unit 5013 assignment corneliu-george moisei p04437128_second_submission

Corneliu-George Moisei, Membership Number: P04437128 , Unit 5013

Word count : 7405

Question 1. a) Explain the difference between effective leaders and effective managers. Cansomeone be effective at both managing and leading? Illustrate your answer with reference to:

i. Current thinking in leadership and managementii. Leaders / managers you have experienced

b) What are your own strengths and weaknesses as a manager and a leader and how do youbalance the demands of both these roles? What impact do your own personal preferences have on

your abilities as a manager and a leader?

The verb 'manage' has a Latin origin. Latin manus -> Italian maneggiare -> French mesnagement ->English manage, that is taking care of, dealing with a situation, an object, knowledge, person, system, society. Management, as a concept of conducting an organization, has old historical roots, like Sun Tzu's "The Art of War", Niccolo Machiavelli's "Prince" with regards to what heads of armyor state should be doing in order to be effective and reach their goal, mostly through others. With the appearance of industrial revolution and modern concepts such as standardization, quality-controland cost-efficiency the needs to plan, organize and control organizations sparked the appearance of modern concepts of management, that consist in setting objectives, organizing, motivating and communicating, measuring and also develops people skills (Drucker, 1974). More recent thinking have refined the definition of management, in conjunction with the concept of leadership. When thelevel of intellectual complexity of the work performed by the employee increased, the management's punishment and reward system it is not enough, studies (Azoulay et al, 2010) are showing that intellectual work cannot be stimulated with financial incentives. As long as manual labour was involved, the higher the financial reward, the higher the output, while on the cognitive tasks, the higher the incentive, the lower the performance. For the cognitive and innovation tasks, intrinsic motivation motivation is needed, this is an leadership trait. With regards to the innovation, others explained that purpose is a a powerful component of the motivation. While management is about maximizing profits, and leadership is about setting goals that are greater than their own self-interest, equal emphasis on purpose maximization has the potential to rejuvenate our businesses and remake our world (Pink, 2009).

Management is about the present, items that can be counted and categorized(mathematics), touched, and set in motion by pushing into a certain direction(physics), in other words the hard work. In physics, what happens when the force that pushes a rock cannot move the rock when and where it is needed, and the force is so great that turns the rock into pebbles? Are there other means of moving the rock ? Of course, the rock can be pulled in a certain direction. When considering people or organization, the force that can pull the rock, or even convince the rock to move itself it isthe Leadership, which is a more immaterial force(psychology), harder to be defined, counted, touched and categorized, in other words elevated thinking and innovation. The verb 'lead' has an Middle-English origin, and it is closely related to Old English l?dan which at his turn is the causative form of lithan,to go, travel. In this context, leading is about acting as a guide, be the first one to see or step on a path and show others how to follow it. What leaders really do is prepare organisations for change and help them cope as they struggle through it, by setting a direction, aligning people, motivating and inspiring. What managers do is coping with complexity, promote stability by 'organising' to create human systems that can implement plans as precisely and efficiently as possible.(Kotter, 2001)

The relationship between Management and Leadership is like the Yin and Yang concept, complementary. Let's take an example for preparing an expedition. A leader can dream about travelling in uncharted territories, inspire others to follow, act as an example by carrying the


heaviest luggage, setting things in motion when the others are without hope, in other words, the big picture. The management is about dealing with organising the expedition, like means of transportation, food and water supplies, assigning roles to expedition members, and even addressingconcerns like best shoes, clothes to wear and considering the need to take an umbrella, in other words the practical details. Imagine Christopher Columbus failing in management, that is to load enough food and water supplies on his ships, or failing in leadership, that is in his quest to convince people to explore the western route to Asia, in not one, but four expeditions. Columbus had a goal, was relentless in pursue of followers, being rejected by 5 governments before being granted by Spain the means to plan the voyage.

One of the early leadership theories is the traits theory, that states that leaders are born and inherit the personality traits genetically. The functional theory states the contrary, that the traits are only habits that can be learned. Personally I believe there is a mixture of both, lucky people are born withmore traits, and hard-working ones can learn the traits that they need. On top of that, the right cocktail that sparks leadership are personal choices, creativity and the opportunity to manifest them.

There are some organizations that are applying the concept of Matrix Management, where the Project Managers are directly responsible for completing the project within a specific deadline and budget, while Line Managers are responsible with employee empowerment, training and development, motivation, organizational development, team building, mentoring, etc. (Galbraith, 2008). In this situation, the Project Managers can achieve results with a lower Leadership trait, since it is covered by another role and Line Managers can be effective with a lower Management trait since the little details are dealt with by someone else.

