A633.9.3 Polyarchy Reflections

    Hierarchal and oligarchy systems of leadership have their reason and purpose for implementation.  In some cases, these types of leadership are logical like war or primary education.  This type of system has been around since man starting to organize (Obolensky, 2016).  These systems mean that a few or one person leads the organization or institution.  One could even argue that there are systems that exist in markets or in top companies that dominate over the Fortune 500 (Melville, 2011).  These companies are so massive and so large that other companies struggle to compete without the capital needed to overcome.  When the conditions are right to drive an organization to use these type of systems, there is usually a demand for more directive leadership and trust and empowerment is restricted to a few instead of the whole.  

   While these systems could be logical depending on the situation, the world is increasingly complex, and companies are so large that these systems cannot be sustained by the few.  These conditional and redundant systems need a fresh look on leadership and development of the organization.  Good modern leaders recognize the need to adapt, to empower, to entrust and to allow the complex to grow.  These leaders set the conditions instead of the conditions setting the company.  They create the boundaries and set the limits rather than the environment establishing the norms.  Leaders recognize a need to "let go" and prevent micromanagement.  Large organizations should consider looking at the whole and ensure that the processes are complete rather than doing (Obolesky, 2016).   Companies can now centralize management into just one of many nodes throughout the chaos.  

   Throughout the last few weeks there has been extensive study in poligarchy system applied to complex adaptive systems.  In this model, I have learned how to react to nodes throughout the complex.  I absorbed the idea that leaders establish the conditions and allow the forces to execute.  This is a long time coming in my leadership development.  I have recently, changed my lexicon from I to We in my organization.  Learning how to use those nodes that help me lead such as my family node, my problem-solving node, my peer group node, and my team nodes, all provide guidance when I need it.  Over the past two decades, my definition of leadership has changed.  This realization has enabled me to understand what my position of leadership means.  I am not alone, and leadership is not done in a vacuum.  This class is the first of many in complex adaptive systems. I hope that this program will help me understand the nodes in my complex and rely on them when the organization needs their help.  Over the next three years, I will retire from the Air Force, the relationships that I establish today will matter tomorrow.  Today is a new start in my development.  

   My strategy going forward is to establish my own molecules of influence to pull from.  To establish my own conditions of leadership and bounds for my team to operate in.  I hope that I can inspire, motivate and mentor those around me in the CAS model.  Leadership is not a solo project and is not restricted to the few.  As I enter the next phase of my life, my complex will grow and my leadership in uniform will dwindle.  It is up to me to figure out how to change the balance.   

References

Melville, A. (2011). Oligarchy. In B. BadieD. Berg-Schlosser & L. Morlino (Eds.), International encyclopedia of political science (pp. 1739-1742). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. doi: 10.4135/9781412959636.n399

Obolensky, N. (2016). Complex Adaptive Leadership. New York: Taylor & Francis.

Ramos, J. (2017). Oligarchy. In F. Moghaddam (Ed.), The SAGE encyclopedia of political behavior (pp. 555-558). Thousand Oaks,, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. doi: 10.4135/9781483391144.n250

A633.8.3 How to better enable leadership

Enabled leadership through conversation

Over the past few weeks, I have explored what makes a good coach. What made them remarkable and why. Coaches, leaders and mentors of mine that I remember throughout my life all pushed me to go further.  These selective few stand out because they made me think about my own reflection.  They pushed me to reach my own goals.  They worked with me to create my own action plan through carefully narrowing my focus, collecting my reality, and helping me make informed decisions.  Throughout our lives we remember coaches and leaders that motivated, drove, guided and mentored us. These leaders knew how to help us achieve our goals.  They adapted their own style to help each individual reach their goals while accomplishing the overall strategy of the institution.  Open-ended questions help guide the leader and the follower into and through their action plans.  These questions concentration the follower and help shape the goal, establish origins of reality, develop individual plans and tug at the willpower of the follower. Goal setting is the first step for any good leader and follower, this helps establish the initial vector in the complex (Obolensky, 2016).  The follower must also understand their origin on the path to accomplish that job. Working together the leader and the follower develop options that help provide the magnitude of the vector. With a good vector and strong magnitude, the players’ morale and willpower to accomplish the principle direction could remain high.  

As mentioned in this week’s assignment, at my current organization, there are a lot of senior leaders that hesitate to give the nodes in the complex empowered and coached leadership, yet it is desired.  The military as a whole is designed to be a hierarchal society and there is often little room for self-driven goals.  In my observation, the organization and the workforce are performance driven by the leader and the organization and it is not common to find individually motivated goals.  There is a constant competition to be better than the next and to have the next rank or title.  This could be in part because of the very nature of the military society is hierarchal leadership and promotions are often performance based not individual self-actualization.  The strategy of workforce is narrowly and linearly directed on the mission and then the people.  Strategy development is conceived by ranking military and civilian leaders instead of flowing from the bottom-up.  The impacts to this linear performance goal and task orientation could be the willpower, morale and motivation of the followers. 

