Identifying the Characteristics Entrepreneurship and Leadership

Case: Coventry Cathedral
Entrepreneurship and Leadership
Institutional Affiliation
Student’s Number
ID: 10494136
Word: 3621
Entrepreneurship and Leadership
Section 1
Coventry cathedral is the Cathedral Church of Saint Michael located in Coventry, West Midlands, England. It has been a place of worship for the past over 1000 years with several subsidiaries spread across the country. Besides serving as a center of worship, the cathedral also runs a variety of services including schools, tourism, different kinds of events, fund-raising, property maintenance, and building planning. The organization has 42 cathedrals in its English territory, all of which operate on a similar structure. Management of the events that are not directly related to the church requires a great level of organization and entrepreneurial skills. An interview with Isabel Merrifield, the Business Manager at the institution helps reveal some of the entrepreneurial strategies that the institution’s management uses to sustain its operations.
Entrepreneurship Leadership Characteristics
Entrepreneurial leadership entails organizing and motivating a group of people towards achieving a common objective. The people can be encouraged to be more innovative, risk takers, taking advantage of the available opportunities, and managing the dynamic organizational environment. The Coventry Cathedral is a small organization compared to the others, such as the York Minster, Westminster Abbey, and St Paul’s. Despite its small size, its presence is felt across the world as many people have heard about the history of the Coventry Cathedral. As the Business Manager notes, the company has had a lot of international platform to share its ideals with the rest of the world. This significant presence despite its size is based on its excellent communication system as a defining feature of entrepreneurial leadership (Joshi, 2014). The leadership of the organization is able to clearly articulate their ideas and plan to achieve a common goal. The leaders encourage interdepartmental communication as well as communication across all levels. In the case of Coventry Cathedral, the Business Manager notes that they have a WhatsApp group where all members from the organization’s 42 branches converge.
Another defining characteristic of entrepreneurial leadership is that it is supportive. An entrepreneurial leader appreciates the significance of innovativeness and go to all lengths to offer the necessary support that the team needs to achieve their goals (Li, Makhdoom, & Asim, 2020). Under such leadership, the leader allows the employees to take responsibilities and risks without facing any repercussions. This type of support is evident in the Coventry Cathedral when Isabel says that she technically runs the cathedral as she has the relevant expertise. Her seniors, who include the dean, who is in charge of the cathedral have given her all the powers to make major decisions. The dean does not react even when he hears her say that she is in charge of the cathedral. When employees are allowed to exercise their powers within an organization, they own it and are ready to also go an extra mile to achieve the goals of the entity. In such organizations, leaders do not punish their employees for risks that go wrong. Instead, they sit down with them and analyze what went wrong and how they can avoid such mistakes in future.
The Coventry Cathedral management also utilizes the Laissez-faire leadership approach, in which they let their employees do the job and make the decisions by themselves. In this case, the Business Managers across the 42 cathedrals are allowed to make decisions concerning the tourism management and other businesses that are non-church related. This leadership approach equips the employees with confidence in themselves and challenges them to make rational decisions (Robert & Vandenberghe, 2021). As Isabel notes, the dean, who is the overall leader of the cathedral does not interfere with their operations. The confidence that Isabel shows means that she cannot make decisions that will make her seniors to doubt her potential on the job. This self-belief is also a key defining characteristic of entrepreneurial leadership, where the leader has immense belief in themselves. Isabel has years of experimenting, sometimes failing and learning and in the process, she knows her strengths and weaknesses and is able to demonstrate her skills. Therefore, leaders who utilize the Laissez-Faire approach allow the employees to develop self-confidence and demonstrate their skills without hubris.
The Management’s Communication Strategies
A communication strategy refers to a plan of action meant to achieve a set of goals or a vision. Organizations constantly communicate to their employees when explaining the desired outcomes, which in most cases is related to profit. Thus, a communication strategy depends on how the organization delivers its message to its audience. The main principle of effective communication is clarity (The Business Communication, 2021). First, there should be a clear management structure for more effective information flow. The junior employees should know where to communicate. Similarly, the recipients of the information from the junior staff should know the next person to deliver the information to. In the case of Coventry Cathedral, Isabel highlights a clear management structure, in which the dean, who is the overall individual in charge of the cathedral has his team called the dean’s leadership team. Then there is a group of managers at the organizational level below the dean’s leadership team, who report to the dean’s team. Finally, there is a group that is directly associated with the service providers including musicians and vergers who operate the services. Therefore, the cathedral has a clear command structure for clear communication.
