change and Resistance to Change

        “Change is some common around us. Facing changes, different people have different opinions. Some people actively face new challenges and try to overcome these changes. Some people prefer to stay in invariable condition and strongly resist any thing to be changed. It is all down to the personality of the individual and there is little management can do about resistance to change”

With the development of internet technology, human knowledge is doubling every 12 months, and soon it will be every 12 hours (Schilling 2013). We are now living in a changing world, many organizations find it difficult to transform themselves in difficult circumstances.

According to research of McKinsey & Company (2009), strong leadership and keeping change are two essential principles for success. Organizations have high success rate when they have both strong leadership and initiate to promote change. So leaders have played an important role in leadership and implementing change.

Leaders’ Role in Managing:

• The Sponsor
• The Role Model
• The Decision-Maker
• The Motivator
• The Enforcer

There are many reasons that promote organizations or individuals to change, such as uncertain economic conditions, political issue, globalization, technical development and culture. In order to make sure the change is implemented successfully,Yukl (2010) suggests that managers have to understand:

• The role of national and organizational culture in.
• The key drivers and types of various changes
• The sequential phases of change
• How to diagnose and approach organizational problems
• Why individuals accept or resist change
• How to lead people effectively in changing world

Resistance to change

Resistance to Change

In my opinion, failure of making changes may affect the capability of a company to survive. However, many employees dislike changes in workplace because they get used to do the same things. The resistance to change form employees has resulted in the failure of implementing changes in organisations.  According to the model, Active resistance is the most harmful resistance to change which mean employees react actively to resist a proposed change attempt.People who participant in the active resistant will limit the implementation of corporation policies and changes; they may be the direct objectors to new procedures of the firm. In terms of passive resistance, they resist organisational changes without expressing their own opinions. Although disliking change, these passive resistors may keep quiet, have the unhappy and stressed feeling of stress, even they will want to change job without expressing their feelings to the organisational decision makers. Passive resistance results in the unforeseen talent loss. At last, enthusiastic supporters are the main drivers of encouraging other and implementing changes, decision makers can give them more powers (Bauer and Erdogan 2010).

Three-stage process of change

Lewin’s three-stage process of change emphasizes the importance of preparation or unfreezing before change, and reinforcement of change afterward or refreezing (Bauer and Erdogan 2010). In similar, Kotter (2002) summarized his 8 step model for implanting change powerfully and successfully.

Kotter’s Eight-step model for implanting change

In this model, successful change process is composed of three stages. Firstly, creating a climate for change to promote other to realize the urgency and necessity of change, clear vision and strategy are provided to help everyone understand what to do. Secondly, engaging and enabling the whole organization to communicate with others, remove obstacles and create short-term win. Lastly, setting goals for organization and embedding change into culture to implement and maintain change (Kotter 2002).

IBM Encourages Blogging

With the development of information technology and knowledge, the acquisition and retention in marketing has changed. IMB started to encourage employees and managers to start company blog. IBM leadership drafted a corporate blogging policy that encouraged employees to be themselves, speak in the first person and respect their coworkers. And these was a positive result, the blogs of IBM have been the most trustful technical resources for related personnel. Instead of resisting changes and fearing new technologies, IBM embraced them and changed, making their customers and employees very happy (Stansberry 2010).

Recommendation for Leaders

In my opinion, to be successful in the turbulent decade, leaders should have the ability of dealing with complex situations, uncertainty and keeping constant change. For doing this effectively, the first things that leaders should do is understanding context and be confident in identifying, anticipating and responding to the change. The three leadership suggestion emerges: engagement, agility and transparency. And the three essential skills are adaptive intelligence, a balcony perspective and conversations. A change-oriented leader should promote changes to explore new and better ways of doing things.

For leaders, they can make personal plans, set clear goal of development based on the organizational vision and have the passion for changes. Leaders should do whatever they can do communicate with both decision makes and employees, promote their engagement, and exchange their ideas about company target and change. If a leader can do so, the company is more possible to transform itself successfully, even in the worst of times.

