MSLD 633 Strategic Leadership

A633.8.3.RB - How To Better Enable Leadership      After interviewing a leader and couple of staff members in my department with questions centered on how the organization can better enable leadership at all levels.     I learned that both groups will like our organization to support leadership by improving communications within the organization.   It seems as if upper level managers are primarily focused on completing the mission objectives set by senior level management, which causes them to be perceived as out of touch with the staff members of our organization.   From the opposite view point, the leadership is under the perception that staff members are focused on unimportant matters and they see fail to understand the requirements, effects and intricacies of mission and objectives set by senior level management.      The implications of these findings from an organizational perspective are that it has caused a de...

Leader Follower Relationship      Completing and assessing my responses on scoring table for the exercise at the beginning of Chapter 10 was very thought-provoking.  The exercise was comprised of sixteen questions which Obolensky (2014), states that ideally the participant should have scored four points in each column.   If not, that the participant’s score may reveal that they might be too devoted to one particular strategy and need to decipher the reason why that is the case.  My score resulted in the following for each category;  6 points- (Tell) Strategy 1, 2 points – (Sell) Strategy 2, 7 points – (Involve) Strategy 3 and 1 point –(Devolve) Strategy 4.       Upon reviewing my responses in order to address the imbalance, I realized that I have a tendency to elect to utilize the Involve Strategy where the focus is a “high people, low goal” approach to leadership.   Obolensky (2014) states, “this is used either when ...

How Do Coaches Help? In this reflection blog I would review the following statement: To be an executive coach, it is necessary to know that clients are the first and best experts capable of solving their own problems and achieving their own ambitions; that is precisely the main reason why clients are motivated to call on a coach. When clients bring important issues to a coach, often they already made a complete inventory of their personal or professional issues and identified all possible (known) options. Clients have already tried working out their issues alone, and have not succeeded. Reflection on the Statement      Clearly clients seek the input and guidance of an executive coach after they have already tried to solve their issues internally without success therefore exhibiting a desire to change.   One will question this decision as clients are the first and best experts capable of solving their own problems and achieving their own ambitions. ...

A633.6.4.RB - Circle of Leadership      After critically thinking about how strategy is formulated in my organization, I determined that it is safe to say that upward leadership is not frequently practiced in my organization.   As a public school district our structure is fixed we are limited in what we are able to achieve in terms of bottom-up or upward leadership.   As with most governmental organizations with a deep hierarchal leadership model, our teams are reliant on the senior management team to develop strategy and then communicate those decisions down to us. We are however encouraged to give upward feedback to our management, otherwise things flow downward from the executive offices of the Superintendent of Schools as approved by the School Board Members, to the senior level management team and the additional staff members.      It is not possible for the complex adaptive organizational structure to be fully operational...

A633.5.3.RB - Reflections on Chaos At the start of the exercise in the video, Who Needs Leaders ?, Obolensky (2008) gave the participants direct and specific instructions of what they were to do for the exercise.   He was careful to dictate the objective and the rules which they were to follow.   This was a very important step in order to keep the system from descending into too much chaos and enable effective action and to take place (Obolensky, 2014). Once processed by the participants, the instructions dictated by Obolensky created a since of ambiguity and uncertainty within the group as it appeared that the task will be next to impossible to complete (Obolensky, 2014).   Once the initial step was complete, he set the participants free to begin the exercise, which Obolensky (2014) explains that each person in the group has the ability to judge distance and use their skills to move accordingly.   That is a decision which is made by those who want to do the ...

Changing Dynamics of Leadership      I feel like the shift in leadership to more of a bottom-up approach is related to leaders realizing the actual value in the knowledge and opinions of lower-level employees.   Obolensky stated, “So the fact is those at the top do not know the solutions to the problems faced by the organizations they lead. And generally speaking they know that they do not know (2014).”   Therefore, considering this leadership charade leaders have shifted their leadership approach from directing to guiding and leading.      This shift to a more bottom-up approach to leadership is not indicative of what is happening at my organization as the leadership approach at the school district as a whole is very much a top down approach.   However, I have seen a shift in the leadership strategies within various departments which correlates to the leadership tending shift and utilizes the bottom-up approach with ...