David Jackson
MGT 380
Instructor: Harold Engle
8 Apr 13
Team Leadership
The leader of an organization can make the difference in the success or failure of the company. There are many different affects that the leader has on the employees and the organization. An effective leader has to make a lot of hard decisions and stay focused on the vision and mission of the company. They also have to ensure that they are able to communicate the importance of these to the rest of the company.
I feel that an important theory in my organization is personality approach. This has always been successful for me. I have be the flight chief for Air Force recruiting for the state of Alaska for the past four years. This theory worked well for me because I was able to read the seven people that worked for me and figure out what drove them to be successful recruiters (Weiss, 2011). This theory is important because as a leader in recruiting service every recruiter has different goals. Some want to be the top recruiter, while others want to do the job and have free time to spend with their family. They have many different reasons for being in the recruiting business.
I felt this theory was important because I was able to spend time with each recruiter and would change the way I would communicate with each person. For instance, one of my recruiters was very into sci-fi and this is something I am not really knowledgeable in. So I would go to his office on many occasions and learn from him. I was able to adjust my communication to more of a listening rather than a collaborative approach (Weiss, 2011). This was important for him and by making him feel that I cared about more than the business, I was able to boost his motivation to make the entire flight more successful. I was able to do this will the seven recruiters that I had, by doing this they were willing to do whatever was needed for me to get the job done.
The big five personality dimensions were a good way for me to decide how to approach each person (Weiss, 2011). At the time I did not know about this practice, but was able to use it affectively. I feel that being a good leader you have to know your people. If you know the good and bad you can adjust your approach to every situation with them and make sure they are staying focused on the mission of the organization.
The leader of and organization can have a lot of power and influence over the followers and well as other leaders within the organization. By using their personality and creditability they can persuade people to many different things within the organization (Weiss, 2011). In the military we have many different levels of leadership. So the power of influence is important as it goes up and down the chain of command. It is very important for leaders in the military to get people to buy into their ideas. It is easy to make people comply with the orders that are given to them, but it is a lot more affective if they followers are willing to do what is asked of them. There are many different situations with in recruiting, that the leader gets many different outcomes from the recruiters. The most important part of being a leader within an organization like recruiting is when people don’t buy into the idea of change that the leader is able to be confident enough to answer the questions that arise from the situation. If they don’t affectively communicate the message to the recruiter getting them to buy in is very difficult.
I feel that the power of influence is very affective and it gets people to do things because they feel that they want to do it. Getting people to do things based off of power allow is not that great because people are doing things because they have to. At that point the employees are filling a block and are willing to do just what is asked of them and not much more. If the leader can influence the employees to do the job they can get them to be happy with their job and tasks at and this