Reference

1. Bauer, T., and Erdogan, B. (2010) Organizational Behaviour [online] available from < flatworldknowledge.com/bookhub/reader/4> [15 June 2015]
2. McKindsey & Company (2009) Insights & Publications [online] available from < mckinsey.com/insights/organization/corporate_transformation_under_pressure> [16 June 2015]
3. Kotter (2002) the 8–step process for leading change [online] available from < com/the-8-step-process-for-leading-change/> [16 June 2015]
4. Schilling, D. (2013) Knowledge Doubling Every 12 Months, Soon to be Every 12 Hours [online] available from

<industrytap.com/knowledge-doubling-every-12-months-soon-to-be-every-12-hours/3950> [15 June 2015]

5. Stansberry, G. (2010) 10 Examples of Tremendous Business Leadership [online] available from

<www.americanexpress.com/10-examples-of-tremendous-business-leadership-1/> [15 June 2015]

6. Yukl, G. (2010) Leadership in Organizations. London: Prentice Hall

M005 -Blog 3- Most effective Leadership and Management Styles and approaches

                        

Blog 3- Most Effective Leadership and Management Style

  “Leadership is the procedure of affecting others to realize and agree about what needs to be done and how to do it (Yukl, 2010:26); Management is to get work to be done via the efforts of others (Mullins, 2013:421)”.

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Theory X-Y

McGregor’s theory X-Y illustrates two different leadership styles. The X leadership style focuses on “productivity. It assumes that individuals are lazy; they don’t want to work and usually need a good productivity. The theory X leaders think employees must be controlled and directed (Russ 2011).

The Y leadership style likes a style of participating in activities to manage people. The X style leaders assume people are self-directed and self-controlled; they can achieve the objectives of the organisation actively. However, theory Y leaders think that people go to work voluntarily, because through work they can have a chance to satisfy their high-level demands for achieving personal targets and self-respect (Russ 2011).

Similarities and Differences

There are many similarities between management and leadership, for instance, good management can lead to effective leadership. The similarities are shown as follows:

• Getting important work to be done or achieve the same organization goals
• Both have unique responsibilities for the organization
• Both depend upon subordinates (or followers) and hence try to motivate them

There are also many differences between leadership and management.

In my oponion, leadership is like the ability of individuals to influence other to do the correct things while management refers to directing and controlling a group of people to do things right. As was explained in seminar (2015), managers’ duty is to get work done via the efforts of other people and leaders should influence others to realize and consent with what needs to be done, how to do it. Moreover, leaders have followers and mangers have subordinates as well. Leaders focus on leading people and managers bend themselves to managing work. The relationship and differences between leader and managers are shown as follows (Sandra L. Torres, 2013).

I really agree with the viewpoints of CMI (2013), for difference organisations, they encounter various internal and external business situations, and the characteristics of managers and employees also influence the company performance and decision making. The shift from control management to consultative and participative approaches can make organisation more flexible and energetic, which can keep talents, motivate the enthusiasm of employees and build good relationship with them. Thus the most effective approach may be flexible leadership based on difference situation and individual personalities.

Jack Ma, the entrepreneur and founder of the Internet giant Alibaba in China. Under his leadership, Alibaba has become the world’s largest ecommerce platform from one small Internet company of 14 years ago.  When it’s listed on the New York Stock Exchange last in 2014, Alibaba became the world’s biggest initial public offering, reach $25 billion. Ma has inspiring leadership style, which has important influence on his partners and employees. He hires enthusiastic employees and encourages dedication and innovation, because Ma thinks they are adaptable and natural leaders that all firms need (Gallardo 2015).

Apple ECO Tim Cook has different leadership style with Steve Jobs, through which he has taken apple to the next level. Tim Cook is good at listening to others’ opinion trusting employees, being humble and admitting mistakes. He also highlights the importance of transparency for the sustainable success of company culture.

As an International Marketing MBA student, I have many chances to work as a group with classmates and good communications skills are crucial for being a good leader, especially your team is a diverse team with people from various culture and backgrounds. The diversity is considered as a huge gap for understanding each other and achieving the organisational goal. Thus, good leaders should have the ability of clearly expressing their ideas to others, making them understand and promoting them to implement the goal.

Taking advertise industry as an example, managers should focus promoting the motivation of employees and inspiring them in various approaches. For the better result of the company, leadership has played a very important role in letting employees know what to do, how to do and how to make the right people on the right position at the right time (Mullins, 2007).

In summary, an effective leadership and management style can promote an organization to a success direction and achieve organizational target effectively. The responsibility of Managers are organizing individuals, planning for achieving organizational target and promoting their motivation in workplace.