Here are some examples from my experience as Line Manager(LM) in a two dimensions matrix, with regards to relationship between Leadership and Management. On a peer functional team there was an LM that had great management skills : setting up processes,rules and procedures, monitoring, rules were followed by the letter. There were some cases when the processes were not covering some aspects, and the employees that were created were punished for not following the rules, that translated in doing nothing since there were no instructions while customers and stakeholders suffered. Since the leadership skills were lacking, the team did not copewith the drastic change the organization went through, they were always behind on terms of adopting new technologies and coping exponential workloads. The only solution that was considered was "hire more people". Eventually they were stripped down of responsibilities by a peer team that had to deal with them being behind all the time and came up with a technical solutiondesigned to do things faster and overcome the need to hire more people. One of my managers was a good leader, came with a vision that summed up developing our careers, growing as individual plus making our way of work evolve both technically and the way of doing things. He was easy to talk to, always concerned about the employee's well-being, with strongethical principles. He also organized a brainstorming team event to generate ideas. We went on to do our usual work for a couple of years, while the number of problems grew, there was a huge gap in term of workload, responsibilities and performance between individuals and no plans of what needs to be accomplished. It was hard for me to understand why this was happening, until the moment when due to not meeting contractual terms our company had to pay penalties to customers and he was fired. He was supposed to handover his responsibilities to 3 people, myself included. Heasked me what do I want to be handed-over, I asked him to make a list of his responsibilites, send it to the three of us so we can decide among ourselves. The reply gave me the explanations for him getting fired : "what should I write on the list?". It was a failure in key areas of management, such as planning and organizing, communicating plans to workforce, solving problems and monitoring ifthe plans are followed, or at least the status quo was maintained.


There was a period of crisis when a Project Manager(PM) sent an e-mail to some of my team members to be available way off business hours "these 5 people have to be available this Tuesday evening at 10 PM for 3 hours, or else!". The moment was very sensitive since the team was already exhausted after a 36-hours week-end at work that ended on Monday morning, which was also due to the bad planning of the same PM. This unleashed a huge wave of frustration and fury, some of the most colourful curses that were ever heard in a corporate open-office, and e-mail replies like "ask your mother-in-law, we're busy" or "please fire me". Not even offering of high incentives such as triple the pay or one day off worked. It was my responsibility to make sure enough resources are there. After contacting the PM and finding out details, I went back to the team saying that a 3rd party provider has an emergency intervention that might disrupt our business in such a way that might destroy whatever we worked for during the past week-end. When informing that I will be participating and needing 2 other people to assist me applying the contingency plan, there were 4 volunteers to pick from. For some, this appealed to their self esteem and respect for all the hard work that was carried on during the week-end. For others, it was just a colleague that supported them in the past and needed help in a tough moment.

So the conclusion would be that ideally a person would benefit of being effective at both management and leadership to have great results, while keeping in mind the most important rule of all, knowing when to act as a leader and when to act as a manager, just as the Ying-Yang concept.

As a manager, the greatest weakness(confirmed by feedback from 3 people) was that the inability tosell my team to upper management, assuming that results speak from themselves. For example, we started to perform a task that was supposed to be done by an under-performing peer team, until everyone started to behave like it is officially part of our job. When we reached 80% of the task, theupper management noticed there's an issue and started to criticise us for the existence of the remaining 20%. So not necessarily for not speaking about the achievements, but not doing it often enough by repeatedly and constantly emphasizing the way the team works, and what are results and drawbacks of the team in a form of comprehensive scheduled reporting. Considering my MBTI assessment(ENTJ), I found myself in the description of "little patience with confusion and inefficiency" and "emotions taking control of the personality" under stress. I did explode at times a couple of times when higher-ranked managers that were skilled in other areas started to dictate how things should be done turning difficult situations into complete disasters. This damaged the relationship in the long run, combined with the fact that I did not do any steps to repair things, personally viewing those managers as incompetents. The greatest strength as a manager comes from the MBTI profile as well, translating possibilities into plans and organise resources to achieve goals, everything as a second nature, no effort. The


next important one is that decisions are transparent and well communicated to the concerned parties.

As a leader, the greatest weakness is the extraversion, talking too much and seldom leaving room for introvert people to express their thoughts. Another weakness is the empathy with team members when it is pushed to the extremes. This burdens me with their problems, not keeping a safe enough distance to be able to help out. Without false modesty, there are plenty leadership strengths. Believing in fairness I am "giving everybody equal chances of involvement and development" (feedback from peer manager). Having a great confidence in my abilities, trusting and empowering the team members comes naturally, being able to challenge them with complex tasks, supporting all the way. Growing up in an educational system and society in which appreciation for the merit is not spoken but flaws are publicly criticised, I felt the need for the other way around, so I made efforts of constantly showing acknowledgement and appreciation to peers; also this enabled me to unravel great potentials even in the ones considered "bad apples" that actually constituted most of my former team. I'm most proud of defending one team member when in danger of being fired for "unable to communicate and inefficiency"; one year later he proposed, advocated for and implemented a disruptive technological solution; he was appointed as successor after my resignation. Motivating mostly by believing in people until they start to believe in themselves. Being a borderline Sensing versus Intuition, close to the ESTJ personality makes be a good coach.

