Leadership

Evans and Lindsay Chapter 5

Strong leadership, especially from the senior management of an organization, is absolutely necessary to develop and sustain a quality-based culture.

What is leadership?

Leadership is the ability to positively influence people and systems under one's authority to have a meaningful impact and achieve important results.

Leaders may seek to motivate employees and develop enthusiasm for quality with rhetoric, but actions speak louder than words.

Leaders create clear and visible quality values, and integrate these values into the organization's strategy.

What is strategy?

Strategy is the pattern of decisions that determines and reveals a company's goals, policies, and plans to meet the needs of its stakeholders. Through an effective strategy, a business creates a sustainable competitive advantage.

LEADERSHIP FOR QUALITY

Senior executives play many important roles as leaders. These include

1. Defining and communicating business directions.
2. Ensuring that goals and expectations are met.
3. Reviewing business performance and taking appropriate action.
4. Creating an enjoyable work environment that promotes creativity, innovation, and continual improvement.
5. Soliciting input and feedback from customers.
6. Ensuring that employees are effective contributors to the business.
7. Motivating, inspiring, and energizing employees.
8. Recognizing employee contributions.
9. Providing honest feedback.

Leadership also applies to individuals, teams, and the organization as a whole.

Examples of individual leadership

Individual leadership is revealed through:

1. Maintaining the focus and discipline to consistently complete jobs
2. Being proactive in identifying and solving problems
3. Working for win-win agreements
4. Making continuous learning a personal habit

Examples of Team leadership

Team leadership is seen by:

1. Making those around you successful
2. Removing barriers to team performance
3. Establishing good lines of communication
4. Resolving problems

Examples of Organizational leadership

Organizational leadership is manifest in:

1. Clear values
2. Creating a competitive advantage
3. Customer and market focus
4. Continual learning.

Effective leadership requires five core leadership skills:

1. Vision
2. Empowerment
3. Intuition
4. Self-understanding
5. Value congruence

What are the 5 core leadership skills?

Vision

Leaders are visionaries; they manage for the future, not the past (think back to the first of Deming's 14 Points).

Vision is crucial during times of change. Leaders recognize the radical organizational changes taking place today as opportunities to move closer to total quality.

They create mental and verbal pictures of desirable future states and share these visions with their organizational partners, including customers, suppliers, and employees.

Empowerment

Leaders empower employees to:

1. Assume ownership of problems or opportunities
2. Be proactive in implementing improvements and making decisions in the best interests of the organization.

Empowerment threatens many managers who are accustomed to wielding their power, often coercively through fear of punishment or sanctions.

What is True Power?

True power is not based upon formal position and authority, but rather aids in spreading power downward and outward and developing leadership at lower levels of the organization.

Intuition

Leaders are not afraid to follow their intuition. Even in the face of uncertainty and change, they must anticipate the future and must be prepared to make difficult decisions that will help the organization to be successful.

Self-understanding

Self-understanding requires the ability to look at one's self and then identify relationships with employees and within the organization.

It requires an examination of one's weaknesses as well as strengths.

Value congruence

Value congruence occurs when leaders integrate their values into the company's management system.

Values are basic assumptions and beliefs about the nature of the business, mission, people, and relationships of an organization.

Values include trust and respect for individuals, openness, teamwork, integrity, and commitment to quality.

They become standards by which choices are made, and create an organizational structure in which quality is a routine part of activities and decisions throughout the organization.

Employees quickly recognize leaders who do not apply the values they espouse or who do so inconsistently. This incongruence causes employees to constantly doubt management's message.

Leading Practices

True leaders promote quality and business performance excellence in several ways:

1. They create a strategic vision and clear quality values that serve as a basis for business

decisions at all levels of the organization.

• Rhetoric cannot stand alone; leaders must demonstrate commitment to the vision and values.

• Successful leaders continually promote their vision throughout the organization using all forms of communication: talks, newsletters, seminars, electronic mail, and video.

2. They create and sustain a leadership system and environment for quality excellence.

• Leaders provide an environment with few bureaucratic rules and procedures. Such an environment encourages managers to experiment and take risks, permits employees to talk openly about problems, supports teamwork, and promotes employees' understanding of their responsibilities for quality.

• Leaders ensure that middle managers and supervisors understand their principal roles and responsibilities for quality.

• Managers at all levels must communicate and reinforce the organization's quality values to the entire work- force.

