PGBM141 Professional Management and Leadership
Introduction:
My professional development plan aims to get the position of financial manager or financial comptroller of a company and I have decided to undergo the necessary education to build the capabilities that the career I am for requires. I have also noted down the theories and strategies that have influenced my personal development plan.
This report is classified into two parts. In Part 1, I have briefly given the details about my previous work experiences, and what I would do to further develop my knowledge and acquire new skills.
Task 1: Management and Leadership theories that influenced me
1.1 Previous Work Experiences and Future Goals:
I have worked as an Manager in a Chartered Accountant firm in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India where I learnt a great deal of statutory compliances that SMEs’ and companies have to manage. It gave me access to work in various statutory and advisory roles from Income Taxes, GST, Compliances with Registrar of Companies and facilitating bank loan to providing advisory services.
After completion of my undergraduation, I felt the need to gain more exposure, to improve my language skills, people skills and other soft skills like public speaking and educating myself for a managerial role in a bigger enterprise preferably a finance role. Hence I decided to study MBA for improving my financial, administration and managerial skills and further to gain more exposure and experience I decided to do the course in a foreign land and after a lot of research, I applied for a seat in University of Sunderland and fortunately got the seat.
Currently, I am working as a part time store manager of a retail store with car wash and Gas facility. Now, in short term I am looking to prepare myself for to get internship for a finance related role . After studies, I am looking to join a Insurance, or Banking, or Asset Management, or Financial Consultation company and slowly climb the ladder of hierarchy to attain the position of the CFO of the company. I believe that this course is a step on the right direction to reach my career goal.
1.2 Management Development:
As a Manager in a Chartered Accountant firm, I will usually be given with a lot of assignments, of different clients with different due dates and degree of importance. Some will be time consuming and some will be easier to accomplish.
While most have due dates attached to it, like preparation of documents for income tax hearings, income tax audits, ROC filings and tax filings. Other assignments do not have a strict deadline and are finished based on the needs and demands of the clients.
Initially, I got confused with too many assignments on table, and I would do the work that I felt I was interested and would be doing two to three works simultaneously and would end up making mistakes due to the constant juggling of work. After few days of work, I figured out a way to manage this.
I studied an analysis called ABC analysis during my undergraduation and decided to apply the same to my situation. Whatever pending assignments I had I classified them into A, B, and C based on their due dates and the time requirement. And also started to maintain a work diary on the advice my manager. Once I followed this exercise I seldom had to work past office hours and always completed my work within the due dates.
After coming to UK, I joined as a store manager, where I have been given with the responsibilities of managing stock, cash, supervising the car wash and gas station and facilitating and assisting customers while they purchase. Since Customers are the top priority for any business, I understood that either me or any other staff should always be available for any inquiries from the customers.
As per the advice of my superior, I had to take stock accounts on closing of the day and reconcile the same with the sales that had happened and stock that has been delivered to the store. It is also under my responsibility to check the car wash and gas station and checking whether the payment and billing is properly done throughout the day.
To accomplish all these tasks, I schedule my day. At the morning, I check the stock books once and after which I go on rounds to check whether items are arranged properly after which I take my position at the cashiers table and assist the customers. In between I used to check the car wash and gas station. I end the day’s work again by reconciling the stock statements.
1.3 Leadership:
Debate is Common about which leadership style is most effective. The answer, of course,…it all depends (Thomas Kohntopp). As a Manager of a CA firm, I have had experience, in delegating work to staffs, inquiring about the work status, pushing the urgent works, ensuring that work I was doing is done properly and responding to the clients.
Now as a store manager, I had to manage the staffs, customer in addition to my other responsibilities. A role I aspire, the role of CFO also deals with management of workforce, responding to the superiors on the financial feasibilities, analyzing the MIS reports, financial performances and designing plans for the future of the organization.
All the roles require frequent interaction with people be it employees, customers or superiors. Hence the interactions with the people and the conversations with them are important part of any leadership role. The leadership style that I like and follow is affiliative style. Being authoritative or autocratic makes the workplace hostile and people feel an urgency to get done with their work hours.
On the other hand when everyone’s needs are taken care of, it enables them to concentrate more on their work and not being an autocrat or authoritative brings out new ideas from people and gives the workplace a holistic development where people like the workplace and willfully contribute.
This style would necessarily bring in new ideas, and innovation and increase the efficiency of the employees. It would boost the morale of the employee. The same pattern reflects with their conversations with the customers and employees tend to genuinely care about the customer’s needs and address them with motivation.
The leadership theory that I believe in is the behavioral theory. It is the situation that forces an individual to be a leader. Often, it is the situation that even influences the leadership style of the individual. A person is slowly groomed to become a leader. It is a process and not an isolated event that determines the leadership capability that one has developed.