With regards to the balance, here it is a great feedback from one of my former team members: "The manager vs leader equilibrium is at risk when he overloads himself with tasks that could be assigned to others", which I often did when things got sour.


Question 2. A leader is responsible for creating the vision associated with his/her part of theorganisation. What exactly is the role of the leader with respect to creating the vision?

On a trip to Rome this year we took a guided tour in English. The guide was holding up a pink umbrella so the tourists can easily locate her in the crowd. For the duration of the guided tour, people from various countries had something that rallied them, kept the group together. Only the fact that we were on the same guided tour made us start talking to people from all over the world that we were not introduced to, cracking jokes and making sure the peers are not separated from the group. We did not care about nationality, gender, age or skin colour we did not even knew each-other's name. One look at the guide holding the pink umbrella and was enough to remember what we were there for. Almost got stranded once from the group once in a crowd, lost sight of the other people, but hey, there was the pink umbrella. In organisations, the tour guide is the leader and the pink umbrella is the vision. When the leader is not there, the vision is the quick and instant reminderof the common goal. Recent studies on the importance of a shared vision "found that a vision provides orientation and meaning for leaders and their teams. It helps them to focus their energies and engage in the transformation of practice. However, it is very important for leaders to monitor closely the energy level of teams and the organisation, in order to maintain the balance between innovation/transformation and relaxation/recovery" because the use of a vision "generated a great deal of enthusiasm, which had the potential to overload the organisation through taking on more than could reasonably be accomplished" (Martin et all, 2014).The vision can be summarized by the Napoleon's quote “A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of coloured ribbon” where "soldier" is any person and "a bit of coloured ribbon" is a great vision.Can organizations function without a vision? If the organization is relatively small, the people knoweach-other well, or the goal simple, easy or well-structured, things can work without vision. People build houses because they needed shelter; ad hoc sport teams can win matches; there was no vision in the first manufactures and factories, and yet they were quite complex. My father worked for 20 years at an agricultural company built from scratch that currently cultivates 25000ha of land, the company was even the 3rd in size national-wide for several years without the use of a vision; the core team had worked in the past for 20-30 years, knew very well both each-other and the business field, had values and common experiences that substituted the vision; when disruptive technologies and foreign companies appeared, the size of the company started to shrink, and now struggles for survival. From a certain level of size and complexity of the organization and the changing speed of the constraints of the environment in which it lives, the vision becomes a must.

In the 2 years while I supported my first vision, I noticed both positive and negative aspects. People that did not believed it possible for the team to achieve it, or considered themselves unable to contribute and threatened by it either fought against it or left the team. The ones that understood andbelieved in the vision, and also in their capacity needed less supervision and rarely had dilemmas when taking decisions; this gave them the opportunity to choose from a wide range of choices and also innovate more, as opposed to periodically asking me what to do. One colleague was burned outfrom overworking and disappointed that the organization was not ready yet for some of the features we were implementing and resigned.

To sum up, the role of the leader would be to gather the facts from the environment, inside and outside of the organization, sum their essence of a path to achieve success that should be presented in a vision or mission statement, identify and promote shared values (belonging to both organizationand individuals) that would support the vision, build a strategy to achieve the vision (ideally assisted by team members), identify and ensure the best skills the team members need for achievingsuccess, ensure consistent communication between all layers of the organization, monitor progress


using relevant performance metrics. (Hannon, 2014).

No matter how successful the vision and its implementation might be, to avoid becoming obsolete and off-balance, the continuous revision should occur, since the environment changes constantly.(Ready et al, 2008)


Question 3. How does the effective leader communicate this vision?

The way of communicating the vision should not be done by speech, facts and numbers alone, but pictures, drawings, appealing to emotions and shared values. Some studies claim that the leaders that proved most effective at communicating were the ones following the why, how, what principle. Where the vision stands for the why things are done, the how stands for the strategy of implementation, and the what means the actions that each one of the group members need to do to accomplish the vision (Sinek, 2009).

