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