Leadership and Change Assignment Sample

Introduction

Leadership is crucial for an organisation and it is capable of directing the workforce towards a common goal. In this management report, a critical reflection on personal leadership skills is presented. Effectiveness of leadership skills in the current business environment is assessed by linking it with relevant literature. Gibbs reflective cycle has been used to present this critical reflection. The reflective cycle would help readers to gain a comprehensive understanding of the experience and learning outcomes become better. A recommendation strategy is to be designed as per identified shortcomings that would prevent me from achieving outcomes of the proposed action plan. SMART framework is used to present the recommendations in a systematic manner.

Reflection

Description of the situation

I have been involved in a number of group based activities during my previous employment as a digital marketing executive. Our team was often asked to conduct market analysis to understand customer preferences. By gaining a comprehensive idea about customer needs, a digital marketing strategy was designed. Every time the task was assigned, any one of our team members were asked to lead the group. This helped to improve our leadership skills and reflect on our shortcomings. Subsequently I was asked to be the team leader during one such assignment. There were six members in our team and they had to conduct a detailed market analysis through online surveys and by utilising analytic software’s. I decided to divide the task between three teams each consisting of two group members. In this way, the task became relatively less challenging and each team was asked to interpret customer preferences from a collected dataset. Since the task was deadline based, we completed the entire procedure way ahead of time. However when the interpretations made by each team were collectively analysed it became challenging for us to figure out a common link. Although the allocated time frame was short, we decided to analyse the datasets once again but this time the effort was collective. Eventually we came to a conclusion that social media websites were being used frequently by target customers and so a social media marketing strategy could be considered viable.

Feelings

Before it was realised that the interpretations did not have a specific direction, we were satisfied with the team work. It became relatively easier to interpret a plethora of customer data when the team was divided into three functional groups. de Kerret et al. (2018) stated that when a collective workforce is divided into functional groups and each group has a common objective then productivity of the workforce is enhanced. So it is validated that productivity of our team was enhanced due to my decision. However when the process failed to yield expected outcomes our team got frustrated. Since the allocated time frame was limited, we became skeptical that the task could be completed before the deadline. In addition to this, quality of the analysis was somewhat jeopardised as it was performed in a much shorter time. I felt guilty as our team’s efforts went into vain and this feeling encouraged me to work even harder. Otherwise we could not have completed the entire task within the limited timeframe. Looking back at the incident, I feel satisfied that we decided to take a last minute decision and expected outcomes were finally achieved. The decision was taken collectively and it ensured that every team member was clearly aware of the situation and it made them function in an appropriate manner.

Analysis

My decision to divide the team of digital marketing executives into small functional groups was frugal. It ensured that the entire task was streamlined and each team was assigned with a portion of the entire analysis to conduct. Group members with complementary skills were placed in a team to maximise productivity of each team. Since they had a common objective, it was relatively easier to achieve expected outcomes within the provided time frame. However I failed to emphasise on the aspect of communication and group members were alienated from each other’s opinions. As opined by Couzin (2018), effective communication is important to understand what other employees are feeling and their feedback can be analysed to improve outcomes of a process. I had failed to emphasise on the emotions of my team members and since they belonged to contrasting backgrounds their evaluation of customer preferences were different. For instance, if we maintained constant communication between the functional groups then group members would have been empathetic to one another. They would understand what other team members were feeling while analysing consumer data and a specific direction would have been maintained. There was a lack of emotional involvement in the task and it made group members feel disoriented while interpreting the datasets.

Conclusion

I learned that when a group decides to divide the work, a suitable plan is needed to understand which sections we want to work on and how we feel about it. It is imperative to know about the opinions of team members before planning for a group based activity. Baesu (2019) suggested that group members feel affectionate towards the leader and they obey willingly if emotional involvement of team members are ensured. I failed to incorporate these aspects and the outcomes were unsatisfactory. By evaluating the entire situation, I came to a conclusion that my Emotional intelligence was not up to the mark. Based on opinions of (), emotional quotient is based on four well defined components namely; “Self Awareness, Self Leadership, Relationship Management and Social Awareness”. These components have to be monitored and assessed otherwise my scope of becoming an effective leader becomes less prominent. Emotion and thinking should be combined and it facilitates making informed decisions which are frugal for an organisation. Engagement of team members is ensured and a sense of loyalty towards the team is developed. For instance, when team members are emotionally involved they willingly exchange opinions and invest more effort to achieve expected outcomes. Therefore I need to work on my emotional intelligence and it could be achieved by designing an action plan that focuses on the four major components of EI.

Action plan

Table 1: Action Plan

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Recommendations

SMART objectives

Table 2: SMART Objectives

(Source: Created by Author)

A recommendation strategy needs to be developed focusing on the shortcomings that were identified by virtue of the self assessment. My emotional intelligence was not sufficient and it prevented team members from getting emotionally involved with an organisation. As opined by Biswas and Alam (2022), sufficient emotional intelligence will help a business leader to understand what employees are going through owing to a particular scenario. It keeps followers satisfied under the leadership and they are willing to take orders. Similarly my communication skills need to be improved so that team members willingly share their opinions regarding a decision. In this way informed decision making is possible and employees are no longer disappointed with a decision being made. An effective scope of communication also ensures that team members are emotionally involved and every action they take is for well-being of the team. In addition to this, my time management skills were inefficient and it made it challenging for the team to finish deadline based tasks. Reputation of the organisation that I would represent could be jeopardised if the tasks were not completed in a timely manner. So I need to design an action plan before assigning tasks to my team members so that workflow is aligned as per the allocated timeline.

References

Couzin, I.D., (2018). Synchronization: the key to effective communication in animal collectives. Trends in cognitive sciences, 22(10), pp.844-846.

Baesu, C., (2019). Leadership based on emotional intelligence in modern organizations. The USV annals of economics and public administration, 18(2 (28)), pp.73-78.

Biswas, M. and Alam, Z., (2022). Unlocking the Relationships between Emotional Intelligence and Group Cohesion in South Asia. The Journal of Management Theory and Practice (JMTP), pp.13-19.

de Kerret, P., Gesbert, D. and Filippone, M., 2018, May. Team deep neural networks for interference channels. In (2018) IEEE International Conference on Communications Workshops (ICC Workshops) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.

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