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The organizational behavior chosen for this project is Leadership Coaching as this has become a policy matter for Sulfates Inc the industrial company, where our group member Christian Gray works. The company has embarked upon a journey to encourage its staff to develop solid leadership skills for its employees. This project focuses on analysis Leadership Coaching as positive tool to encourage Sulfate Inch’s employees to develop leadership skills to their maximum potential and to further advance on their own professional development.
Developing leadership skills can improve Sulfate Inch’s employee’s performance and the company potential to grow as a business. Nowadays, business organizations are exploring the field of Leadership Coaching in order to implement different methods of personal or human resource development. It is common to see, inside the firms, a constant practice of coaching as the act of providing positive support and positive feedback. The main purpose is to offer advice to an individual or group so as to help them recognize ways in which they can improve the effectiveness of their performance.
Leadership Coaching s considered as an exceptional way to attain a certain work behavior that will improve leadership, employee responsibility, teamwork, sales, communication, goal setting, strategic management and more. It is used not only in businesses which are perceived to have bad performance but also in organizations which are successful. Inside the firms the coaches often specialize in different practice areas such as executive coaching, corporate coaching and leadership coaching.
Coaching can be provided in different ways, such as one-on-one, group coaching sessions and in large scale organizations. Coaching is not a practice stricter to external professionals; many organizations expect their senior leaders and middle managers to coach their team members toward higher levels of performance, increased job satisfaction, personal growth, and career development. Analysis of the issues from multiple perspectives with scholarly literature Leadership Coaching comprehends leadership styles, theories and learned lessons.
Throughout this project we analyzed different fields to have a broad understanding of Leadership Coaching. According to “The Coaching Conundrum Report 2009,” best practices are important to take into account when coaching people to become successful leaders. Among these best practices they suggested topics such as: Tackling business problems with coaching initiatives, setting new managers on the coaching tracks, delegating and encouraging employees to explore their full potentials. Along the reading we came to agreed that “the role of Cal “coach” isn’t something that (managers] should turn on or off.
They need to adopt coaching as a daily leadership practice and focus on creating a supportive, encouraging, and trusting environment for their teams” quoted from (The Coaching Conundrum Report 2009). Furthermore, in this investigation e have explored several perspectives regarding Leadership Coaching as a way to encourage employees to become leaders in their field and as a tool of improving business in the long run. According to our investigation, we have found a few recurrent theories in relevance the leadership coaching policies that Sulfates Inc is implementing.
The recurrent theory concepts are: goal setting, expectancy, equity and corroboration. We will deepen on each of these topics to better understand leadership coaching as a way positive influence for the staff in a company. There are two kinds of leader ship transformational and ramifications leaders. A Transformational leader is value-driven change agents who make followers more conscious of the importance and value of task outcomes; they provide followers with a vision and motivate them to go beyond self-interest for the good of the organization.
A Transactional leader is an exchange process in which leaders clarify employee roles and task requirements and then reward or punish followers based on their performance. In the leadership model created by Jim Souses and Barry Poster, there are five leadership practices they recommend to best improve leadership skills: Hellenizing the process, inspiring a shared vision, enabling others to act, setting a good example and recognizing individual contributions. Challenging the process encourages people to seek new opportunities to improve and grow within the work spectrum.
Questioning a process helps to think out of the box and bring in fresh ideas. Inspiring a shared vision installs a positive picture of the future of the company and lifts the employee’s moral. Enabling others to act refers to delegating work and authority which helps managers to focus on priorities or new tasks, while the employees have a great opportunity to learn ewe things. Setting a good example will grant authority and respect to the managers, plus inspire employees to follow a road to success.
Lastly, recognizing individual contributions is one of the most effective ways to lift moral and encourage employees to set goal and accomplish them. Motivation goes along with leadership as a motivated employee is a potential leader. In leadership coaching, it is a mayor task to motivate the employees continuously in order to accomplish a goal. Motivation plays an important role in leadership and there are also some theories that refer to motivation which we will discuss in this project.
Before jumping into a long term project or any project for that matter, it is imperative to have clarity about the goals. Employee’s motivation is highly affected by the goals set by the company and the personal goals traced to accomplish such goals. There should be a well defined time limit in order to create a cycle with a beginning and a conclusion. Clear goals strengthen the completion process of a goal; therefore it is very important to develop good communication skills to make sure every employee involved is aware of what is expected from his or her performance in order to achieve the goal.
It can be reductive to divide the goal into milestones to provide recognition of task accomplishment especially when there is a long term goal. Milestones provide acknowledgment of progress and enlighten the group to make adjustments as needed. By settings goals increases motivation and performance of employees according to EAI. Locke and G. P. Lethal on their article “A Theory of Goal Setting and to Task Performance. ” Goals provide a clear vision of the things that need to be done and the route you should take.
Goal increase performance, a comprehensive but hard goal result in higher performance, providing feedback directs a person towards better performance, and people tend to commit more often to publicly announced goals. As a conclusion, as long a goal is created within a reasonable frame, it promotes the urge for accomplishment and encourages people to put in more effort. Once the goals are well defined it will be easier to draft an action plan in order to execute the goals traced. A good leader communicates well in all areas and expectations are a good point to highlight in this regard.
It is important to set clear work expectations in order to boost and maintain employee’s motivation. Expectations have to be set clear room the company side and as well as from the employees side. According to V. H. Broom on his book Work and Motivation people believe a good effort equals a good outcome, so good outcome equals a reward and the reward provides a value to the person. This is a chain of events that interact with each other and provide a clear positive outcome; on the other hand if this interaction is interrupted the person will not put in as much effort to accomplish a goal because there is no good clear motivation.