Psychological studies indicate that the success of persuasion of people to accept an idea transmitted through a speech depend on the following key factors : the emitter, the message itself, and the audience. The emitter needs to be credible, like a leading expert in the field, but also interesting at emotional level. The message itself needs to be interesting, and adapted to the situation : when the receivers agree forehand, only enumerating the facts is enough, when they are strongly against, prosand cons need to be addressed alike. A bilateral speech is also increasing resistance to propaganda. The audience matters, so the form of the message should be adapted accordingly : people with keen interest in the topic itself will be more focused on the message and the facts, while the others will bemore focused on oratory skills, language, clothes or other marginal aspects; age group is a key factor, young people being willing to change opinion faster than older one; emotional state of the public is also important, a jolly audience will tend to avoid being to critical to a speech with the potential to change the mood in a negative way(Amar, 2008). When preparing to communicate a vision the audience should be considered and the speech, dress-code and mood of the leader should be adapted accordingly. There are two types of communication, descending (from management to employee) and ascending (from employee to management). When communication about the vision and strategy are only usingthe written descending communication, there will be no feedback in the audience, or chances to ask for clarifications. Using verbal communication to supplement the written one, and allowing ascending communication will increase engagement and effectiveness in implementing the actions. When leaders do not receive information they may not have enough data to address real challenges and concerns, resulting in a loss of innovation and optimization and in most extreme cases a parallelcommunication, where neither of the parties understand or know why the other is acting the way it is (Panisoara, 2006).

The way to improve the vision communication process would be by displaying it on a wall so the entire team can see it, adding a logo or background picture as a constant reminder. Setting the correct expectations in terms of benefits size and achieving time is also important. Paying more attention to the reaction the vision creates to the key people and mitigating the differences of standpoints when implementing it. Choosing a representative refrain and associate it with the visionwill have a tremendous impact on people from various cultures.

Vision is the innovation in a company, so unless the vision is able to draw enough followers, reach critical mass in order to self-sustain and creates further growth the adoption fails. The Everett Rogers' theory of Diffusion of Innovations, states that the innovation must be widely adopted in order to self-sustain and gain marketshare.


To push things forward with the engagement in supporting the vision, most successful leaders are empowering people within the organization to find ways to implement various areas of the vision.Increasing the broad innovation throughput is accomplished by bringing together representatives from various roles and areas of the organization, so the innovation will have a broad impact and with most aspects covered. Furthermore, the innovators should have enough means to implement the changes, technical skills, resources and leadership support. Alignment between company's vision, processes and subunits is important.

Most of all, the continuous revision of the vision and strategy is needed to keep in touch with the reality. (Ready et al, 2008)


Question 4. How do you create and communicate a vision for your own team and how could you improve the way in which you do this? Illustrate your answer with examples from your own experience.

With regards to the vision creation process, I learned that there is a discovery process about what is being requested to from the organisation from both outside (customers) and inside (members) pointsof view in terms of concrete goals to be achieved. The next step is to understand the culture and values of the community the vision is addressing to. When analysing the motto's of various successful companies, I noticed this is usually a simple sentence, easy to understand and most importantly easy to remember. I've seen so-called visions that were complex phrases, I would cite them, but I do not even remember what was all about. So my first vision, "always available, always upgradable" had the purpose to automate end-to-end software upgrades on a 99.9% available software service. The purpose, measure of success and strategy were inconsistently explained and progress seldom reviewed. It was somewhat clear to some members of the team, but peer teams were asking if the members of our team will always be available to solve issues. Furthermore, I failed to sell the vision to the upper management and most of peer teams. Although we had consistent progress, the team was demotivated, and the peer teams were frustrated by our constant challenge to adapt to the automation changes.Based on my previous experience and further reading, some lessons were learned, so here it is a small summary of my Sonny Automation volunteer-based project.

The purpose : Reduce the time taken to build software environments using automation.

Shared values :- Motto : Humans think uniquely, machines work repetitively. It means being smart lazy : think more, do creative work so you can perform less repetitive tasks.- The name of the project, as well as the mascot, Sonny, comes from a fictional character from the "I, Robot" movie whose most interesting statement is "I am unique". It represents the freedom to be yourself and think outside the box.- Volunteer work, selfless collaboration without immediate material reward, non-contributors can benefit free of charge.- Our Sonny mascot and the motto appear on all project's slide-shows.

Strategy :- Build a pilot project - Automate a flagship product- Iterate on a next product- Modular and flexible solution- Build virtual scrum teams : Core central team and dedicated teams per each product, each Product team decides what is best for it.- Agile development methodology, with small, modular increments that work- Sell the product through peer-to-peer communication and evangelize spreading demo videos

Measures of success :- Number of project tasks closed weekly/monthly/overall- Time gained by automation versus manual deployment- Number of software combinations deployed by the solution- Number of Products deployed by the solution- Number of version for each Product deployed by the solution


- Number of users / adopters- Automation percentage- Number of organizations adopting the tool (Customers/Pre-sales/Project/Support/Development)

To improve the vision creation and maintenance process would be to periodically query both the team and the clients what would be the their current view of it. It may happen that the environment changes, as well as the needs of the team or the customers, and the project could easily become obsolete or out-of-sync. To make sure the team is engaged, I'm constantly enforcing the fact that theproject should help them the way they see fit, implementation decisions are taken by them accordingly. Considering the Aristotle's model of communication,

the best I'm good at is the Pathos, appealing to their emotion and imagination, depicting the personal gains in terms of personal skills and satisfaction. I'm improving the Ethos method, increasing my credibility and their trust by being a reliable team member, helping whenever possible. Also adding the Logos by presenting logical arguments, key facts and numbers.


