LEADERSHIP ASSESSMENT - Essay Example

The company’s CEO did not appear to be excessively ambitious; and never used harsh words when addressing employees. He believed in demonstrating the attributes he expected to see in his employees. Organizational Structure and Culture and Team Development in the Company The organization in which I worked was more oriented toward individual tasks than group activities. It was based on a hierarchical model where orders came from above and were sometimes vague because the workers had limited guidance on how to implement them.

The hierarchical model sometimes caused other problems when the company’s executives gave orders that had adverse implications in the lower ranks of the organization. When such impractical orders were given to groups of workers that had been formed by executives, the workers always had different concepts about what the leaders meant to be done or how to implement their ideas. Some workers were irritated by the fact that they were not allowed to choose their own team partners. Usually, the only workers who were happy to be ordered into specific teams were the partially skilled workers who escaped total responsibility for projects when they shared them with other workers.

Workers can be commanded to form teams; but cannot be forced to work harmoniously. This is why it is important to allow workers to form their own teams when necessary. Even though the skilled workers in the company distrusted the claims of the managers about their dedication to teamwork, the semi-skilled workers believed the CEO’s rhetoric. Faced with sporadic accusations from their skilled workers of being too autocratic, the company’s managers sometimes went to the extreme by giving no instructions about projects.

This caused further confusion among the workers and left the responsibility of realizing successful team projects to the skilled workers. Communication and Motivational Skills of the Leader Using autocratic leadership might have been more practical for the organization’s leaders because the company had many workers and participatory leadership would cost too much in terms of time and amenities (Schein, 2010). The size of the company also made considering the views of all employees before making decisions on even the simplest tasks counterproductive.

The CEO of the company was quite dedicated to ensuring that the company achieved its objectives. As a person he was compassionate, dedicated, courageous and extremely self disciplined. He might have imagined that all workers knew they could develop his work ethic if they pushed themselves to achieve their best, and were striving to do so. Moreover, he was aware that it was important to keep demonstrating what he wanted to see in his employees. The CEO had fought his way from a subordinate position of the company to his present position.

Even though he told of this story with pride in the few general meetings that were held during the year, I believe that he was quite hardened by his journey to the top most position over two decades. Even though the CEO constantly spoke of the importance of cooperation among workers and the management, this principle was hardly ever realized. CEOs can fall into patterns of merely talking of the importance of certain principles without following their words with any action (Kouzes and Posner, 2008).

Three Practices that Leaders Use to