3. They set high expectations.

• A leader can inspire people to do things they do not believe they can do.

• To promote such 'stretch goals," leaders provide the resources and support necessary to meet them-especially training.

4. They demonstrate substantial personal commitment and involvement in quality, often with a missionary-like enthusiasm.

• Leaders display a certain passion about quality and actively live the values. By 'walking the talk," leaders serve as role models for the whole organization.

• Leaders also evaluate and improve the effectiveness of their personal leadership processes.

• Leaders apply quality tools to improve their management processes.

5. They integrate societal responsibilities and community involvement into their business practices.

• Leadership responsibilities include promoting ethical behavior and the protection of public health, safety, and the environment that may be affected by a company's products and services.

LEADERSHIP THEORIES

List the five perspectives from which Leadership Theory can be studied?

1. Trait
2. Behavior
3. Situational (contingency)
4. Role
5. Emerging theories

Trait Approach

The trait approach involves discovering how to be a leader by examining the characteristics and methods of recognized leaders.

They were right-brained and left-brained, tall and short, fat and thin, articulate and inarticulate, assertive and retiring, dressed for success and dressed for failure, participative and autocratic.'

What can we conclude as a result of Bennis and Nanus's findings?

That this approach did not reveal any useful information!

Bennis and Nanus also discussed the need to lead others and manage oneself, thus separating the concept of leadership from management.

Behavioral Approach

The behavioral approach attempts to determine the types of leadership behaviors that lead to successful task performance and employee satisfaction.

Effective leadership depends on a proper blending of an employee relationship-centered approach to employees' needs with a production-centered approach to getting work done.

17 leadership competencies that people most often associate with leadership:"

1. Setting or sharing a vision
2. Managing a change
3. Focusing on the customer
4. Dealing with individuals
5. Supporting teams and groups
6. Sharing information
7. Solving problems, making decisions
8. Managing business processes
9. Managing projects
10. Displaying technical skills
11. Managing time and resources
12. Taking responsibility
13. Taking initiative beyond job requirements
14. Handling emotions
15. Displaying professional ethics
16. Showing compassion
17. Making credible presentations

Douglas McGregor's Theory X-Theory Y model"

McGregor explicitly defined contrasting assumptions that managers hold about workers and how those assumptions tend to influence the manager's behavior.

Blake-Mouton Managerial Grid model.

Blake and Mouton defined five managerial styles that combined varying degrees of production-oriented and people-oriented concerns. Their contribution was to suggest that a high concern for both production and people was needed and that effective managers could be trained to develop a balanced concern for both.

Contingency or Situational Approach

The contingency or situational approach holds that there is no universal approach to leadership; rather, effective leadership behavior depends on situational factors that may change over time.

Current leadership theory is based heavily on this approach, which states that effective leadership depends on three variables:

• the leader
• the led
• the situation.

List 2 contingency theories concerning leadership?

Victor H. Vroom and Phillip W. Yetton's supervisory contingency model

Their model prescribes an appropriate leadership style based on various contingencies in a decision-making situation. The model centers on the problem-solving function of leadership, and is based on the theory that the three major concerns of a leader in solving problems are

1. the quality of the decision
2. the degree of acceptance of the decision by the subordinate(s)
3. the time frame within which the decision must be made.

House's Path-Goal model

Robert House developed his Path-Goal Leadership model based on expectancy theory."

House's model states that the appropriate path to high performance and high job satisfaction is dependent on:

1. Employee needs and abilities
2. The degree of structure of tasks to be performed
3. The leadership style that is selected by the leader

Effective leaders choose one of four styles (achievement-oriented, directive, participative, or supportive) that matches the situational contingencies and helps team members along the path to their highest-value goals.

The Hershey and Blanchard model relates the requirement for directive or supportive behavior of the leader to team members' readiness (relative maturity) to take responsibility and participate in decision making-"

Role Approach

The role approach suggests that leaders perform certain roles in order to be effective.

The role approach is similar to the trait and behavioral approaches, but also takes into account situational factors.

Thus, leaders at upper levels of the organization, or in large firms, may frequently be called upon to play the role of figurehead or liaison person between the firm and its outside environment.

At a lower level, where spans of control extend widely, motivational, coordinative, or disturbance handling roles may be needed for effective leadership.

Emerging Theories

Emerging theories enhance or enlarge current theory by attempting to answer questions raised, but not answered, by traditional contingency approaches.

