Understanding Leader Strategies and Sustainability

Question:

Critically evaluate the effectiveness of different types of leaders for developing and implementing a strategy for sustainability?

Every company is headed by an effective board that controls and governance the systems within the company.

This paper explains the importance of leaders and their strategic roles on sustainability. So to understand the strategies took by leaders we have to understand what do we mean by leaders and their strategies and sustainability from a leadership perspective. It is an important job of a leader to develop and implement strategies as it help to bring sustainability into the system (Harris, 2013). They can create corporate social responsibility in the system. A successful leader is one who tries to engage people in their works and build relationships in between them. So there is a difference between leaders and managers. To understand the different types of leaders, we must have the ability to differentiate the roles played by them.

It is necessary to understand the role of leaders and who they are. The job of a leader is to influence others towards the achievement of their goals. They must be able to communicate with others employees of that firm and must have clear knowledge about themselves and others members of that team. There is a difference between managers and leaders (Metcalf and Benn, 2013).

There are subordinates under managers, but leaders do not have subordinates but followers. These managers generate power circles where as leaders generates influence circles.

Managers have a duty to control a group to achieve the goal, but leaders try to motivate workers and enable them to contribute towards the success of the organization. So it is the power and control that separate managers from leaders.

So, managers, have innovative ideas and leaders have jobs to implement them to achieve their goals. Managers control groups and leaders have the duty to generate teams and influence them towards their goals (Huis et al. 2013).

We always create or set our different strategies to achieve our goals and this strategy is called ‘personal technologies’ that are termed as styles in this leadership model. This model explains three types of styles and these are direct styles, relational style and instrumental style. So persons who like direct style, do their task individually and directly, their concentration is on power and competition. Within this style, three styles are competitive, power and intrinsic. People who are self-motivated emphasise on this set.

Persons who like to help others to achieve their goals and work with them prefer the relational style. They like to share responsibilities and rewards with others and support people in their groups (Bhansing, Leenders and Wijnberg, 2012).

The people, who consider themselves and other team members as instruments for achieving mutual goals, like an instrumental set. They use other instruments to attract others’ support to do the work and get their goals. The people rarely depend on one particular style to complete their tasks. There are three styles of each style. They use other instruments to attract others to join with them and achieve goals.

Differentiating Leaders from Managers

Figure- Achievable Styles

The relationship between two leaders depends on the different types of exchanges between them; the state of a relationship depends on the extent of exchanges in between them. And depending on this exchange, various leaderships can be defined 

These types of leaders always motivate their subordinates and reward them for good performance. They motivate and influence them by using incentives. These leaders deal with present issues and depend on suitable forms of punishment and rewards (Harris, 2013).

The transformational leader always stays focused on motivation, team management. They work with an employee at various stages of an institution to accept changes that give best results. Their job is to generate opportunities of learning for followers and indulge them to work beyond their self-interest (Lukes and Stephan, 2012).

 In several crucial ways, sustainability is different and should not be treated like other corporate initiatives.  However, it includes three diverse phases that requires different leadership skills.

The reactivity of the organization mostly related to the challenge of sustainability. It is usually not aware of the opportunities. On the other hand during transiting from unconscious to cognisant reactivity, the leader must be an expert at influencing others (Hill et al. 2012).

During the emergence of companies from Phase 1, the prime competence in aligning value creation and sustainability initiatives is customer orientation. Furthermore, the task has to be translated to comprehensive change program from high level commitments with clearly set initiatives and achievable targets.  

Commercial orientation is continuously required but it matched by a tough strategic orientation. The firm increasingly projects sustainability as a strategic opportunity if the organization increases the level of performance and leverages sustainability for establishing competitive advantage (Jameson, 2013).

Leadership can help a business act sustainably by the following steps:

1. Creating integrated and smart public policy

It is not easy to build better public policy on environmental issues. However, the uncertainty developed by governments’ failure to act increases companies’ existing planning challenges.

2. Engaging the members related to value chain, also composing NGO partners and industry.

Good alliance would be helpful in accelerating pace of sustainability in establishing productive value chain.

3. Building a acceptable dialog on conscientious consumption.

Companies can do perform superiorly by gaining immense support from the consumers (Griffin and Hu, 2013).

CSR denotes corporate social responsibility. Corporations should act in a way that enhances society and should be held accountable for its actions that affect people.

As per the study of MIT, 2011, it was shown that sustainability plays effective hand in almost 70% of corporate agenda in the US (Spicker, 2012).

Unilever was able to attain this growth by being conducting their business as a responsible, sustainable one. As a result of that, they were able to accumulate and money including, energy, packaging, etc., building customer base and fostered innovation.

On the other hand, it can also be mentioned that not only big enterprise engaged themselves in CSR activities but also there are many small and medium sized firms operate their business in sustainable way to gain long term benefit (Metcalf and Benn, 2013).

 Building strong and effective alliance between the stakeholders and firms the important requirement of good corporate governance. Compliance is not the only thing which is demanded from good governance. Culture and climate are involved in corporate governance. The ‘CRAFTED’ principles of governance consists Consistency, Responsibility, Accountability, Fairness, Transparency, and Effectiveness which are implemented throughout the organization (Huis et al. 2013). The Boards must provide strategic guidance in order to ensure sustainable improvements in corporate valuations. The firms would be able attain their targets on a continued basis if senior management of the firm behave as a role model for implementing the principles of governance. The quality of decisions and management is influenced by the topics such as members of the boards, schedule and different processes for decision-making, etc. It would help in achieving sustainability in performance and leading a better team.

Conclusion:

Boards should be concentrating not only on the results of business but also on the way and technique of obtaining results. On the other hand, taking excessive risk could sometimes result in better performance. An open and transparent culture is required in the elaborate evaluation of management proposals, where employees of the organisations could be stimulated and encouraged to make correct assumptions and evaluate the possible alternatives for the betterment of the business and staffs. Corporate social responsibility should be aligned with corporate governance to execute the company operations. It is the CSR which acts as the basis for good corporate governance.

References

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Griffin, M. A., and  Hu, X. (2013). How leaders differentially motivate safety compliance and safety participation: the role of monitoring, inspiring, and learning. Safety science, 60, 196-202.

Harris, A. (2013). Distributed Leadership Friend or Foe?. Educational Management Administration and  Leadership, 41(5), 545-554.

Harris, A. (2013). Distributed school leadership: Developing tomorrow’s leaders. Routledge.

Hill, R., Dunford, J., Parish, N., Rea, S., and  Sandals, L. (2012). The growth of academy chains: implications for leaders and leadership.

Huis, A., Schoonhoven, L., Grol, R., Donders, R., Hulscher, M., and  van Achterberg, T. (2013). Impact of a team and leaders-directed strategy to improve nurses’ adherence to hand hygiene guidelines: a cluster randomised trial. International journal of nursing studies, 50(4), 464-474.

Jameson, J. (2013). Leadership in post-compulsory education: inspiring leaders of the future. Routledge.

Lukes, M., and  Stephan, U. (2012). Nonprofit leaders and for-profit entrepreneurs: Similar people with different motivation. Ceskoslovenska psychologie, 56(1), 41-55.

Metcalf, L., and  Benn, S. (2013). Leadership for sustainability: An evolution of leadership ability. Journal of Business Ethics, 112(3), 369-384.

Spicker, P. (2012). “Leadership”: A perniciously vague concept. International Journal of Public Sector Management, 25(1), 34-47.