Describe Leadership Experience Enable Others To Act

Leadership Experience-‘Enable others to Act’
Name
Institution
Leadership Experience-‘Enable others to Act’
When Ms Jones was appointed as the head of marketing in a telecommunication company, she knew that she had a giant task ahead of bring the company back to its glory. The company had undergone a massive loss of subscribers which translated to loss of profits after the company rebranded. This was because the subscribers had lost trust with the company after the rebranding. In addition, the process of rebranding had been costly for the company. When she took up the job, she promised the company’s shareholder that she would increase the number of subscribers to its original numbers within six months. She opted to use ‘enabling others to act’ as a leadership practice because she knew the importance of having a team. According to Kouzes and Posner (2007), a leader must be able to foster collaborations and strengthen others so as to enable them to act. This facilitates team work among employees who have a common objective of attaining the companies set goals. Listed below are the activities she undertook to ensure she fulfilled her promise.
Building Trust
Ms Jones understood that she could not be able to achieve her target without the help of other employees, more so those from the marketing department. As a new employee in the organisation, she needed to earn the trust of her team in the marketing department for them to support her in achieving the set target.
One of the things she did after taking up office was sharing all the information regarding the problem at hand with her team. She knew that in order to succeed, she had to be upfront about the expectations and the challenges that the team would face without with-holding anything. For them to be able to achieve their target of acquiring subscribers within six months, they would be forced to sacrifice their personal time and do away with their off-days to ensure they meet the deadline. Once the team was aware of what was expected of them, they offered suggestions on how they can work to beat the deadline. They shared knowledge from their previous experiences while working on a deadline. Sharing of knowledge among team members improves the performance of teams and gives the company a competitive advantage (Ketvirtis, 2011). By pooling all the ideas and knowledge shared, the marketing team was able to select the best ideas that helped their cause.
She had an open door policy which allows employees to come in and consult or give ideas as soon as they need to without fear of being accused of interference. Employees had the freedom to come in into her office at any given time whenever the need arose. An open door policy facilitates open communication between leaders and employees at the workplace. The advantage of this is that increases trust between superiors and junior staff (Holtzhausen, 2002) and this was experienced by Ms Jones and her team by the end of the first quarter after she became their leader. The open door policy enabled the team to have an easy approach to problem-solving and the employees were sure that they can reach their boss incase a problem arose or an idea came to mind. This arrangement created an environment where employees could trust their boss with their challenges and were sure they would get her assisstance.
Enhancing Relationships
For any team to be productive, it is important for the team members to have a healthy relationship. The relationships should not be one sided and each member should benefit from the relationship. Ms Jones had various ways of ensuring healthy relationship within her team.
There was a meeting every Monday morning where employees met in her office and suggested ideas that would help them pitch new customers. Each employee was given an opportunity to explain the challenges and achievement of the previous week, and to highlight some suggestions on how to deal with those challenges. That way, Ms Jones was able to identify the weaknesses and strengths of each individual. After identifying the areas that needed to be improved, she would offer the necessary support based on the team’s suggestions on how to improve and this ensured that goals were achieved by working as a team. Individuals were allowed to bring in creativity and new ideas since they had the freedom to make decisions that would benefit the whole team. She also recognised the achievements of the individuals by acknowledging them in front of other employees. This ensured that each employee was accountable for their actions, regardless of whether they succeeded or failed. Individual accountability ensures that employees are self-determined to do better and meet the expectations of their team members. Furthermore, holding the meetings every week helped the team to trust each other as they interacted and got to know each other better.
She also encouraged job rotation within the team to ensure that every individual has a taste of what it is like to perform the tasks and duties of others. This helped in ensuring that all the team members were working together towards achieving the common objectives by performing different tasks. When roles or tasks were interchanged, every team member was able to appreciate what each other go through and this brought about some sort of cohesion between the team members. For example, some of the employees had to go out to market the company’s product while others remained in the office to handle the day to day administration. However, the manager ensured that they rotated to ensure each group had a feel of what the other group’s responsibilities were. This ensured a healthy relationship among the team members
As part of ensuring collaboration on achieving the company’s objectives, M...