 Everyone from frontline supervisors to senior staff are encouraged to want to achieve this mission, sometimes at great cost.  One of the most difficult challenges for leadership is to have the courage to admit strengths and weakness, shortcomings and talents (Leadership reality, 2014).  Situational leadership drives the goal of the team rather adaptive path-goal for the individual in a complex environment.  Therefore, in my military opinion, many supervisors at all levels “fake it to you make it” and the word “no” is seldom heard, even if the leaders knows that the follower is not prepared to accomplish the goal.  The follower and the leader have to be able to master the courage to investigate the goals, reality, options and willpower to succeed (Scott, 2014).  Leaders at all levels need to coach their people with high self-driven expectation through ambiguous task characteristics (Northouse, 2016). 

In my role as the Senior Enlisted Advisor, my mission is the people first and mission always.  I can lead, guide, and mentor the people that work for me.  More importantly, I hope that I can inspire them to reach their own goals.  There are so many people in the organization that it becomes almost a default position for deliberate planning with checkpoints along the way.  In this case, my role becomes more of a guiding light to ensure that they are reaching their maximum potential.  While to some this might seem as an lazy approach to leadership it actually becomes motivational for the follower.           

References

How to see your current leadership reality (2014). . Fountainebleau: INSEAD. http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.libproxy.db.erau.edu/docview/1582289286?accounti    =27203

Northhouse, P. (2016) Leadership; Theory and Practice 7^thEdition. SAGE Publications. 

Obolensky, N. (2016). Complex Adaptive Leadership. New York: Taylor & Francis.

Scott, S. (2014). The reality in leadership. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 114(5), S28-S29. doi:10.1016/j.jand.2014.02.026

A633.7.4 How do Coaches help

Have you ever interacted with a coach that is so memorable that twenty or thirty years later you still reflect on lessons?  We walk through the halls of leadership schools and academia and there are motivational posters and meme's online that are all inspiring and emotional.  This is a coaches job, to enable us to push through the problem (key word--US).  A good coach is a mentor and trusted advisor, a good , someone to push us to improve to GROW, someone that pushes us past our own limits to solve the problems  (Northouse, 2016).  Take for example, my high school track coach.  When I was fifteen, I was afraid of him, until I got to know him, I would follow this man into war if he asked.  I admired him with all the strength I could muster.  Though he was tuff, he led me, he pushed me to "run my race", to "race yourself" and finally "there is no one else but you on that track."  These immortal words still haunt and pushed me.  This is the coach I remember, this is coach that demanded yet cared. 

Now several decades later I am reminded of qualities of a good coach.  A good coach is about building the follower to accomplish long term capability (Passmore, 2010) or "coaching is the long game."  A good coach should inspire, create the momentum toward the vision and help the follower see the strategy (Hicks, 2011).  A good coach asks the tug questions, what is the goal, what is the reality (current), what are the options and what is your will to achieve these goals (Obolensky, 2016). This is how we move through life, this is what we remember.  For example, during my track years, I had a goal of running a sub-ten minute two mile, this was my goal.  I trained everyday for years, I trained everyday during the summer.  I knew that my reality was I needed to run faster after the first 800m.  I needed to learn to sprint the segments.  My coach put this into options for me, he broke it down in bite size pieces.  He used what skill and will I had and turned it into an evolution for me.  We set our sights on the long game and risked the short game (the week by week results) into a journey towards this evolution.  It was not until my senior year, that I broke the ten minute mark and set the school record.  I worked for four years to break that record. 

 A coach needs to understand how to push and pull the relationship between the reality and the end game.  My coach took my reality and created strength points, create a long game to improve what I already had, he used my willpower to plow through the task.  He sharpened my options to allow me to achieve the goal.  This is what arching is all about.  This GROW "coaching" method can be used over and over again throughout leadership.  This is why we remember our coaches, not because of their attributes but rather our own seen through their eyes.     

References

Hicks, R., PhD., & McCracken, J., PhD. (2011). Coaching as a leadership style.Physician Executive, 37(5), 70-2.

Northhouse, P. (2016) Leadership; Theory and Practice 7^thEdition. SAGE Publications. 

Obolensky, N. (2016). Complex Adaptive Leadership. New York: Taylor & Francis.

Passmore, J. (Ed.). (2010). Leadership coaching : working with leaders to develop elite performance. 