Besides ensuring clarity as a mode of communication, the organization also has some visual cues that unfortunately, it has not successfully managed. An organization’s appearance plays an essential role in communicating about its dedication to its services (Conner, 2013). An entity that gives a poor image about its services in terms of its appearance turns potential clients towards competitors. The Cathedral has not been effective at communicating a positive image to its customers. Isabel notes that the institution has had poor facilities without sufficient access to toilets, which often worsened the visitors’ experiences. The poor facilities served as a nonverbal cue about the lack of seriousness of the organization. Being a tourism promotion center, one of the most important initiatives was to ensure that all its facilities are functional. Fortunately, Isabela notes that the institution had a variety of people stepping in to help improve its image through funding.
Section 2
How Entrepreneurial Characteristics Enhance or Inhibit Organizational Change
Organizations change all the time depending on their operation environment. These changes have to occur, whether they are planned or not. The most important thing is that the organization goes through the change process in the best possible way. However, this is not always the case. The ability of the organization to successfully undergo a change in its operations depends on several factors irrespective of the organization’s size, type, age, or sector in which it operates. In most cases, the success depends on the leadership of the entity (Kolzow, 2014). Many organizations succeed in the change process because of having effective leadership. Even when leadership is not the only defining characteristic, the style that the leader uses to manage risks, motivate employees, make decisions, communicate the vision of the organization to the employees, and the level of passion all play an essential role in determining the ability of the organization to undergo successful change.
One of the major entrepreneurial characteristics is transformational leadership. Transformational leaders are able to successfully change an organization’s culture and align its strategies to meet its environmental demands. According to the transformational leadership theory, a leader should be able to motivate their followers by using four main leadership traits: idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration (Riggio, 2014). Such leaders inspire their followers to accomplish more by focusing on the employee’s values and helping the follower align their goals with the organization’s goals. Proper investment in the organization’s managers makes them improve their engagement with their subordinates, ultimately improving the organization’s performance. Operating in certain environments, such as the tourism sector, requires the organization to build a positive relationship with its customers. Many organizations in the contemporary world understand that the employees are their most passionate, credible, and impactful brand ambassadors because when employees talk positively about an organization, potential visitors can hear about it and opt to either visit or not visit it.
Leaders with the Laissez-faire leadership approach can also facilitate change in various ways, one of them being provision of training and support. Change entails taking a different approach in handling the organizational issues. In the modern business environment, there are several environmental challenges that demand the use of different approaches in approaching the obstacles. For example, the advent of technology requires employees to adapt to the new mode of communication and service provision. Therefore, entrepreneurs utilizing the Laissez-faire leadership approach can help in implementing change by ensuring that the employees understand what is expected of them. After training, the leaders then leave the decision to the employees. By leaving the employees to make the decisions, the entrepreneur empowers them and also saves the company time and money through reduced outsourcing (Anderson, 2019). The workers, in turn, will strive to ensure that they do not disappoint their leader. The fact that this approach also allows the employee to commit some mistakes also presents the workers with an opportunity to learn from experience and hence avoid the mistakes.
In the case of the cathedral, the dean allowed the employees to make some mistakes and ended up making huge losses. As Isabel notes, the cathedral had been on survival mode before she joined. It operated on a deficit budget with the reserves diminishing each year. Therefore, the organization has had the experience of running losses and would not make any mistakes that can send it back to the situation. The entity had to take drastic measures including exploring ways to cut costs, generate income and operate on a shoe-string budget. Since Isabel’s entry, the dean gave her all the authority to make any decisions that would turn around the cathedral’s fortunes. The authority gave her confidence and she felt ownership of the cathedral. She strived to be careful in her decisions since she knew that any other mistake would be blamed on her. Similarly, she knew that she would receive all the credit if she managed to turn the organization’s fortunes around. Therefore, the management’s adoption of this leadership approach was fruitful.
However, the use of Laissez-faire leadership approach is also associated with some challenges. One of these disadvantages is that there is lack of role clarity. In this approach, the team has poorly defined roles within the group because the members receive little to no guidance. Consequently, they may end up not being sure about the role they are supposed to play in the group. Additionally, the members may exhibit poor involvement in the group because most members view leaders as their role models. When leaders show poor involvement with the organizational affairs, their junior...