In the specific case of a business a manager must pay attention employees performance, task completion lust create a reward system to highlight the employee’s accomplishment a contribution to the company. To foster motivation and leadership skills there has to be a sense of Equity among the staff. The equity theory states that employees have expectation based on their output and they will evaluate their performance in comparison to their peers. The value of their output can be measured through rewards given by the employer, such as salary, recognition and job security among others.
A good manager must pay attention to the fair recognition of employees work to avid inequity at work. Leading a group calls or an effort to motivate people and ignoring inequity can trigger a setback in employees moral. It is important to create a well balanced labor environment to avoid giving recognition to underachievers and overlook overachievers. Also, to promote leadership and motivation there is the Reinforcement Theory where the manager’s performance is closely associated with the reinforcement of the employee’s behavior.
A good leader must “walk the walk”, set the example for the staff to follow. This gives the manager authority and people will follow his/her lead. Managers must be very mindful of their behavior and how it if arrayed among the employees. ‘The main tenets of reinforcement theory are that managers should reinforce desired behavior and discourage undesirable behavior by negative reinforcement, extinction or punishment. ” F. Lutheran and R. Grittier, Organizational Behavior Modification and Beyond: An Operant and Social Approach (Gleaning, IL: Scott, Foreman, 1985).
Description of the field exploration to Sulfate Inc. The company has made its strategic plan for the next five years (2011-2015) and this plan is based on three pillars: Equipment, Processes and People. This means to have to best resource for each pillar. The third pillar, “people”, is directly related to this assignment because, for the company, to have the best staff means to search and hire people with a manager-of-tomorrow profile, and these people must have leadership skills, or better said, potential leadership skills, which will be cultivated and enhanced within their career in the company.
After the acknowledgement of the vision of the company, we decided to visit and interview different members of strategic positions in the company related to the leadership coaching. These members were 01_, Human Resources Manager; USB, Operations Director and GA, Vice-President (we put the initials of the names for a confidentiality matter). We took interviews with these people in informal meetings and without specific questions, just talk about the issues and taking notes of the information they gave to us, in how to deal and be successful in leadership coaching and how to practice and promote it.
These interviews took us a whole morning and took place in the company headquarters. In addition to that, Christian brought information of his own experience in working with this staff in several situations such as committees, admission processes, group tenting and daily activities. In every situation the leadership coaching was present, in one way or another. After gathering all the information we needed we sent a thanks letter to the members of the company who helped us and kept their contact information in case we needed further information.
Discussion of the data collected After interviewing the members of the company and gathering the information of the experience in the company from one of the members of our group, we can identify two kinds of leadership coaching in the company: * Direct: The one that is made from face to face, from boss to employee, without a specific plan, just led during the daily activities with one objective: to develop the leadership skills, identified by HER in the recruiting process, of the employee. Indirect: This is a planned coaching held by HER. This includes periodic evaluations of the employee of the aspects involving leadership skills and also scheduled training such as workshops or external courses. The company has a program of “future entrepreneurs” which consists precisely in recruiting young professionals with high qualifications in order to make a rotation through different areas of the company and stay in the one where they have their best performance and they loud like to develop their careers.
During the time spent with the members of the company mentioned above, we inquired about their leadership charisma, the way they handle Leadership Coaching and the way they interact with the employees in the effort to train them to become leaders. In this segment we will discuss the major points related to Leadership Coaching that came up during the interviews: USB, Operations Director: * By showing the coaches how to explain the goals to the people in a motivational way, how to manage problems without losing control, and how o make every employee feel they are an important part of the company.
By being an example of his behavior according to the company ‘ s values: punctuality, honesty, and care for the people and the environment. GA, Vice-President: * To have a very clear vision for the company. By explaining and making sure that his staff knows that the company’ s strategy is based in three factors: Equipment, Processes and People. In every committee he is always checking those three factors. Also he projects a lot of experience and pressure handling. He is the promoter of the “future entrepreneurs” program * Also is an example of behavior according to the company’ s values LO, Human Resources Manager: She applies the indirect coaching, using the tools explained above. Basically her role in the leadership coaching is, as said before, to measure how the leadership skills of the employee are evolving through time and to do the corrections that are necessary to assure it.
What we can see in the data collected is that there is well-defined policy of the company to mentor high-potential employees in several skills in order to assure they will have a very promising career in the company and reach directive sections in the long term. This is clearly observed in the two directive-members (USB and GA), who have this statement present in every action they take, from recruiting people to their everyday work with them.
Also, there is a good work environment in terms of communication, which contributes very much for a mentoring process because all the managers and directive staff are very open to answer questions, to dialogue, or to give any advice to the employees. There is also a policy of awards, bonuses and recognition for the outstanding employees, and to know their expectations to develop their career line. This is used as an example for the coaches in how to treat their workers when they become managers and, therefore, leaders. Conclusions Leadership Coaching comprehends leadership styles, theories and learned lessons.
A good leader must have a defined role, must have good communication skills and should continuously focuses on creating a supportive, encouraging, and trusting environment for their employees. Leadership Coaching calls for people to develop their leadership skills to the maximum. Leadership is linked to motivation; therefore a manager must keep into account Taft motivation to succeed as a leader. Leadership has a valuable role in fostering motivation on employees and we have exposed in this project some of these theories (Goal-Setting, Equity, Expectancy and Reinforcement) relevant to the Leadership Coaching initiative that Sulfate Inc. As embarked upon. These theories were recurrent in all of the interviews we directed at Sulfate Inc. We also discussed about two different styles of leadership that can be put into practice along with best practices and motivational theories. One is Transformational leadership where managers motivate employees to improve heir performance by acknowledging their valuable contribution to the business. The other one is Transactional leadership where managers reward or punish employee according to their work performance.