Thursday, January 15, 2009
Chapter 9 Communicating Leadership
Situational leadership suggests that appropriate leadership emerges from behavior that is responsive to varied situations (pg. 278). I understand this to mean that a leader handles every situation differently. This makes sense when you are dealing with people. There are some people that you have to talk to differently than others. For instance my boss yells at me when I mess up but it is not meant to hurt my feelings but instead to make sure I remember. I do not mind because he is family and he always makes a joke after he yells at me. I know if he were to talk to some of his other employees like he talks to my brother and I they would start crying. He knows who he can and cannot mess around with.
I think that situational leadership can be both good and bad. First, everybody is different and learns differently. So one employee might respond better to one on one conversations, and another might respond better by walking through the steps of what he got wrong and learning how to fix it. Situational leadership appeals to every individuals style of learning.
ReplyDeleteHowever, this type of leadership style can make some people feel as if there is favoritism. If one person gets yelled at, and another gets spoken to and trained on how to fix the mistake, this can obviously make employees feel that inequality exists. Having some sort of uniformity in offices keeps things equal and expectations the same.
I think that this is a essential characteristic of a leader. A leader cannot do everything by the book. There is not one universal way that you can communicate with everybody. You must be able to adjust you style of speech based on what is most effective for the person you are communicating with. Speaking in one way with everyone makes a leader seem less genuine and causes the people under him to loose faith in him.
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