Answer

1. 1. Executive Skills Development: A Reflection

      There are many beliefs about the relevance of different leadership styles in organizations and the success or failure of such styles. However, whether or not executives attain the desired level of success depends on the practicability and institutional relevance of their chosen leadership styles. This paper reflects on some of the opinions that I held before, assessing any changes in perspective that subsequent exposure to other course content may have had on such views. Furthermore, it looks at the practical evaluation of situations at work that may have also helped shape my view about leadership and the development of executive roles. This is a reflection of how the relationships between the employees and executives are advanced by the application of various methods and leadership styles.

      Effective leadership demands that the leader be flexible, adaptable and understanding. I am not mentioning these as mere characteristics of a good leader; I want to use them to illustrate the practical way in which failing to demonstrate them can lead to organizational failure. In my first reflection, I emphasized on the need for good leadership to be focused on the goals set for the organization. While this is true, it must not be cast in stone. While a member of the High School Scouting Movement, our troop leader was the uncompromising one. He was fond of saying that he acts “by the book”. While this was admirable to an extent, it gave him a damaging notoriety for being inflexible and never willing to adapt to new things. The member numbers kept plummeting. I have realized that leadership is not simply about the outcome no matter what. It is also about listening to competing perspectives and embracing new insights that may in the long run bring the goal even closer. When newer perspectives are embraced, it is easier to instil the notion of teamwork because the employees are convinced that their opinions matter (Slack et al. 2015).

      Initially, I confused being accommodative with being weak, and being collaborative with being indecisive.  In any organizational structure, there are decisions to be made. They can be decisions about operations or about the workers or adoption of a new strategy, model or equipment. Even while I thought teamwork was a positive element of leadership, it was my long-held opinion that taking too long to bring people on board is to demonstrate indecisiveness. Right now, I believe that bringing people on board before a major change or decision is made is vital for the success of that decision. While the intention of the leadership or the executive would be to simply show assertiveness, it may be misinterpreted as high-handedness. In a situation where there are no platforms to explain decisions and participate in collaborative efforts, there is a lot of room for misinformation and the spreading of baseless propaganda. The adoption of new technological equipment may be seen as a spirited effort to rid the organization of some workers even when the real intention was to make their work easier.

      When it comes to work, I have found it particularly difficult to dissociate the individual from the team. What I have in mind is the fact that the aspects of team work and collaboration have eclipsed the notion of individual achievement in my estimation. I have found this very difficult to reconcile with my earlier notions and beliefs. It was as if my belief that individual excellence and achievement were supreme met the shock of the reality of what working together can achieve. Work is almost like a soccer game in which the coach cannot extricate himself or herself from the loss of the team. The leader or executive is part and parcel of the team. This fact has made me rethink about how I view work and even the achievement of objectives. This new perspective I have been exposed to has made me view work as a series of tasks that can only be successfully finished by coming together. Of course the workers themselves have to put in effort individually (Schmidt, 2017), but often, the failure of anyone in the team to work for the common good leads to a heightened possibility of failure. The other aspect that this has made me clearly see is the need for me as a team member or a leader to be ready to take responsibility for any failures that the team may experience.

      As discussed above, leadership and success within work or in an organization depends on the practical methods that the leader and the workers are willing to put into the job of attempting to achieve goals. Adaptability and flexibility is an invaluable trait in the ever changing environment of work. Being accommodative and collaborative is not a sign of weakness; it is an attempt at harnessing the best in workers and improving their esteem and self-confidence. Ultimately, I have discovered that the concept of teamwork is vital in leadership and the attainment of desired results.