Question 5. Consider the four leadership strategies:-• Ethical Leadership• Transformational Leadership• Transactional Leadership• Situational Leadershipa) Which is the most appropriate at this time and why?i. For you?ii. For the top team in your organisation?b) Which of these four leadership strategies would you apply in order to benefit your team more?

Practising the Ethical Leadership is about constant respecting the values, views and opinions of others, believing in fairness and equality of rights, being open and honest as well as avoidance of the power abuse, which have as a result the ability to empower people in their line of expertise. Transformational Leadership is best summarized by Napoleon's quote "a leader is a dealer of hope".Selling the hope in a good vision, while harnessing the energies, frustrations and dreams of followers to build that vision, and also enriching their lives, skills, and state of mind. While using Transactional Leadership people are getting paid, told what to do, rewarded when doing it right, punished when failing to do so, and the organization will function. (Rabinowitz, 2014) One method provides excellent results in certain situations and huge flops in others. The Situational Leadership Theory Adapting the leader's attitude depending on the follower expertise, willingness and state of mind : directing when the expertise is none, guiding when intermediate, supporting when good and delegating when excellent; with regards to the willingness, selling when it is low, orcoaching when it is high. (CMI Unit 5013,2014)Management styles are best used based on the situation that arise, like the Swiss Army knife varioustools :

At this time a combination of Situational and Transformational Leadership styles are most appropriate for me. Actually, since my personal vision is "growing people" the Transformational one, by deliver results with a team while growing the team members along the way is my favourite. The project I'm running at the moment has no official resources or formal authority. No resources interms of people's time is not allocated officially, and no formal authority since I'm on a technical position. I have identified a need within the organisation, which is at the bottom of the list in terms of priority at top-management level. The management will be happy to have it as long as there is no cost attached. The solution that is being built consists in building an automation software that will drastically improve engineers' efficiency, with a chance to become a product to be sold to customers. To kick-start the project, I had to use the Transformational Leadership to create a vision :"Humans think uniquely, machines work repetitively", choose a name for the project, that matches the vision, sell the idea to support engineers that would like to contribute. Selling meant not only


the benefits of having the product itself, but also unlocking some hidden or unused potential within the team. A list of rewards was also painted : be a part of something great and gain self-respect and visibility in the company, be able to use, improve or learn skills less used of the daily work. For people that wanted to pursue certain career paths, not knowing which way to go and how, roles were assigned inside the project team that would enable them to practice/improve their potential skills and find if it suits them or not on the long term; suggestion were made on career paths and trainings that would match both their aspirations and project's needs. This way one colleague decided to build a Developer career path another one a People Management one, attending corresponding trainings, and four other colleagues gained more knowledge about the main job specific skills, improving their efficiency in the daily work. The agreement is that anyone can benefit from the project, and whoever wants to contribute is free to volunteer when and how much itwould like, no deadlines. This is where the Situational Leadership fell into place : two very good technical colleagues and also highly motivated were delegated to build the application being given only the high-level structure on how the solution would look like. The colleagues that were testing the application, highly skilled in those aspects, but with low energy/time/interest were supported and praised publicly whenever they were contributing to the project. The colleagues really wanted to contribute to the project and had no or little skills at the beginning were coached until becoming autonomous. To summarize, my approach in terms of the Situational Leadership in integrating a new a team member is by practical experience : "1. See how it is done by others" "2. Do it with someone watching over your shoulder" "3. do it with documentation and someone available to answer questions" "4. Do it alone. Is there a way do it better?".