Reference

1. Gallardo, L. (2015) 4 Lessons in Leadership from Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba [online] available from

<http://blog.eonetwork.org/2015/01/4-lessons-in-leadership-from-alibaba-ceo-jack-ma/> [10 June 2015]

2. Sandra, L. (2013) Leadership vs Management Characteristics [online] available from <http://www.creditunionbusiness.com/2013/09/19/leadership-vs-management-differences-and-similarities/>[11 June 2015]
3. Seminar (2015) slides of M005 Unit 1 Ethical Leadership in business
4. Russ, T (2011) ‘Theory X/Y assumptions as predictors of managers’ propensity for participative decision making’ Management Decision [online] 49 (5), 823-836. Available from

<http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/00251741111130887> [12 June 2015]

M005 -Blog 2-Challenge of Diverse Team

                     

                   Blog 2- Challenge of Managing Diverse Team

      With the trend of globalisation, many organizations are facing fierce competition; meanwhile, they are also working in a much more complicated environment, demanding to coordinate geographically dispersed operations and a cross-cultural workforce.

Diverse Teams Produce Better Results

Research has proved that diversity can bring a team better performance on complicated decisions and issues, such as the challenges faced by international companies. Also, diversity has a bigger influence on organizations with greater managerial discretion such as the high-technology sectors or when undertaking new action plans. In my opinion, diversity will be more and more important for global business, and all managers should have global mindset to ensure long-term cultural agility in globalizations (Financial times 2015).

Diversity can come from many different characteristics such as gender, age, nationality, ethnic, cultural group, or on indicators of cognitive diversity such as life experience, academic background, sector and workplace experience that can all lead to different perspectives in diverse teams (Financial times 2015).

Advantage of Diverse Team

• Cognitive Flexibility: For example, if a team has members form difference background, they can have more methods to solve an issue, and this team has more possibility to identify the best solution based on correct communication.
• Roles and Motivation: In a diverse team, members play difference roles based on their personal strengths. The special roles can motivate members make the most of themselves.
• Increased Creativity
  According to research of Horwitz (2007), diversity has been a contributing factor to the creativity and innovation exhibited by teams. In my opinion, diverse teams are creative because diversity resists conformity.

Limitation of Diversity

However, diversity often produces conflict. The conflict can be harmful if it isn’t managed properly. For instance, diverse teams from difference areas or culture can also experience their differences as barriers to communication, so that to make an agreement takes much more time and effort, and increase the difficulties of teamwork.

I think diversity team like a “double-edged sword”, which can have both positive and negative effect on organizations because team members have so many differences. However, when team members have compliance and consensus, remain focused on the team goal, and respectful of each other, they can still succeed. For example, if one member proposes a way to balance the company budget, and another thinks the proposal is flawed, the team can collaborate and investigate until they reach a consensus. Through that process of strict critical analysis a diverse team that challenges each other in order to get the best results possible will succeed.

Tuckman and Jensen Model

In order to build the diverse team for getting a better organisational outcome, Tuckman and Jensen Model can be applied for building the team. This model proved the common stages of team development, which is composed of 5 stages including forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. 

 

Allianz Group

Allianz Group operated business in over 70 countries, from America to Asia. The firm’s headquarter has employees from 56 different counties, which caused diversity of culture and nationality. The male employees and female employees are balanced properly in this firm include different age groups, education backgrounds and abilities. Each group’s employees can bring the origin source of experiences, skills and ideas. Diversity in Allianz has been an essential part of company culture, which has this firm better understand the demands of consumers from different countries or cultures. Allianz is continuing expand diversity, for example, disable people are employed in Italy. Diversity has help Allianz gain long-term competitive advantage in Globalizations (Allianz 2014).

Advertising Firms Need Diverse Teams

I think diversity or managing diverse team is one of the most important skills for leaders at advertising sector. As a business activity which focuses on communicating with clients of different background, culture or purpose, an advertise company need to satisfy their various demands by cultivating a highly diverse and inclusive context. In my opinion, for managers, diversity of thought is powerful. Managers of the advertising industry should try to attract talents with various ethnic and racial backgrounds. Advertising firms can recruit employees based on their culture background, age groups, religions and life styles.

Conclusion

In my oponion, the conclusions that drawn from the research are as follows:

• Diversity is an essential part and one of the most important skills in global firms
• Diversity have both positive and negative influence on organizational decision-making, however, good management of diversity can help teams gain success or competitive advantages.
• As an international student of MBA, diversity has provided opportunities for us to make most use of our strength in diverse teams.

