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 7thEdition. 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)
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