The leadership theory that I have a disagreement with is the great man theory, where there is a whole image that is constructed around a leader which slowly makes him drift away from his employees. No one is a born leader, it is the situations and the response made by the individual in the situation that makes him a leader.
While trait theory gives a structure or a basis to assess a good leader based on traits like the desire to lead, honesty, self confidence, intelligence etc., is has its own limitations. Trait is subjective. The assessment should be based on the results that a leader gives. A person can be a introvert and still be a good leader, but this theory does not consider him to be a good leader.
Ultimately, this theory becomes a more refined version of the great man theory and tries to inculcate a thought that leaders are born and not created. This approach is descriptive at its best but not analytical. On the other hand, the transactional management theory is very analytical and works based on rewards and penalty system.
This theory makes the managers to monitor the employees and provide rewards or penalize them based on the assessment of their work. There is no importance give for the communication. It overemphasizes the short term goals and leaves out the long term goals and strategic ambitions of the company.
It does not give importance to creativity and innovation. It is more applicable for a manager than a leader due to its short sightedness, and responsive nature instead of being long sighted and proactive. A leadership theory that is analytical and methodical is transformational theory of leadership.
This theory takes into account the importance of long term vision and mission. While this theory poses itself as logical, this is another form of the great man theory as the leaders who follow this theory ultimately pose themselves as an intellect and always route to motivate the employees.
It leads to self promotion of individual leaders. It aims to keep the workforce enthusiastic and motivated to increase the productivity of the organization. Another leadership theory that I like is situational theory which states that a best leader is the one that adapts to the situation.
They change the type of leaders they are based on the situation at hand and act according to the situation. It provides flexibility to a rigid structure that was given to leadership role by other theories. Situational leadership means choosing the right leadership style for different kinds of people.
1.4 Strategic decision making:
As a manager in the CA firm, it is my responsibility to promptly finish the assignments assigned to my team. We as a team had a strategy in place. While designing the same we took into account the short term and long term goals.
The short term goal is to complete the project at the earliest with utmost efficiency possible and the long term goal is to build a lasting customer relationship, educate ourselves and update ourselves as we work inorder to give the best service to our clients and to properly train our juniors for the future projects.
I decided with my team a strategy to achieve the above goals. While doing any outstation audits, any complex filings, it always requires a team and we made sure that there is atleast one junior or trainee in every team so that, the individual can learn the work properly from the grassroot stage before doing the same. Secondly, planning the work at hand based on a time bound schedule.
Thirdly, addressing the needs of the client at the earliest possible and with the utmost dedication to solve their issue. Now as I am doing the work of a store manager, the aforesaid principles are still maintainable with few adjustments. In my current job, the main responsibility is to address and facilitate the customers in the purchase as it is the goal of any store.
With proper customer service we aim to gain every new customer as a returning customer. Since in retails, we sell the same product as every other store, we try to add value to the customers in everyway possible. Starting with properly cleaning the lavatories for the customers, making sure that all the trollies are fine, reducing the time for home deliveries etc.,
This added with increased communication with the customers has already yielded positive results in the store.
1.5 Mintzberg managerial role:
While working as a manager in the retail store, I followed mintzberg managerial roles. I divided my managerial responsibilities in different sectors. Complex managerial duties are divided into manageable simple components.
By dividing the duty into simpler components, it gives a strategic approach to complete the work as it is easy to complete the simple components and can also be delegated and collective lead to the completion of project. While working as a manager, I observed several conflicts and issues between my employees and have resolved the same.
I used this theory and executed my duties based on the degree of priority. Moreover the tasks of the team members are also divided. By this, each of them is separately provided with tasks and it enables them to show their ability and also develop their skills (Gould, 2017).
1.6 Motivation:
A manager must always keep his employees motivated. This helps to keep the employees motivated to do their respective roles (Maguire and Blaylock, 2017). Thus it is my responsibility to keep the employees motivated in their respective roles. I could observe that Herzberg’s motivational theory could be used in this context.
This theory identifies two factors, Motivating factors and hygiene factors. While the presence of motivating factor enables the workers to work harder, the hygiene factor are the factors that surrounds the workplace. The absence of hygiene factor will make the worker work less hard.
Some of the hygiene factor are, Company policies, supervision, remuneration, security, relationships etc., As a manager, I make sure that all the hygiene factors within my purview are properly provided to the employees. Ultimately the employees are motivated and the same reflects in their services.
For the factors that are not within my purview, I work with my supervisor to provide those hygiene factors like employee friendly company policy. The motivating factors are achievement, recognition and responsibility. Collectively the fulfillment of these two factors keeps the employees motivated to work. The absence of any one of the factor will lead to dissatisfaction of employees.
1.7 Personal Analysis:
The aim in that I have career wise is to acquire the position of a chairman or CFO or anyother top managerial role in a Multi National Company and I aim to do this by starting from the bottom.