Since my company is such a big one, by the top team in my organisation I will assume the management team of the Line of Business - Support. A support organisation is mostly built like an Emergency Department in a hospital. Support cases are triaged, assigned priorities and grouped the type of conditions, then treated accordingly. Employees work in shifts and/or on call to cover 24x7 availability. The goal is to treat the issue as soon as possible. This leaves room for little innovation at global level and low tolerance for mistakes. Rules are strict, rigid, and many, so the TransactionalLeadership should be the main approach. On the other hand, the support organisation brings together people from all over the world, as employees and customers, which leads to many cultural differences. Only an Ethical Leadership, with the respect for the values dignity of others, no matter how different they are, treating everyone fairly, with consideration and putting the trust in the capacity of each person to overcome the challenges can hold such a structure together. Here is an example from my past experience when Ethical Leadership failed to keep the cohesion of a multinational organisation together. First failure was from the Nordic European management to treat the Eastern European and Indian colleagues with respect, and there were a lot of cases of people looking down on people from a country less economically developed. This led to a self-sufficient attitude from the Nordic teams, and a drop in the work quality from their end, and the resignation of quality people from the Eastern teams. The same type of failure was seen from the Eastern European with respect to the colleagues from India, with similar effects in morale and resignations. Furthermore, teams were on adversarial terms North/East/India with little cooperation and frequent blame-games. Another failure of Ethical Leadership was in romantic affairs between manager and employee that resulted in preferential treatment and decrease of morale and efficiency from the team and some peer teams. Another unethical example was when one person bullied a colleague on daily basis, in open-office, making everyone feel very bad. Since the victim's manager was the bully's spouse, the victim received no support from the manager, and furthermore, the manager was acting on the spouse behalf instead of a fair assessment of the situation. This made a lot of people feel unsafe at their workplace, wondering "what if I'm next?", and eventually find other employers.


Now an example of a successful Ethical Leadership that I saw and contributed to as a Line Manager, working together with a good Project Manager on a cross-functional project. There was an outsourced peer team that was as a rule not given the freedom to take technical decisions, only receiving tasks without the opportunity to challenge the overall process. The cultural background(India) was also of a team where bosses are doing all the thinking and decision making. It took about 3 months of Daily Scrum meeting with some of the team members in which we treatedeach-other with respect, and kept challenging them to think and come back with solutions of their own, bridging the cultural differences gap. During this time the project did not advance too much. Suddenly, one colleague from India, Saby, started to actually make tremendous progress and come with great solutions, dragging the entire team with him. The project was a success, Saby was appointed Team Lead, I gained informal authority over and great response times from Saby's team. The most unexpected gain for myself was that my team members from India (same office as Saby's team) that I couldn't reach out to that well until then started to communicate a lot easier to me as well.

The Ethical Leadership would be the most beneficial for me. At the moment the team members are all from the same country, and the next step in the natural growth of the project is to become global.This would mean that cultural aspects should be considered when gathering volunteers from other locations. Another component would be to put the good of the team before my own interests : the team members put their trust in me and time plus energy in this project. All the decisions should be taken by considering this aspects, like not braking any organisational rules, or leaving this position/projectbefore being mature enough. The direction in which the project is going is currently being decided by two people alone, me as Product Owner and the technical architect. When the project and the team will grow, there will be one core team that will connect several other teams, that should start deciding on their own areas, while being in sync with the others. This would mean that cultural gapsneed to be bridged, decisions taken respecting other people needs for fairness, situational ethics, welcome totally different feedback, disruptive technical approaches, encouraging leadership in others. All of these are only possible by using the Ethical Leadership.


Question 6. How does personal energy, self belief and commitment impact on leadership styles? Give individual examples to illustrate your answer.

The personal energy is a mix of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energies, with direct impact on the capacity to achieve things as an individual. A leader is expected to be the role model followed by the others. Most often this translates into working more, coping with stressful situations and providing spiritual strength to followers. The Transformational Leadership seems to be needing most energy since the adversities are both from the outside world, and from the team. The resistance to change is one of the biggest challenges and the leaders need a lot of energy and resilience to overcome it, both in themselves and in others. Standing up to principles and reinforcing them over and over again is energy consuming as well. Genghis-Khan said about a general "no one has rarer gifts. But, as he feels neither hunger nor thirst, he believes that his officersand soldiers do not suffer from such things. That is why he is not fitted for high command." Since my energy needs recharge quite often, I'm always planning things to take the least amount of time, considering the energies of the people and means to recharge them when needed : a break when physically tired, a joke when grim, hope when in despair, etc.

The self belief is the confidence in oneself and one's ability to achieve things. A person with low self belief will fail in applying the Ethical Leadership, but will be able to apply Transactional Leadership. Empowering someone else needs a lot of mutual trust, while people with low self belieflack confidence in themselves and do not trust others either, keeping a climate of mistrust. I experienced this at one of my former workplaces where a director had a huge mistrust in people, and spent a lot of the time monitoring people through surveillance cameras. He demanded unconditioned obedience at the expense of creativity, common sense and personal choices independence. This mistrust was spread throughout the entire organization, people were more concerned of covering their backs instead of performing their job. A high self belief leader could loose the sense of reality, demanding impossible targets, while offering little support to followers. One of my former managers kept imposing a 1,4,16,32,64 growth ratio every 4 months while the achieved growth was 1,2,4,8,16. He never acknowledged the feedback that more resources would be needed to achieve a higher growth ratio, so the result was team's attrition followed by growth stop; with regards to the Situational Leadership approach, he was only able to apply the directing and delegating approaches.

