AC 2.1 Explain the skills and attributes needed for leadership.

AC 2.1 Explain the skills and attributes needed for leadership.

            Having great ideas and assembling team to meet the set goal is the first step in forming a successful business venture. The ability to successful execute the ideas is what creates the difference between a dreamer and an entrepreneur. In that case, there are several attributes that contribute to good leadership skills. They include:

Communication

It may seem clear in you mind to know what you want to accomplish; however, making someone else understand to understand your goals can be a problem. As such, good leadership relies on the ability to explain clearly what you want to be done, by communicating your visions to your team. The benefit of a leader having good communication skills is to create a productive working environment in which the members involved can work towards achieving the same goals. For example, the leaders can practice an open-door policy whereby he can talk to his employees on a daily basis (Pride, Hughes & Kapoor, 2009).  From the excerpt, Mrs. Hogan established a worker productivity group in which she encouraged worker to come up with goals and develop plans for achieving them.

Positive Attitude

As a leader, it is his job to keep the team motivated in order to ensure the success of the company, and to keep the morale of the workers at high levels. Workers feel happy and when treated to be as a part of the company and when they are appreciated. For example, a team leader can provide snacks, or give awards to the most hardworking employees (Pride, Hughes & Kapoor, 2009). Mrs. Hogan part of her method of leading her workers was the formation of the worker’s award group. The purpose of giving awards was to encourage workers to be devoted in achieving the set goals.

Ability to Delegate

One key element involved delegation is the ability to learn to trust your team with the company’s vision. Learning to trust your employees’ devotion towards achieving the company’s objectives is a sign of strength, and not a weakness. Delegating tasks within various departments involves identifying the strength of your workers. For example, it is important to find what each employee loves doing most, which establishes trust and enables the team leader to focus on higher tasks (Pride, Hughes & Kapoor, 2009). From the excerpt, Mr. Worthy trusted workers to do their work without his interference. Most workers never saw him, but they liked his leadership and some even had stayed for long time in the business while enjoying the freedom in their work. In addition, Mr. Worthy trusted the workers and this enabled him to attend to other tasks.

AC 2.2 Explain the difference between leadership and management.

Leadership involves motivating and inspiring the employees while the role of a manager is to plan, organize, direct and control. Mr. Worthy inspired many workers by not monitoring their workers at a close supervision. As a result, some of the workers loved their jobs and were motivated to continue working at the Fancy Footwear (Pride, Hughes & Kapoor, 2009). Mrs. Hogan more often engaged in organizing workers into groups and communicating down the ideas on notice boards so as to ensure the workers achieved the goals of the company.

A manager motivates while a manager develops (Mumford, Gold & Thorpe, 2012).  Mrs. Hogan was a motivator and she gave out awards as a way of motivating workers to achieve the set goals. On the other hand, Mr. Worthy developed a self-motivating attitude to his employees by allowing them to work under minimum supervision, a plan that motivated employees to carry the company’s vision.

Furthermore, a manager is a copy while a leader is original (Mumford, Gold & Thorpe, 2012). Mr. Worthy had been in the company since when it was formed and therefore, had the leadership skills to operate the business. Mrs. Hogan had been an employee who was promoted to management position. She was relying on the company’s already established skills to advance her leadership style.

Another difference is that a manager focuses on doing thing right while a leader focuses on doing the right thing. What was the right thing to do for Mrs. Hogan was to ensure productivity of the workers, without being sensitivity to whether her methods were well received by the workers. For Mr. Worthy, he cared about the how the workers responded to adjustments and as one of his tactic; he used correspondent groups and memos to communicate his plans.

AC 2.3 Compare the leadership styles of Mr. Worthy and Ms. Hogan.

            It is clear that Ms. Hogan adopted participative/democratic leadership while Mr. Worthy adopted autocratic leadership.

Participative leadership is a common style in small financial institutions. Leaders invite their subordinates to make suggestions in the process of decision making. This kind of leadership motivates workers and it facilitates personal development. As Mumford, Gold & Thorpe (2012) explains, it involves following written rules or ‘working by book.’ It is perceived to be suitable since workers in banks handle large sums of money. Mr. Hogan used the participative leadership to engage workers by communicating frequently with them, creating suggestion groups and even making an effort to know them by their names.

In contrast, autocratic leaders exercise powers over subordinates. In this kind of leadership, subordinates have limited opportunities to make suggestions and they just follow orders. This is an extreme form of transactional leadership where leaders have absolutes powers over their subjects. According to Mumford, Gold & Thorpe (2012), the subjects have limited or no opportunities to make suggestions even if they have views that could be beneficial to an organization. This kind of leadership tends to demoralize worker who feel that they are not treated fairly. Consequently, autocratic leadership usually experiences high levels of staff turnover and absenteeism. In extreme cases, it leads to workers’ strikes. However, the style is often effective when applied in some unskilled and routine jobs. Despite this, its disadvantages outweigh advantages. It is clear from the excerpt that Mr. Worthy practice autocratic leadership. He often used his secretary to communicate with the workers but never engaged in active supervision. As a result, the workers had to comply with the order from their boss.

AC 2.4 How do you think the people under Ms. Hogan can be motivated? Explain how Ms. Hogan can motivate the staff to achieve the objectives.

Further, management should motivate teams by instituting an effective reward system. Organizations should provide rewards to teams in recognition of good performance (Mumford, Gold & Thorpe, 2012). Examples of rewards and benefits are bonuses, special assignments, and office fixtures, time off, awards, promotions, recognition and verbal praise. Basically, employees in a team feel good and “naturally high” after completing a job and delivering high quality outcome. They feel that they are more competent, have achieved greater development jointly and at personal levels and that they have greater self control over their work (Mumford, Gold & Thorpe, 2012). An effective reward system has to satisfy the basic needs of all team members, needs to be distributed fairly and equitably and need to be comparable or better than those given by other, competitive organizations in the same area. Mrs. Hogan can use verbal praise to make employees feel good, especially the senior employees who had been in that industry for a long time (Mumford, Gold & Thorpe, 2012).

            Mrs. Hogan can also use time-off; the can introduce contest that earn time. She can put goals in a scheduled time, and once these goals have been realized, she can reward the workers with time off. For example, allowing earlier dismissal and earlier lunch breaks will make people compete for the time-off. Furthermore, giving workers.............