A635.8.3.RB – Transformational Strategies
According to Brown (2011), a strong culture can be depicted by an organization’s fundamental values shared by the leadership, employees, and stakeholders. When the majority of the members share the company’s core values, the greater their steadfastness thus resulting to a stronger culture. A strong culture could produce in employees and stakeholders passionate engagement is creating and supporting the organization’s vision, mission, and values or norms. The organization’s culture impacts its growth, finances, level of risk-taking, internal communication, and innovation. Strong culture establishes what the clientele’s expectations are from the company and if they can together create a healthy business relationship.
I can certainly relate with McChrystal and McIngvale on the leadership approaches they have taken to the success of their team. As a leader, I am accountable for the creation, development, and leading a team to the highest standards of performance outcomes. To be an effective leader, it is of utmost importance to embrace the diversity of members of our team and at the same time creating a transparent relationship with them. Cultivating an environment of continuous innovation, improvements, and initiatives in the workplace is one way of fostering team commitment embracing a mindset of innovation and building a bigger brain. Innovation and change are not entirely dependent on executive leadership’s participation, but it is reliant on every member of the workforce who are focused and familiar with the organization’s customers, employees, and stakeholders’ unique needs.
Stanley McChrystal
According to McChrystal (2011), serving with his military team, it is of importance to developing a personal relationship with his team. In the line of fire, they have to trust and rely on each other's skills and abilities to defend and protect each other and keeping their promise that they will never leave a fallen comrade falling into the hands of the enemy. I find it a very profound commitment not only for a leader but for the members of the team equally. McChrystal reminds me of an adaptive and a transformational leader whose primary focus is encouraging and inspiring individuals to modify and discover new vision and pathways of living to grow and do well. In short, the adaptive leader is one whose initiative is to promote members of the team, addressing and resolving challenges that are the epicenter in the individuals’ lives (Northouse, 2015). At the same time, McChrystal represents a servant leader who puts the good of his followers or team first-hand over his self-interest and focuses on the development of his supporters or team members (Northouse, 2015).
In my years of management and leadership experience in the workplace and the community, I discovered that my leadership style could be more identifiable to a transformational leader. A transformational leader who prevails on change, exercises “control” through trust, inspires a vision of what might be to attain the respect and confidence of followers. I can focus on motivating and empowering my team always on a commitment to excellence, excellent team-building, and a strategic collaborative effort with my group to achieve transformation successfully. Lastly, I have managed to find different avenues to elicit a solid performance from my team in the absence of blind allegiance.
Gallery Furniture
When Gallery Furniture faced business challenges from housing industry dropping down to 75% back in 2008 and suffered a fire incident in 2009, McIngvale wore his innovative thinking skills. With the position that McIngvale took, I believe that he utilized Osborn and Parnes’ creative problem-solving (CPS). Insight to Innovation pathway will be effective and efficient if organizations make their determination to new ideas based on potential usefulness. Innovation needs a rebellious innovator as its refuge for creativity that is practicable. But the challenge for organizations is how to influence or create a climate or culture of practical creativity that will break out boundaries and limitations leading to advancement and growth.
McIngvale’s successful utilization of creative problem-solving (CPS) required three stages:
· Exploring the challenge. At this juncture, McIngvale and his team found the need to process some objective finding to get a sense of what our organization’s challenges, desires, and dissatisfaction that drive the quest for inventive resolution. They also factored fact-finding procedure to warrant data consortium regarding the situation, the market, facts, etc. and problem finding whether the existing issue or problem is the best issue to be resolved in their organization. The primary issue or potential problem that needs to be addressed was that six out of their ten customers leave their stores without purchasing any of their product and there was no customer follow-up initiative in place for their salesperson to initiate.
· Generate ideas. In this process McIngvale’s team probe and research for insights and potentials correlating to new ideas or innovations magnifying authenticity to realize team member’s creativities. Exploring and empowering every team members’ perspectives, skills, and abilities will help them to continue making dreams to reality thus strengthening the innovative power of our organization.
· Prepare for action. This is the stage that involves for McIngvale’s team finding solutions and acceptance find. Solution finding is where all generated ideas are built and structured exploring benchmarks to decide what new idea needs further nurturing. Once the working mechanism is in place, leadership team and the innovation taskforce pursue the job that is imperative to generate new ideas to materiality so they can be competitive in the marketplace.
Gallery Furniture hired coaches to teach their salespersons how to get clients and follow-up on them through utilizing new technology such as iPad and computers. The company learned that incentivizing their employees and improving employees’ benefits as part of empowering them was very beneficial and efficient. By being transparent to their staff by providing them the daily data information and letting their employees know the expected behavior, Gallery Furniture’s bottom line has increased to 600,000 dollars. They have established customers for life due to customer satisfaction and eliminated reworks on delivery which gave them a million of dollars’ savings annually, and Gallery Furniture gained empowered, engaged, and healthy employees.
Leading innovation is becoming to be paramount that it gives organizations stronger position from competitors, it generates consumers’ favor or appetite apropos to the organizations’ offering, and innovation magnifies organizations’ capacity to impact the global market. Although innovation is geared towards increasing efficiency and reducing the cost for the customers, we also have to keep in mind that innovation is a result of the creativity of the human minds. Incentivising employees for their creative work in not enough to boost advancement in technology and employee morale, retention, and development. Open communication that is built on trust and acknowledging the employee’s creativity and contribution is of utmost importance to continually promote and encourage innovative and creative thinking within the organization.
Additionally, developing teamwork is critical for the success of any organization. It is to the advantage of the company when every member of the team works cohesively to accomplish departmental and organizational goals. It is not only of utmost importance that team members have the autonomy and freedom to achieve assigned tasks, but it is also of importance that they can work well with other members of the team. It is also of significance that members of the team not only have the skills to communicate their aspirations or ideas to other members of the team and be collaborative to accomplish departmental projects and tasks successfully but also have the willingness to accept constructive criticism to improve themselves.
Today, I am still being challenged and shaped by my limited experience and am well aware of how those limitations influence the decisions I am making; I can say with certainty that I am on my way to be a better leader. My attitude towards change and tolerance of ambiguity has been enhanced. Physicians’ Practice acquisitions, software enhancements, and organizational change are common in my workplace nowadays. Dealing with an overwhelming amount of information, the manner in which I gather and evaluate data and act on that data has improved. Approaching inevitable change with an open mind, without a pre-determined decision, I can develop positive and innovative approaches to improvement.
Culture has to be evident in whatever I do and use it in guiding my organization and myself how to approach the things that I do. The ability to pull “it” together when faced with tough decisions like McIngvale and McChrystal due to change is evident to my colleagues and supervisor. Self-awareness of my weaknesses and strengths can only enhance the trust of my colleagues, staff, and supervisors, it will strengthen my credibility and will increase my innovative leadership effectiveness.
References:
Brown, D.R. (2011). An experiential approach to organization development (8th ed.). Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Northouse, Peter (2015). Leadership: Theory and Practice (7th ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Sage
Publishing
McChrystal, S. (2011). Listen, learn…then lead [Video file]. Retrieved from
McIngvale, J. (2012). Influencer / Gallery Furniture Video Case Study [Video file]. VitalSmarts
Video. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E20RW75Fhu4
McKeown, M. (2014). The innovation book: How to manage ideas and execution for outstanding
results. Harlow, England: Pearson
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