Situational Leadership Analysis

Words: 960
Pages: 4

I find my brief introduction to this long history of leadership/managerial sciences, and to the different elements of leadership models upheld over time has taught me not simply the difference between leader and manager, but mainly, the many ways in which one who leads (or manages) can work to coordinate the functions of the organization they serve. In short, I would say my exposure to everything from the Industrial Age model of workers and leaders, closely allied with the model of transactional leadership, to the more modern day styles of situational leadership, has given me a sense of the possibilities and versatility one may assume as a leader in an organization. It has also given me a firmer sense of some of the principal pitfalls that …show more content…
This new understanding of what leadership is, in theory and in practice, is changing my values by forcing me to recognize the ethics of my decisions in the community I serve (who inevitably must bear the consequences of my leadership decisions). My interests as a leader have become the continual refinement of my skills as a leader; i.e. as a person with the ability to understand those I work with in whatever field, and direct them, and motivate them towards success, increasing my abilities or creatively adapting them to the demands of a problem-scenario becomes the primary focus of interests as a leader. My needs are fulfilled only to the degree I have the ability to take initiative in an organization and seize their fulfillment. Increasing my abilities to lead, and thus, my abilities to respond to the problem-situations I am confronted with in an organization sensitively enough to know, precisely, what abilities to increase, must be a hallmark of my own model of leadership. …show more content…
The laborer was lead and managed and treated as if they were a replaceable cog in a factory; and in an almost metaphorical sense, they were. People became seen as an expense while machines came to be seen as assets (Davis, 16). People could be desperate for jobs, given how much of them were rapidly being replaced by new machines of production. People could be quite desperate for for what meager wages they could find. And the captains of industry at the time saw the exploitation of this desperation as a necessary means of leading, or managing, their organizations. Hence the emergence of the “carrot-and-stick” motivational philosophy during this time, which itself underlies the model of transactional