List 2 emerging theories concerning leadership?

Attributional theory

Attributional theory states that leaders' judgment on how to deal with subordinates in a specific situation is based on their attributions of the internal or external causes of the behaviors of their followers.

Transformational Leadership

Transformational Leadership Theory, explains the impact of leadership in a TQ environment. According to this model, leaders adopt many of the behaviors discussed earlier in this chapter.

They take a long-term perspective, focus on customers, promote a shared vision and values, work to stimulate their organizations intellectually, invest in training, take some risks, and treat employees as individuals.

Some empirical evidence suggests that transformational leadership is strongly correlated with lower turnover, higher productivity and quality, and higher employee satisfaction than other approaches.

Quality Implications of Leadership Theories

Read

CREATING THE LEADERSHIP SYSTEM

What is a leadership system?

The leadership system refers to how leadership is exercised throughout a company.

This includes:

• How key decisions are made, communicated, and carried out at all levels.
• The formal and informal mechanisms for leadership development used to select leaders and managers, to develop their leadership skills, and to provide guidance and examples regarding behaviors and practices.

An effective leadership system creates clear values that reflect the requirements of company stakeholders, and sets high expectations for performance and performance improvements.

It builds loyalties and teamwork based upon these shared values, encourages initiative and risk taking, and subordinates organization to purpose and function.

It also includes mechanisms for leaders' self-examination and improvement.

Steering Teams

The use of steering teams of senior managers, which Juran terms quality councils, is prevalent in total quality organizations.

Quality and Organizational Structure

The effectiveness of any leadership system depends in part on its organizational structure-the clarification of authority, responsibility, reporting lines, and performance standards among individuals at each level of the organization.

Traditional organizations tend to develop structures that help them to maintain stability. They tend to be highly structured, both in terms of rules and regulations, as well as the height of the "corporate ladder," with seven or more layers of managers between the CEO and the first-line worker.

In contrast, organizations in the rapidly changing environments characteristic of modern organizations have to build flexibility into their organization structures. Hence, they tend to have fewer written rules and regulations and flatter organizational structures.

What are the factors impacting how work is organized?

Factors impacting how work is organized:

Company operational and organizational guidelines. Standard practices that have developed over the firm's history often dictate how a company organizes and operates.

Management style. The management team operates in a manner unique to a given company. For example, management style might be formal or informal, or democratic or autocratic. If the organization operates in a highly structured, formal atmosphere, organizing a quality effort around informal meetings would probably meet with little success.

Customer influences. Formal specifications or administrative controls may be required by customers, particularly governmental agencies. Thus, the quality organization needs to understand and respond to these requirements.

Company size. Large companies have the ability to maintain formal systems and records, whereas smaller companies may not.

Diversity and complexity of product line. An organization suitable for the manufacture of a small number of highly sophisticated products may differ dramatically from an organization that produces a high volume of standard goods.

Stability of the product line. Stable product lines generate economies of scale that influence supervision, corrective action, and other quality-related issues. Frequent changes in products necessitate more control and commensurate changes to the quality system.

Financial stability. Quality managers need to recognize that their efforts must fit within the overall budget of the firm.

Availability of personnel. The lack of certain skills may require other personnel, such as supervisors, to assume duties they ordinarily would not be assigned.

What are the 4 types of organizational structures?

Three basic types of organizational structures (most companies use variations or combinations)

• The line organization
• The line and staff organization
• The matrix organization.

The Line Organization

The line organization is a functional form, with departments that are responsible for marketing, finance, and operations.

The Line and Staff Organization

Line departments carry out the functions of marketing, finance, and production for the organization. Staff personnel, including quality managers and technical specialists, assist the line managers in carrying out their jobs by providing technical assistance and advice.

The line and staff organization is the most prevalent type of structure for medium-sized to large firms.

The Matrix Organization

The matrix type of organization was developed for use in situations where large, complex projects are designed and carried out, such as defense weapons systems or large construction projects.

In a matrix- type organization, each project has a project manager and each department that is providing personnel to work on the various projects has a technical or administrative manager.

Cross-functional Teams

The organizational structures of many organizations are built around high-performance, cross-functional teams as shown in Figure 6.3.

We see that a "one-size fits all" quality organization is inappropriate.

The organization must be tailored to reflect individual company differences and provide the flexibility and the ability to change.