Interview on Leadership Practices - Essay Example

ALLWRITING’S ORDER: INTERVIEW Leadership takes place when one person influences the behaviour of another person to work in achieving a desired objective (Management Development and Productivity Institute, 2000). As the lead worker at the fast paced unit called, Medical Redetermination, Jessica Maldonado perfectly fulfilled this role. A cursory review of Miss Maldonado’s biosketch reveals one who has a penchant for knowledge and therefore strives to keep her knowledge at the cutting edge. We see a deliberate plan and consistent effort on her part to update her knowledge base. From excelling academically at Cerritos College, she went on to complete her Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Work from the California State University with high honours. She is now planning to pursue her Master’s degree in the coming year. Jessica Maldonado is described as knowledgeable, and possibly a thought leader, who is able to influence the attitudes and behaviours of her co-workers. It is also said of Miss Maldonado as one who likes to train new employees. A leader must be able to impart knowledge to his subordinates. As a trainer of new employees, Miss Maldonado fulfilled the role of leadership in imparting knowledge and skill sets to her staff for optimal performance. Leadership also entails the use of power and knowledge has been identified as one source from which power is derived. There is even a popular saying that stress that “Knowledge is power”. It would therefore not be surprising to find that Jessica Maldonado’s leadership at her workplace is founded primarily on expert power. An assertion of this sort can be made because she personally gives high premium to knowledge acquisition and impartation. Jessica Maldonado also has a teachable inclination, which makes learning easy and an enjoyable undertaking. It is emphasized in her bio-sketch that she is always willing to learn from others. A person with such a description can grasp knowledge from virtually every source. Quite apart from the knowledge needed for social work, we are informed that she is also learning a language to better her communication skills and also computer programmes to facilitate the delivery of work done. Workers with multi-lingual skills have become hot commodities at today’s workplace. By her desire to gain competency in another language, she has demonstrated the urge to make herself indispensable at her workplace. Knowledge in computing and computer software programmes has become a treasurable asset in the present information and communication age. Workers with knowledge in computer programmes are very much in high demand at the workplace than those who do not have such skills. By pursuing learning programmes in these key areas of her career, Miss Maldonado has shown great foresight as far as her future career development is concerned. At the end of these learning programmes, she would have technical knowledge in social work as well as computing skills and multi-language skills. The latter skill sets would enable her take international assignments with ease. Leadership is all about responsibilities. A leader must have the willingness to assume responsibilities. According to the Management Development and Productivity Institute (2000) leadership roles can be demanding in terms of the time, effort and knowledge required to fulfill the role effectively as well as being time consuming. From Miss Maldonado’s biosketch we learnt that she is responsible. A responsible worker easily sees to the fulfillment of assigned roles in the organization. An irresponsible worker, on the other hand, shirks even accepted responsibilities, much to the detriment of organizational progress. Another good trait found in Jessica Maldonado’s profile is that of time management. We are told she is ‘always on time’. Leadership roles can be high pressured work, which requires the ability to manage one’s time properly. In this wise, Miss Maldonado scores high marks. It is also stressed in her biosketch that she is “always cheerful, no matter what stress she is experiencing”. Good time management enables one to even out stress-inducing issues to make them more manageable. Her ability to keep her ‘cool” under stressful situations is itself a hallmark of her stress management skills. Yet another good characteristic possessed by Jessica Maldonado is her ability to remain ever cheerful, no matter what she is going through. Cheerfulness is a good morale lifting trait, most needed in difficult and trying moments. A leader must exude cheerfulness at most times to help subordinates work at their optimal levels. Difficult and trying moments including failure are all part and parcel of leadership. The ability to cope with such periods to a large extent mirrors one’s leadership potential. Jessica Maldonado scores high marks on several fronts of the leadership scale. It is therefore not surprising for her to be penciled in for a leadership role at her workplace. Miss Maldonado as a team player, is also an important career trait mentioned in her biosketch. The star worker who cannot work with others makes himself easily dispensable. Where as the average worker who can play his role effectively in a team is a worker with a desirable trait. This is because it often takes significant others for work to be carried out and delivered. It is therefore necessary for every worker to learn how to work with others. Many workplaces the world over put greater emphasis on team working. Some of the characteristics that effective team workers possess include the ability to express themselves openly, directly and honestly. They also meet deadlines promptly and assume personal responsibility for getting a particular work done. Good team players know also the roles expected of them and make every possible effort to fulfill them. Team players such as Jessica Maldonado take great pride in the contribution and achievements of others in the performance of a