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Leadership & Ethics for Managers

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As a management consultant you make a living by providing management advice to senior level managers with regard to management problems that they are experiencing within their organization. Your role is to analyze the situation and then apply your experience, general business knowledge, and sound management principles and theories, to produce a report or other deliverable on the subject for the senior manager.

Your recommendations are important, but equally important is your justification for those recommendations. The justification must convince the manager that your advice is worth the price he or she paid for it. The manager should feel confident that you have arrived at the correct conclusions and that your conclusions are well supported by good judgment and competent authority in the subject. Your goal is to produce results that will strengthen your reputation as a management consultant and encourage the manager to hire you in the future for other projects.

Leadership Challenge: Selecting Team Members

The leader of your client organization has observed a lack of flexibility and a slow decision-making process in many of the departments. He believes that he is not serving his customers well, and has decided to move to a team environment and to push many of the decisions to the lowest possible levels. In other words, he wants to create a team-based, empowered organization. Several of his best managers are resisting the idea strongly. They not only feel that many employees are not ready for the change, but they also believe that they personally could never change from a "command and control" style to allowing more participation (adapted from Nahavandi, 2003, p. 54).

Your client has asked you to prepare a report in which you address the following questions:

1. How should the leader deal with the situation?
2. What arguments can he use to persuade his managers?
3. What can he do to help his managers change their style?
4. What are the implications of his actions and decisions?

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1. How should the leader deal with the situation?

Organizations should move away from the definition of employees and be more of "partners" who would function independently, take decisions independently, and work as a part of extremely high-powered, self sufficient teams, empowered to take their own decisions. "Flat, self-managing teams" will be the units of the future since empowerment and decision authority must be with the people who are closest to the product and the customers. Marvin Weisboard, an expert in organizational development suggests that self - management typically adds 40% increase in output per man hour. Thus the leader has to use transformational style of leadership and develop an empowered team. This doesn't mean that the leader is shunning his own responsibilities, but rather delegating specialized tasks to experts within his group. This leadership style is used when the leader has a high level of trust of his staff, or if delegation is really needed in order for him to do other important things.
(Clark, 1997)

2. What arguments can he use to persuade his managers?

A team is put up with the objective of attaining a certain specified goal. The philosophy of a team is that the team will give a better output than the each of the team members working as individuals as collectively they can overcome all the weaknesses inherent in an individual
(indiainfoline). The role of individual differences and traits in team will be important. Factors affecting values include ethnicity, gender, culture, personality, and generational differences (Vecchio, 1997). Primarily technology driven, this new ...

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