The commitment is willingness to give your time and energy to something that you believe in. Practising the Ethical Leadership is about constant respecting the values, views and opinions of others, believing in fairness and equality of rights, being open and honest as well as avoidance of the power abuse. Transformational Leadership is best summarized by Napoleon's quote "a leader is a dealer of hope". Selling the hope in a good vision, while harnessing the energies, frustrations and dreams of followers to build that vision, and also enriching their lives, skills, and state of mind. While using Transactional Leadership people are getting paid, told what to do, rewarded when doing it right, punished when failing to do so, and the organization will function.One method provides excellent results in certain situations and huge flops in others. The Situational Leadership Theory Adapting the leader's attitude depending on the follower expertise, willingness and state of mind : directing when the expertise is none, guiding when intermediate, supporting when good and delegating when excellent; with regards to the willingness, selling when it is low, orcoaching when it is high. In my current project, there are times when team members cease to contribute due to high workload, demotivation in face of the challenges, etc. Since I'm committed tothe success, as long as the technical leader, we seldom work in our free time such as week-ends or stay several hours overtime to push things to the next step; this leads to the other team members to resume efforts as well, without being told to, as an acknowledgement of our efforts.


Question 7. How can you improve as a manager and a leader? What specific development actions will you take and how will you review this?

As a manager an impacting weakness was that my inability to sell the team to upper management, assuming that results speak from themselves. The other weaknesses being the bursts of anger and being over-talkative sometimes. Here are the goals set to overcome these weaknesses.A. Improve my team's visibility inside the organisation- Measures of success :

Number of users adopting the toolNumber of company awards gained by the team's membersHierarchical Levels of management supporting the projectHo much of my reporting appears in the high-level reporting.

- Specific actions :Assess the company's needs and make sure the team meets as much needs as

possible.Emphasize the results in periodical reports, preferably with graphical touches to

illustrate the achievements to meet company's needs and the challenges we overcame. Since this alone failed in the past, I should also request feedback for the reports.

Involve the team members in finding ways to merchandise team's achievements : supplying with new ideas, preparing videos, adding project's logo to the e-mail signatures, peer-to-peer evangelism of achievements, etc.- A review process :

Quarterly assessment of Measures of Success.- Who will support this: My manager.

This approach has as: advantages high visibility for the team, increased motivation for performers; disadvantage low performers may be even more demotivated. However, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Care is taken that the ones contributing less are not judged and thanked for no matter how small contribution.

B. Better management of stressful moments

Bursts of anger, like any event has causes and effects. Managing them consists in understanding and eliminating the root causes, coupled with repairing the consequences as much as possible if they do happen.

Why did I outburst in my former job :- high workload and a lot of overtime- inefficient communication of the goals and priorities from management;- imposed targets and deadlines instead of agreed ones- toxic work environment

The following actions were taken from my part and will be used in the future :- sessions of therapy to get to the root cause of the outbursts- take more time off; show my manager studies about drop in productivity when employees are tired and stressed- insist on a clear list of goals and priorities- ask for 360° feedback then sum up the team's role, challenges and goals to the peer teams and high management


- find a rewarding activity or goal at work that soothes the toxicity pain; this actually made me crystallize my personal vision "Growing People".

Actions that would have improved the situation and that I will take if similar situations appear :- avoid giving any reply when furious or direct the anger towards the situation rather than aperson- publicly apologize for the outbursts- insist on a two-way agreement of deadlines and targets with an emphasis on the impact of short-notice deadlines to the daily operations

C. Give the opportunity to introvert and/or timid people to express themselves - Measures of success :

How many introverts can have a line longer than 5 minutes when involved in a meeting organized by me

How much did the introverts shared of their thoughts- Specific actions :

Time-boxed token-holding rules for speech in joint meetings, with introverts speaking in the second half.

Using the "coffee filter" technique, that is deliberately keeping my mouth shut and leaving a couple of minutes of silence during 1-2-1 talks.

Use active listening to draw out more information and make them feel listened.Send a meeting agenda so introverts can come prepared.Ensure the possibility of reply by e-mail post meeting.

- A review process :Ask introvert/timid people how easy they find to share their thoughts around me.

- Who will support this : An introvert friend is coaching me on this topic.

Furthermore, this is the continuous improvement plan of my leadership&management skills :

- Measures of success : Number of articles/books read or course attended per yearNumber of new habits/skills used per yearSize of managed team(s)

- Specific actions :Read at least one article per month or read a book / attend a training every every 6

months.Assessment of items that can help my personal improvement. Implement at least

one of the learned items in the daily routine using the plan–do–check–adjust technique.- A review process :

Quarterly assessment of the readings, trainings and applied skills.- Who will support this :

The training plan is included in the yearly evaluation by my current employer. There is a quota of 1 training per quarter, and I agreed with my manager to split it in half : job-specific and soft-skills trainings. The training goal for 2015 is already met, and also agreedfor the 2 trainings for 2016.