Now I am a retail store manager and I look to achieve my aim slowly by acquiring the required skills that my aim demands. During the second year of post graduation, I look to intern in a finance role in any company listed in the university for placements. After graduation, I would be getting into any finance managerial role in a company.
After which I slowly look to climb the corporate ladder and after 15 to 20 years I would have achieved my aim of becoming a CFO. I should work on my soft skills like public speaking and communication to make myself a leader. I should relate the experiences and knowledge that I have gained to properly stir my career path in the right direction.
Task 2: Evaluation of contribution to the management simulation game:
Leadership skills play a major role in shaping the characteristics of an individual (Buil et al. 2018). This skill is effective in personal as well as professional areas. My previous work experience as well as my current job profile has given me enough opportunities to infuse leadership and management attributions for overall development.
While studying MBA, I was provided with business simulation games to get constructive knowledge about finance of a business. Management simulation games are also very beneficial in order to give insights about real life experience. While doing an internship, I was given responsibility to manage these business simulation games to examine real life scenarios and processes in a virtual environment.I had to develop an acute plan and execute it in a proper way.
In this process of managing simulation games, I faced some difficulties, which could be considered as a learning experience for me.
- Managing simulation games was not easy at all. I was facing problems regarding focusing on learning outcomes. I was confused about choosing a business topic for the simulation game that will be knowledgeable as well as interesting to play with.
The entire design of the business simulation depended on the learning outcomes. The simulation game runs on a BPMN model. Hence, I had to analyze the model and make designs according to it. Executing this process was quite hectic for me.
Selecting characters in the simulation game was quite easy. I had focused on the targeting learners and their personal information. The learning objectives have also helped me to design characters according to the requirements in a particular scenario. In this case, the game developer has also helped me to sketch a character. The simulation game is all about creating a virtual environment and incorporating strategic plans.
In order to design an assessment strategy, I have faced difficulties in implementing ideas that are quite effective for the assessment test. This was toughto design effective scenarios for the simulation game. Therefore, the learners or new joiner could gain real time experiences from virtual experience.
- Communication is the main pillar when it comes to managing any project and scenarios (Karriker et al. 2018). Simulation games are highly required in the business field as these games provide insight about realistic scenarios of business (Holmes et al. 2021). In this case, simulation games are high on demand. I was more focused on providing learning outcomes regarding problem solving, finance and investment management.
In this case, I created situations such as finance management in the context of overrunning the budget. In the whole process, I had to work with so many people from different branches such as graphics designer, game developer, finance manager, project designer. I had faced a huge communication gap with graphic designers. Our views and opinions were clashing continuously. I was lacking to embrace the opinions from others.
Apart from that, I also faced some issues to bring the sense of collaboration and co-operation among the employees. I was not able to do interactive sessions with additional employees. Hence, they felt hesitant to discuss their ideas and thoughts for the development of this game.
Cultural barriers were also a problem while communicating with my team (Watts et al. 2018). In addition to that, lack of software to store databases and information, created confusions among the employees. Hence, I encountered the communication gap with other employees. Managing them and making them work for one vision and mission was tough for lack of communication.
- I faced communication issues while making plans and executing them to build simulation games for learners and new joiners. I faced many difficulties while exchanging views with graphics designers and game developers. In this regard, I considered adopting affiliative leadership theory in order to enrich my communication skill and convincing skill.
Figure 1: Affiliative leadership
Source: (influenced by Watts et al. 2018)
The affiliative leadership theory gave me confidence and flexibility to manage the project and embrace the views of others. This theory helped me to mitigate the communication gap by executing proper interactive sessions, where the employees could exchange their views regarding the learning objects and designing of the characters.
The requirements of e learning authoring tools were much needed to provide interactive training sessions for the new joiners or learners. Hence, the prime target was to find a platform for using e learning tools. In this case, a poll had been executed to take opinions from all the employees allocated in that simulation project.
In this regard, the team of game developers suggested atyi studio, which was easily accepted by other employees. These employee engagement activities such creating polls or executing group discussion sessions were effective to increase their involvement with simulation games (Rosenhead et al. 2019).
With the help of transformational leadership theory, I was able to inspire them by providing vision and mission behind the simulation game. I also made them aware about the effectiveness of this simulation game, which could be a resting platform for incorporating strategic plans. I focused on aligning the business goal with their psychological need, so that they could positively participate in developing a simulation game.
I was also facing issues regarding oversimplification of the techniques, which means focusing on a particular element. The main criteria of this simulation game were to align the objective of businesses with the objective of the game, which needs to be balanced (Rudolph et al. 2018).
I was only focusing on exploring different e learning training tools that could make the learners confused about outcomes . Hence, I had focused on executing selected teaching tools that could five those limited but enriched ideas, tricks and strategies in different scenarios of business.