A633.7.3 RB leader-follower relationship

As I feared all along, I needed more leadership skills and development through my military career.  During the past few weeks.  I have had a wonderful opportunity to study complex adaptive system (CAS) and its application to leadership.  Leadership is an art form, that takes years of study and complicated research to apply the right brush stroke to the right canvas at the right time.  Throughout the study of CAS, I have learned about balance in Ying/Yang, balancing the delicate paint brush on the canvas hard when needed and softly when necessary.  In the quiz at the beginning of chapter 10, in Obolensky's book on CAS, I scored almost straight across the top half in Involvement leadership and Selling (2016).  This is neither right nor wrong, it is just my application to fit my leadership currently.  This quiz is a building block applied to the Situational Leadership model developed by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard.  This model has four quadrants of leadership styles depending on the purpose or situations (Vecchio, R. & Thompson, G., 2017).  Situational leadership is about letting the situation drive the approach and staying flexible enough to do so. (Northouse, 2016) When overlaid with the Ying and Yang model, I score well in Involvement and Selling however I score low in Telling and Devolving.  This could mean that I work too hard and am more emotional connected to the people and not the mission and have a hard time disconnecting from the problems.  THIS IS TRUE!!!

Throughout the past few years, my emotional connection to the problems have led to difficult marriage, a rocky relationship with work and a separation from friends.  I worked hard so that no one else had too.  I gave my heart and soul into project development and research at my own risk of will.  While my team and I had a high skill sets we just simply ran out of will.  In the CAS model it would behoove us to adapt, to change the pull relationship to a balanced push and pull.  Since I took my current leadership position, I had to reference this over and over.  Reminding myself that life is about balance, find a strength in character to endure through the storm, know when to paint with depth and know when to paint with breadth.  This is what I have learned over the past few weeks.  That it is not about how much energy you are spending towing the line but rather how much energy you spent keeping the balance in the system (Sorry, so many bad puns).  

I believe that my scores in this quiz are less about why this leadership model applies currently to me but rather the deeper definition and contributing factors that lead to this.  I am tired, my mind, body and soul has gone through so much that it is hard for me to actually WANT to do a project.  In the CAS model, I need to balance this relationship, to remind my motivation and get to a point where I can let go.  Let go of the stress, let go of the informational and positional power and spend time polishing not policing.  This is where I need to be, and this is where I need to go.   My work will increase in perfromance and where I am in strategic leadership will hopefully produce more sound doctrine to set the stage for the future.    

Balance is hard for me but needs to occur for work, for my family and for my mind.  

References

Northhouse, P. (2016) Leadership; Theory and Practice 7^thEdition. SAGE Publications. 

Obolensky, N. (2016). Complex Adaptive Leadership. New York: Taylor & Francis.

Vecchio, R. & Thompson, G. (2017). Situational leadership theory. In S. Rogelberg (Ed.), The     SAGE encyclopedia of industrial and organizational psychology, 2nd edition (pp. 1446     1447)

A633.6.4 Circle of Leadership

The vicious circle for leaders as described by Obolensky describes my military career, my ups and downs and my cycle of willpower.  The cycle is a harsh dose of reality for many senior leaders as well as any level of follower. It is a cycle that haunts the rooms of the Pentagon and sours productivity in local business.  The cyclical process is repeated over and over again, the follower produces, seeks advice, the leader gets “concerned” and gets more involved and the followers confidence is lowered and repeats.  This is because the follower is not empowered and entrusted with return and the leader decides to get more involved.  This is negative leadership and followership is stuck (Obolensky, 2016).

            This has happened to me to a point where my morale, my love for what I was doing and my expectation in myself was affected. The cycle is permeant until either the follower or the leader breaks the momentum.  This is especially true in the hierarchal system of the United States Military, it is relentless, impacting morale welfare and lives.  This played true in my life and career over and over again. In my current organization, this cycle continues, and followers are held captive by this cycle.  Division chiefs are continuously getting involved and the followers are asking for direction instead of the follower presenting new ideas and routinely updating the senior staff.  This authoritative leadership approach is micromanagement at its finest, it is intervention instead of positive reinforcement.    

       Another model to observe the relationship between the leader and the follower could be allowing the leader to give constructive feedback to the task at hand.  A different approach could be leadership models that allow for adaption from the leader to the follower like those described my Northouse (2016).  Path-goal theory (PGT) is a leadership approach that adapts to the changing needs of the follower.  PGT gives the leader and the follower directive, supportive, participative or achievement orientation through follow-up/feedback (2016).  The leader needs to be adaptive, flexible and give trusted followers feedback in this adaption.  Given this a new example of a cycle orientation/feedback and adaptive followership is listed below:

     This diagram has both the leader and follower empowered to make independent decisions.  It presumes that the leader and the follower are organized, trained and equipped to accomplish the task/mission/work without directly intervening.  This cycle enables both the leader and the follower to “follow-up” and provide feedback across the complex.  It provides a way to achieve Level V followership through routine feedback from the leader and the follower.  It is not micromanagement and neither is it laissez-faire, instead it is involvement with empowerment.  This cycle could be formed in any leadership and follower work center and across all work centers, it is agnostic to the division of labor or the amount of people involved. It is hard to accomplish this cycle but I have seen this in action.  I have witnessed this guidance-to-assessment work and easies the burden of leadership while empowering the follower.     

References

Northhouse, P. (2016) Leadership; Theory and Practice 7^thEdition. SAGE Publications. 

Obolensky, N. (2016). Complex Adaptive Leadership. New York: Taylor & Francis.