Whenever I'm facing a dilemma or a complex situation, I'm contacting with my support group of life-lasting friends, having different personalities and work backgrounds. We're


providing each-other feedback, as honest and painful as possible, and also share our knowledge and experience on similar cases.


Appendix I : Sources

1) Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices Published: 1974Author: Peter DruckerPage 7-9 : http://youth-portal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Peter-F-Drucker-Management-Rev-Ed.pdf

2) Incentives and Creativity: Evidence from the Academic Life Sciences, December 30, 2010Pierre Azoulay MIT and NBER Sloan School of Management 50 Memorial Drive, E52-555 Cambridge, MA 02142

Joshua S. Graff ZivinUCSD and NBER IRPS9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla, CA 92093

Gustavo MansoMITSloan School of Management50 Memorial Drive, E52-446Cambridge, MA 02142http://pazoulay.scripts.mit.edu/docs/hhmi.pdf

3) Drive, the Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, 2009Dan Pink, http://www.academia.edu/7362816/Daniel_H_Pink_Drive_the_Surprising_Truth_about_What_Motivates_Us_html

4) What Leaders Really DoWhat Leaders Really Do, Harvard Business Review article, 2001John P. Kotter, https://hbr.org/2001/12/what-leaders-really-do

5) Designing Matrix Organizations that Actually Work: How IBM, Procter & Gamble and Others Design for Success (Jossey-Bass Business & Management) – November 10, 2008Jay R. Galbraithhttp://samples.sainsburysebooks.co.uk/9780470374078_sample_410514.pdf

6)The importance of inspiring a shared visionJacqueline Martin*, Brendan McCormack, Donna Fitzsimons and Rebecca Spirig*Corresponding author: University Hospital Basel, SwitzerlandEmail: [email protected] for publication: 25th June 2014

http://youth-portal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Peter-F-Drucker-Management-Rev-Ed.pdf

http://youth-portal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Peter-F-Drucker-Management-Rev-Ed.pdf

http://samples.sainsburysebooks.co.uk/9780470374078_sample_410514.pdf

https://hbr.org/2001/12/what-leaders-really-do

http://www.academia.edu/7362816/Daniel_H_Pink_Drive_the_Surprising_Truth_about_What_Motivates_Us_html

http://www.academia.edu/7362816/Daniel_H_Pink_Drive_the_Surprising_Truth_about_What_Motivates_Us_html


http://www.fons.org/Resources/Documents/Journal/Vol4No2/IPDJ_0402_04.pdf

7) Transformational change, Training Journal article, 2014,Veronica Hannon https://www.trainingjournal.com/articles/feature/transformational-change

8) Enabling Bold Visions,MIT Sloan Management Review article, 2008Douglas A. Ready and Jay A. Congerhttp://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/enabling-bold-visions/

9)How great leaders inspire action, Ted Talks speech, 2009Simon Sinek

10) 50 petites experiences de psychologie du manager pour mieux reussir au travail, 2008Translated in Romanian and published at Polirom, 2009Patrick Amarpages 115 - 122http://www.polirom.ro/catalog/carte/50-de-experimente-privind-psihologia-managerului-cum-sa-reusesti-la-locul-de-munc-3362/

11) Integrarea in Organizatii, Pasi spre un management de succes (Integration in Organizations, Steps to Successful Management), Polirom, 2006Georgeta Panisoarapages 161 - 185http://www.polirom.ro/catalog/carte/integrarea-in-organizatii-pasi-spre-un-management-de-succe-2448/

12) Leadership and Management, Chapter13 Orienting Ideas in Leadership, Community Tool Box, 2014Phil Rabinowitz http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/leadership/leadership-idea

13) CMI Unit 5013 : Leadership Practice v1.14, 2014DDA Consulting International

http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/leadership/leadership-idea

http://www.polirom.ro/catalog/carte/integrarea-in-organizatii-pasi-spre-un-management-de-succe-2448/

http://www.polirom.ro/catalog/carte/integrarea-in-organizatii-pasi-spre-un-management-de-succe-2448/

http://www.polirom.ro/catalog/carte/50-de-experimente-privind-psihologia-managerului-cum-sa-reusesti-la-locul-de-munc-3362/

http://www.polirom.ro/catalog/carte/50-de-experimente-privind-psihologia-managerului-cum-sa-reusesti-la-locul-de-munc-3362/

http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/enabling-bold-visions/

https://www.trainingjournal.com/articles/feature/transformational-change

http://www.fons.org/Resources/Documents/Journal/Vol4No2/IPDJ_0402_04.pdf