Value-Based Leadership

Discuss about the Ethical and Unethical Leadership Plan.

From my experiences leaders are often inconstant in their communications and in their actions. These inconsistencies are truly noted from the followers thus dampening the morale of followers leading to lower efficacy and effectiveness that often spreads ramped throughout the organizational culture as a whole. Senior leadership often takes a top down approach that often misses the small details that can make a huge difference in the operations of an organization where the tasks are being completed (Pecukonis, 2014). Therefore, it is important that the leaders should have a personal development plan. There are various improvement areas that leaders can focus on. In this personal leadership plan I would focus on value based leadership, teamwork and ethics.

A values-based leader uses strong ethics and morals to lead and leading by example in a way that encourages the entire organization to follow suit.  Open communication is a key component to making it all work. It would be correct to say that leader sets the tone for his or her organization and is the one on which the reputation of the organization hinges with both internal and external stakeholders (Talan, 2014). In short, I think that values-based leadership starts at the top and that it filters down to middle management and rank-and-file employees.  Oftentimes, there is a disconnect between the activities of the leader and the intentions of the leader. Leaders sometimes become overwhelmed with the activities and results to step back and recall why they do what they do.

The second important dimension of the leadership model is ethics. Daft, (2015) explains that an organization’s board that handles unethical behavior is top executives of the organization that form an ethics committee.  This ethics committee has the responsibility to oversee the function of ethics in the organization (Daft, 2015).  They provide rulings of wrong behavior and in the event leaders are unethical they determine the disciplinary action that should be given to correct the wrongdoing. Even though the organization is profitable, unethical leaders must still be corrected to preserve the ethics and moral standing of the organization at large (Brown & Mitchell, 2010).  By doing so, this can ensure that the organization remains profitable and stay out of harms way of negative attention of the public and lawsuits that can occur because of unethical activity within the organization.  Brown and Mitchell, (2010) also share that unethical leaders can bring out a dark side of organizations.  This is because unethical leadership can cause organizational behaviors to shift to a negative light.  This then changes the emotion, fit, and identification of the organization (Brown & Mitchell, 2010).  This causes harm to the organization being that what leaders are seen followers will then portray doing.  Therefore, the ethics committee must enforce proper ethics in the organization to safeguard the organization. It is often too easy to follow the leader in organizations.  DuBois (2012) reminded us that doing the right thing is not easy but there are ways to address unethical leadership and “righting” the ship.  DuBois (2012) pointed out that not getting involved with unethical leaders is the first step to protecting yourself but she suggested that if you are involved because of your position bringing to light is not an option.  Forcing strict internal policies is a way to weed out unethical behavior. 

Ethics

This model suggests that When leaders become unethical, it is the responsibility of the organizational board and ethical committee, if applicable, to get involved. If the leader is acting in an unethical manner but the company is profitable, there will appear to be an ethical dilemma. On one side, the leader is unethical and has avoided the ethical standards of the organization. However, the company is remaining profitable, despite his or her actions. The organizational board must enforce the ethical standards through disciplinary actions of leaders who are unethical. Pascual-Ezama, et al. (2015) stated that unethical behavior could be influence by peer effect, incentives and supervision. If leaders are unethical, their behaviors can carry on to the followers, which can lead to an unethical organization.

The third important dimension of my leadership model is teamwork or support from employees. As Plucknette (2014) discusses, leaders tend to invite discussion and debate.  This can be an issue for a leader-focused individual because many managers look down upon these qualities and see opposition as insubordination.  Conversely, the attitude of many manager-focused individuals is that what they say is law and the final word.  This type of managing can inhibit the growth of trust and respect for the manager by the employee(s) (Plucknette, 2014).  Leaders may be better set to organize and lead whereas managers may be better at planning and controlling.  It is the leader/manager who can meld the two that will be an effective leader. It is important that the leaders must follow on all the three dimensions of this leadership development model. In addition to the three core values or the core dimension of the leadership development model, the model would also have support or non-core attributes. The core and the

The application of the above leadership model would enable the organization to develop leaders from managers. A manager’s primary challenge is to solve problems creatively. Managers will analyze, delegate, organize and control which to some people may seem to be a know it best attitude. Managers are more concerned of end results. Leaders approach situations with the attitude that no one person knows it best so they a leader will do something, fix it, try it, change it and do it all over again and are more concerned with satisfaction whether for employees or customers (Graham, 2014). Leaders see people as critical resources to be developed, and this in turn will help the organization to achieve process innovation. Managers view people as an exploitable resource. I think the challenges are accountability; leaders tend to emphasize on mutual accountability as opposed to managers who emphasize on individual accountability.