given task. It is therefore not strange that she takes the effort to teach newly employed staff. so they can make the contribution expected of them by the organization. Good team workers also have a clear understanding of what the organization and team demands of them and make the necessary effort to meet them. To recap Jessica Maldonado’s abilities, we learnt that she is knowledgeable, responsible; possess good time management skills, a teacher who is also teachable, a learner and also a team player and above all a worker that exudes cheerfulness. It is rare in practice to find all of these excellent traits in one person. It is even compellingly rare to also find such characteristics in a person the age of Jessica Maldonado. It is therefore not surprising that she was chosen for a leadership position in her organization. That choice indeed is a step in the right direction given the sterling qualities catalogued about her. Let us assume that before Jessica Maldonado was offered the leadership position in her organization, she attended a leadership interview. In this section of this article, an attempt shall be made to summarize her responses to the questions posed to her. With respect to qualities considered essential for a good leader, she dwelt upon a lot of the traits she possessed herself in answering this question. Leadership qualities she mentioned included readiness to assume responsibility, voracious appetite for knowledge, teachableness, team working and leading, ability to manage time and stress, ability to communicate, good foresight, perseverance with dexterity and the ability to live with ambiguity. Given the emphasis she herself gives to training, especially of newly recruited staff, she gave an indication to give greater premium to training at the workplace. Being a good trainer herself, she stressed the need for encouragement to be given to staff to better their lot through formal classroom or online-based training programmes as well as on-the-job training schemes. Success and failure are part and parcel of life including what takes place at the workplace. Being able to handle such matters is a good indicator of one’s leadership abilities. She emphasized that there is the need to learn how to handle success to the same extent or even more than how failure is dealt with. Failure is to be handled as one of those issues of life that we cannot do without. It is a realistic viewpoint in life to consider that we cannot be successful at all times. That we may fail on some occasions and be successful at other times and that we shall endeavour to do all within our power to prevent failure if that is possible. Failure itself can be a good teaching experience if taken in good faith. It has been said that to every failure we learn one way in which a particular approach to solving a problem is not right. This therefore gives us the opportunity to alternate our approach to solving that problem or achieving that goal or objective. There are several examples in life where success was achieved only after repeated failures and setbacks. The onus therefore is not to give up when one is met with failure but to keep trying until success is eventually attained. Success can be defined simply as the attainment of a set goal or objective. When we set for ourselves a set goal or objective and that goal is achieved we say we have been successful in our undertaking. Goals are set in virtually all facets of life such as career, organization, family life, etc., so in all these areas of life, success can be attained when set goals are achieved. Jessica Maldonado was self-effacing as far as her accomplishments at the workplace were concerned, so when asked about what makes her unique, she simply said nothing except that she works very hard on every goal she sets for herself. Her uniqueness as a worker or person lies in the fact that, she sets for herself hard goals and strives to achieve them. She drew the attention of the interviewers to the many goals she had set for herself such as pursuing further studies in social work, learning computer programmes, and the acquisition of foreign language skills. With respect to the techniques used in motivating her people, she said as a lead worker, she uses both monetary and non-monetary rewards to motivate her staff. Some members of her staff are motivated more by monetary rewards, whereas with others you can get them to perform optimally if certain non-monetary rewards are offered. She had learned which of the motivators and hygiene factors work best with the staff under her control through trial and error. She therefore knows how to motivate each and every one of them. With respect to her past, Jessica Maldonado claims she has no regrets whatsoever. That she is very happy with her accomplishments and would take the same path if she had to go over all again. On ethics and morality, she pointed out that it’s an area of her life that she has been very careful about and so far she has had no problem whatsoever. She gave credit to her mentors who offered her useful advice on how to stay clear of such matters. She also attributed her commitment to the Christian faith and principles as a contributing factor that has helped her all these years. On the issue of what she accomplished for which others said she could never succeed at, she said everything. According to Jessica, she believes more in working than talking. So whilst others claim she cannot master the computer and the foreign language she is learning, she rather gave more of her time to them to ensure that she acquire the needed skills in them. She pinpointed several significant achievements that people ruled her out even before she started them to buttress this fact. One area that Jessica Maldonado claims she could improve upon was in team working. She confessed that her independent and competitive demeanour sometimes conflicted with her team working commitments. Whereas she allowed her team working commitments to override her individual pursuits, she