Reference

1. Allianz (2014) Diversity at Allianz Group [online] available from < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMYUIikCc5Q> [15 June 2015]

2. Financial Times (2015) definition of diverse teams [online] available from < http://lexicon.ft.com/Term?term=diverse-teams> [15 June 2015]

3. Horwitz, S (2007) ‘the Effects of Team Diversity on Team Outcomes: A Meta-Analytic Review of Team Demography’ Journal of Management [online] 33 (6), 987-1015. Available from < http://www.sagepub.com/vaughnstudy/articles/dair/Horwitz.pdf> [16 June 2015]

M005 – blog 1- Leadership and Ethics

                           

Blog 1- Leadership and the Ethics

      Based on research of Yukl (2010), Leadership is the procedure of affecting others to realize and agree about what needs to be done and how to do it. Good leadership has relationship with many features; one important one is the ethics. Ethics are the criterions of conduct recognized in respect to a particular class of human actions or a group of people; they are about morals and values of society and individuals. 

  

Ethical leadership Theories  Ethical leadership is considered as a social, relational practice concerned with the moral purpose of education since ethics is about relationships with others; and leadership is a human centered relational activity. Ethical leaders, in this professional context, are those who act fairly and justly. They are viewed as caring, honest and principled persons who make balanced decisions and who communicate the importance of ethics and ethical behavior to their followers. Moreover, they promote values such as inclusion, collaboration and social justice when working with staff and students alike (Ehrich et al 2014) Two Principle Theories

• Deontological and Ethics

Deontological ethics focus on the duty and rights, which looks at the actions and decide if it’s right or not. They take account of the motivation and intention of the individuals’ engagement in the action. In my opinion, deontological ethics mean achieving the goal in moral way.

• Teleological and Ethics

Teleological approaches focus on consequences of an action to decide if it is right or wrong. Teleological ethics are the morality of an act which is based on the outcome of the act.

• The 4-V Model of Leadership

4-V model

Based on the 4-V model of leadership, leaders can make an inner journey of integrity and an outer commitment to the common good. Firstly, this model begins with the inner journey; from this journey people would find their main value, and determine a vision by which makes the world different, and then leaders can utilize their personal voice as a tool to express the vision. Secondly, the approach of leadership progresses and moves to an outer commitment of living; and leadership behaves in ways that serve the profit of most people. The purpose of leadership is shaping the world into a beautiful and inclusive world, and allows all the members in the organization to satisfy their demands and potentials.

• Values– Ethical leadership starts with identifying the leader’s targets and value. After finding out core value that makes up the motivators of our vision, we begin the process of integrating our unique values with the Vision.
• Vision – Ethical leadership needs the capability of framing organizational activities in a picture of “what ought to be”.
• Voice– Ethical leaders must have the ability of articulating the vision to other people in an authentic way that motivates them into action.
• Virtue– Ethical leaders always want to do the correct and good things. For example, ethical leaders usually virtuously ask others if their values, visions and voice can benefit others.

Ethics is very important for leadership because leaders and follower have closed relationship. Leaders influence followers negatively and positively. 

 

Ethics in Apple

Apple has become more ethical under leading of Time Cook after the death of Steven Jobs. Although bad influence caused by working conditions at the Foxconn plants in China, Apple still insists on demanding suppliers to treat workers fairly and ethically at all times. Apple declares that all suppliers must demonstrate the highest commitment to protect workers’ right, and this company is striving to eliminate unethical hiring and excessive work hours. All these ethical policies have helped Apple to improve its ethical image (Apple 2015).

Recommendations for Managers 

In my opinion, ethical leaders should understand what the organization purpose stand for, and then they can leader people. Managers need to collect feedback from others and motivate their engagement, and then increase employees’ perception about the importance of their job. Such ethical leadership would increase the employee’s sense of control, broaden an individual’s responsibilities, and create a sense of psychological feeling, thus inducing greater motivation and increased effort by employees (Kuo et al 2014). Recommendations for managers are as follows:

• Talk frequently about the ethical values and ethical commitment of the organization.
• Promoting the motivation and work engagement through rewards and punishment policies.
• Manager should take personal responsibility for making sure their part of the firm is ethical
• A good manager should be the role model for employees, from actions to words.
• Make ethical decisions consistent with organizational values and ethics.

Reference

1. Apple (2015) Supplier Responsibility [online] available from

< http://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/labor-and-human-rights/> [10 May 2015]

2. Ehrich, L., Harris, J., Klenowski, V., Smeed, J., and Spina, N. (2014) ‘The centrality of ethical leadership’ Journal of Educational Administration [online] 53 (2), 197-214. Available from <http://www.emeraldinsight.com/loi/jea&gt; [4 May 2015]
3. Kuo, J., Cheung, Y., Cheng, J., and Chang, S. (2014) ‘Ethical leadership, work engament and voice behavior’ Industrial Management & Data [online] 114（5），817-831. Available from <www.emeraldinsight.com/0263-5577.htm> [4 May 2015]