The greatest challenge, according to Clarke (2013) regarding operationalizing strategy of teamwork is because operationalizing has to connect the strategy and its execution within the company. This step is most important and the art of doing it requires finesse and mixes strategic planning and program management.  These skills require a different set of skills and discipline than the planning phase.  One must understand the strategy, goals and the initiatives they represent.  Next, is to group initiatives into programs that are goal-aligned.  Mapping the initiatives in terms of impact on the company is next and who will execute.  Individuals need to be accountability, which requires clarity of roles and responsibilities relative to the goals.  The executor must have the understanding of the innovation in order to execute the plan along with sufficient incentive. 

Teamwork or Support from Employees

The biggest challenge of teamwork is in multicultural environment. The biggest challenge of working with a cross-functional team is to accommodate everyone’s perspective. Each person or function has a view of the problem and solutions that is based on their vantage point, concerns, and presuppositions. To meet the overall mission of the organization all of this must be weighed out and the best way forward should become clear (Daft, 2013). The purpose of utilizing a cross functional team is the assumption that a small group can accomplish more than an individual based on skills, accountability and commitment.  There are a variety of reasons this type of approach could be utilized; overcoming the limits of a hierarchal struggle, improving the quality of decision making, increasing organizational flexibility, and increasing organizational productivity.

The application of this leadership model is beneficial not only my personal development but also for the department or group development and the organizational development. As a conclusion, I would like to say that communication and collaboration is the key to implement this model in organizations. Collaborating in the workplace is essential unless you are a super hero with all knowing powers. Working collaboratively sometimes is smooth from the beginning and sometimes it takes a while for each participant to feel like they have an equal voice in the process. Cross-functional teams have been described as team comprised of employees with similar ranked positions within a company (Daft, 2014). It is important that my leadership development model should be implemented with a long-term vision. This model should be implemented as a top-down approach. The senior leadership should communicate about the benefits of this leadership model to different managers in the organization. I think your idea about having meetings and regular communications with the other managers makes a lot of sense.  It seems like such a logical solution for the lack of communication.  Sometimes those solutions are the ones that are overlooked in the middle of chaos. The above leadership model would address the issue of communication and ensure that the leaders can follow on the core values.

References

Bliss, D.L., Pecukonis, E. and Snyder-Vogel, M., 2014. Principled Leadership Development Model for Aspiring Social Work Managers and Administrators: Development and Application. Human Services Organizations Management, Leadership & Governance, 38(1), pp.5-15.

Brown, M. E., & Mitchell, M. S. (2010). Ethical and Unethical Leadership: Exploring New Avenues for Future Research. Business Ethics Quarterly, 20(4), 583-616.

Clarke, N., 2013. Model of complexity leadership development. Human Resource Development International, 16(2), pp.135-150.

Daft, R. L. (2015).  Organization theory and design (12th ed.)  Mason, OH: South-Western, Cengage Learning.

Gifford, W., Graham, I., Eldh, A.C. and Lefebre, N., 2014. Theoretical foundations of dissemination and implementation leadership: a conceptual model for leadership development. In The 7th Annual Conference on the Science of Dissemination and Implementation, Bethesda, Maryland, USA, 8-9 Dec, 2014.

Lepsinger, R., & DeRosa, D. (2015). How to Lead an Effective Virtual Team. Ivey Business Journal, 2-6.

Pascual-Ezama, D., Dunfield, D., Gil-GÃmez de LiaÃ, B., (2015) Organization’s Board. Prince Hall.

Plucknette, D. (2014). 4 differences between managers and leaders. Plant Engineering, 68(10), 16-18.

Talan, T.N., Bloom, P.J. and Kelton, R.E., 2014. Building the Leadership Capacity of Early Childhood Directors: An Evaluation of a Leadership Development Model. Early Childhood Research & Practice, 16(1), p.n1.