admitted that this stance has not been easy sometimes. Within the next five to ten years, Jessica Maldonado sees her self with her Master’s and doctorate degrees in Social Sciences, a competent computer programmer and also an international multi-lingual worker with fluency in two other foreign languages apart from the English language. She also sees herself as accomplished thought leader in her fields of specializations, working with international organizations outside her native country. According to Jessica Maldonado, her mentors have been a source of great inspiration to her especially in her career pursuits. The company leader or boss had always told her that she could do better than what she had been able to achieve and helped her in diverse ways to bring her goals into fruition. According to Jessica, She also draws inspiration from other great social workers. On the issue of balancing professional life and private life, she pointed out that so far she has been able to marry the two perfectly. As a result of her good time management skills she has been able keep her professional activities from her private life. She affirmed that a pledge she made to herself some years ago never to carry work to her home after a day’s work has been dutifully kept. As a social worker she involves herself in several social activities. These activities enable her to perfectly blend her professional work with her private one. She also indicated that on some occasions she had had to take a very tough stance in separating the two facets of her life. She recounted an incident when work was being entrusted upon her which would have affected her private life adversely and she had to step in assertively to decline her involvement. Her position was not immediately understood but later the decision makers applauded her for her insistence of keeping her private life separate from her professional activities. With respect to obstacles that had come her way and how she surmounted them, Miss Maldonado pointed out that there have been many of them. Coming from a humble background, financing her education has been a big hurdle for her. But with dint of hard work and through help of other funding institutions she was able to secure the funds needed to finance her education. She also gave account of people that could not tolerate her ambitious character as far as career issues were concerned, who tried to put impediments her way. To such people, Miss Maldonado said she just ignored them and with iron-fisted determination went ahead to accomplish her career goals. She confirmed that sometimes some of these obstacles were difficult to bear but profited immensely from pieces of advice received from her mentors on such occasions. She added that perhaps without the advice of her mentors, she probably could have given in to some of the obstacles. Mention has already been made of Miss Maldonado help to newly recruited staff by offering them training. So, on the issue of how she encouraged others to do their best, she pointed out that she provided them encouragement through the training she offered to them. She stressed that it is demoralizing to be assigned a task at the workplace for which one does not have the requisite knowledge. She has witnessed several of such instances at the workplace and that compelled her to take to teaching and training of newly recruited staff. After the training session, taking assigned task becomes a delight to them. On the issue of what and who does she draw inspiration from; Jessica Maldonado said draws inspiration from the people she has helped on the way. According to Jessica, it is a great joy to find people who used to literally struggle in performing assigned work, now doing the same job with joy on their faces. To her, this transformation is what brings her, her greatest joy. She also confirmed as having received the same help when she first joined the organization. Her mentors provided her the needed help which enabled her to better cope with the teething problems she initially faced. On the issue of how she would like to be best remembered for, Jessica Maldonado pointed out that she would like to be known as someone who could not see newly recruited staff struggle with assigned task when she is well placed to offer help. She added that she would like to remember as a developer of talent in the organization. The common thread that runs through successful workplace leadership is often the same or similar. When there has been success at the workplace, a careful review of this success would find most of the traits earlier mentioned. Good leadership skills often run through consistent success achieved at the workplace. To this end therefore, good leadership skills are often inseparable from success. The two are inextricably linked. To the issue of whether she considers herself a good role model, we find Miss Maldonado’s self-effacing demeanour come up. She simply said that she is trying to be one. However, people that know her intimately attest to the fact that she is already a good role model. If our workplaces can be filled by people of Jessica Maldonado’s caliber, a great deal of progress couldbe achieved in no time. From this interview, it became obvious that Jessica Maldonado is a well rounded workplace leader, who can accomplish more for the organization if offered the opportunity. It also became crystally clear that until the interview very little was known about Miss Maldonado, eventhough she has been with the organization for a couple of years now. The interviewers resolved to continuously update their knowledge about staff of the organization so that they can assign them to given task as they arise. Much of this interview has also confirmed ideas that already learned about leadership. Reference Management Development and Productivity Institute (2000). Handout on Managerial leadership Skills Development for Council For Scientific and Industrial Research, May 29 to June, 2nd June, 2006, Accra, Ghana. Read More