- In my simulation game crypto stella, the main character plays the role of project manager where he has to make designs, estimate resources and budgets for a large scale project. This game will expand the thinking power of an employee by making him introduce with realistic scenarios.
If I face an overrun of budget in a large-scale project, at that point of time I will try to evaluate the project scope and cut down the operational cost as much as possible. I will try to use an alternative element that is cost effective and can be beneficial for the project.
- While working as a store manager, I hold some ethical values such as integrity, honesty, time management, analytical skill, and reliability. These ethical values will help me to keep going and managing the store department and maintaining cordial relation with customers.
References:
TASK 1
Beausaert, S., Segers, M. and Grohnert, T., 2015. Personal Development Plan, Career
Development, and Training. The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of the Psychology of Training,
Development, and Performance Improvement, p.336.
Brockman, J., 2013. Thinking: The New Science of Decision-Making, Problem-Solving, and
Prediction in Life and Markets. Harper Collins.
Clegg, S.R., Kornberger, M. and Pitsis, T., 2015. Managing and organizations: An introduction to theory and practice. Sage.
Girvan, C., Conneely, C. and Tangney, B., 2016. Extending experiential learning in teacher professional development. Teaching and teacher education, 58, pp.129-139.
Gould, J., 2017. Career development: A plan for action. Nature, 548(7668), pp.489-490.
Greenan, P., 2016. Personal development plans: insights from a case based approach. Journal of Workplace Learning.
Henderson, I., 2017. Human resource management for MBA and Business Masters. Kogan Page
Publishers.
Kravitz, A.S., Bullock, A., Cowpe, J. and Barnes, E., 2015. Manual of dental practice
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supporting employee learning and perceived performance: the moderating role of selfdirectedness. Human resource development international, 19(4), pp.307-328.
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of exercising self-directed learning within personal development plan practice. The International
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TASK 2
Buil, I., Catalán, S. and Martínez, E., 2018. Exploring students’ flow experiences in business simulation games. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 34(2), pp.183-192.
Holmes Jr, R.M., Hitt, M.A., Perrewé, P.L., Palmer, J.C. and Molina-Sieiro, G., 2021. Building cross-disciplinary bridges in leadership: Integrating top executive personality and leadership theory and research. The Leadership Quarterly, 32(1), p.101490.
Karriker, J.H., Madden, L.T. and Katell, L.A., 2017. Team composition, distributed leadership, and performance: It’s good to share. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 24(4), pp.507-518.
Rosenhead, J., Franco, L.A., Grint, K. and Friedland, B., 2019. Complexity theory and leadership practice: A review, a critique, and some recommendations. The Leadership Quarterly, 30(5), p.101304.
Rudolph, C.W., Rauvola, R.S. and Zacher, H., 2018. Leadership and generations at work: A critical review. The Leadership Quarterly, 29(1), pp.44-57.
Watts, L.L., Ness, A.M., Steele, L.M. and Mumford, M.D., 2018. Learning from stories of leadership: How reading about personalized and socialized impacts performance on an ethical decision-making simulation. The Leadership Quarterly, 29(2), pp.276-294.
Appendix:
Personal Development Plan:
Part I Personal Analysis:
| Strengths:
1. One of my strengths that I am proud of is that I am hard working and persistent to achieve what I aim for. 2. I tend to be logical while I am thinking and weigh down all the alternatives before my hand
|
Areas of development:
1. While I have a good knowledge and grasp of finance management. I lack knowledge in other areas of management. 2. I sense a need to improve my soft skills especially communication. |
| Opportunities:
1. Having experience in finance and after getting a MBA degree I could find many venues of employment opening up for me. 2. I find the university education that I am currently pursuing to give me opportunity to explore various alternatives and gain more knowledge
|
Threats and weakness:
1. While I am methodical, sometimes I tend to overthink and over analyse the situations which increases the anxiety and hampers the process. |
Part II Setting Goals:
| 1. What do I want to learn? | I want to learn the nuances in management of the business. While it is easy to have a theoretical knowledge of the subject, I want to have a rich practical experience in finance and management. |
| 2. What do I have to do? | I have to finish MBA and get a good finance related job |
| 3. What support and resources will I need? | I have enough financial support from my part time work and enough resources of study materials from the university. So Currently I have all the resources and I need to make sure that I have attained all the requirements for getting internship in the second year. |
| 4. How will I measure success? | I measure success by the achievement of my short term goals and the time I had taken to achieve the same. |
| 5. Target date for review? | Regarding personal developments, once in a month I practice self reflection where I think what I have been doing and whether I am going on the right direction. I consider it as a self review. |
Part III Personal Objectives:
Short term Goals: Passing MBA and getting placement.
Medium term Goals: Acquire a financial administration position in a MNC
Long term Goals: Becoming CFO of a Multi National Firm.
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