A633.7.3.RB: Leader Follower Relationship


My results to the assessment at the start of Chapter 10 were interesting, in that I answered exactly zero questions within the S1 or S2 strategies. Instead, my scoring was split this way: 10 S3 answers, and six S4. This says a lot about my leadership style — namely, maybe, that I lean heavily toward the "pull" approach, but that I also might underestimate my potential impact on a group of followers (Obolensky, p. 173). 
"Taken together S3 and S4 are typical strategies when the leader does not know the solution (or chooses to hold back) and follows/supports. This leadership approach can also be applied to upward leadership and in today's complex world, where solutions are more at the bottom than the top, upward leadership is becoming increasingly more important" (Obolensky, 172).
This passage encapsulates a lot of my theories going into the quiz. As a worker, I tend to believe (because I've seen it firsthand) that employees are capable of a whole lot. After initial direction and goal-setting, I've seen followers take initiative, be creative, push the limits of their talents, and lead upward, and I've always respected that. Consequently, I've always appreciated a leader with restraint, one that displays an abundance of trust in his/her employees by resisting the urge to control too tightly or micromanage. "Your job in exercising adaptive leadership is to make yourself dispensable" (Heifetz, 169). Obviously, these tendencies showed up in the results of my questionnaire.

Analyzing Obolensky's various charts in Chapter 10 (2014), it becomes clear that I err on the side of involving and devolving, rather than selling and telling. Also, I have a low goal focus and a high people focus. This sounds about right for the extra focus on people, but the low goal focus is concerning. As far as my future leadership goals and objectives are concerned, these quiz results have been illuminating. Although I think it's important to make people comfortable at work and create an environment that brings out the most of their talents, I realize that those goals need to be balanced by a mission to get things done, too. "Action is the only way forward" (Heifetz, 175). Keeping that at the front of my mind going forward will absolutely be a priority.

As I've traveled through this class, that realization — the belief that a leader must be multidimensional — has arguably been my greatest takeaway. It seems so simple, almost like common sense, but being able to employ different strategies at different times to accomplish different goals is, or should be, a prerequisite for all leaders. "It is the way that these strategies can be combined which lend power to the model" (Obolensky).

I want to keep that in mind. I want to push myself to get better at the Sell and even the Tell strategies. For a long time, I've seen most leaders in my work life as one of only a handful of types: the hyper micromanager, the controller (always "checking in"), the hands-off encourager. But I've learned to move past that mindset and be wary of binary definitions: black or white, hands on or hands off. Now, I strive to find, and be, the complexity, and that’s a takeaway worth striving toward.

References

 Heifetz,R. A., Linsky, M., Grashow, A. (2009). The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for changing your organization and the world. Business Harvard Review

 Obolensky, Nick. (2014). Complex adaptive leadership: embracing paradox and uncertainty. New York, NY: Routledge.

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