Challenge the Process and Enable Others to Act (Essay Sample)

Challenge the Process and Enable Others to Act
Name
Institution
Challenge the Process and Enable Others to Act
Effective leaders seek opportunities that can enhance their status quo to facilitate development. They search for innovative ways in which they can enhance their organization and by doing so, they experiment as well as take risks. Additionally, leaders enable other people to act by fostering collaborations and establishing spirited teams. The engage others and acknowledge the importance of mutual respect, which sustains extraordinary efforts. This paper will analyze the three leadership areas that I aspire to improve, and elaborate how the Challenge the Process and Enable Others to Act practices of leadership will help me in developing the three selected areas.
Leadership Areas of Improvement
Lussier and Achua (2015) state that every leader has room for improvement in spite of the time they have been in a leadership position or the development that they have already accomplished. Given that change is inevitable, leaders need to change to keep up with the transformations. Authentic leadership has been highlighted to be effective in leading change especially by eroding cynicism or the belief that people are motivated by self-interest. Northouse (2015) emphasizes that leadership is not associated with personality, rather, it is more about a learned behavior or a set of skills and capabilities. As an observation, there are three major areas that I should improve in my leadership skills including skills of negotiation, communication, and conflict resolution.
My first area is communication, which I think as being a problem to me. Hackman and Johnson (2013) highlight that effective communication is integral for leaders to enable them to interact and build good relationships, as well as make the most appropriate decisions. Personally, I always have a problem when it comes to communicating openly and honestly mainly when it involves criticizing my colleagues’ opinions and perspectives. As such, even when I believe that someone’s perspective may not be effective enough, I always end up not airing my views concerning that person’s opinion. Even more important, this affects me when a leader’s opinion or view is not as useful compared to the view of workers concerning issues. This communication problem is prevalent in organizations dominated by the formal communication structure and little informal communication.
Challenge the process helps in keeping any leader’s job new as well as exiting and allowing them to feel like they have an anonymity to make changes inevitable. To enhance my communication skills especially with my team members and seniors, I have found that as an authentic leader, I should communicate openly and honestly to ensure that my perspective and opinion is aired (Leroy et al., 2016). Also, I also aspire to foster a culture where besides discussing or interacting with the team members at the formal level, I can interact with them at the informal level. For instance, this may include discussing our social lives or problems affecting our performance as a team during a lunch break. By creating an open-door policy where the team members feel comfortable when approaching me whenever they identify faults or a problem, this can promote a culture of open communication where everyone can communicate openly and freely to their seniors and colleagues.
Secondly, many are the times when I arrive in a negotiation, for instance with other supervisors, without the tactics and tools required to result in a win-win outcome. Such circumstances also occur when I disagree or when two members of my team disagree on the solution for an issue or the goals for a particular contract, and I eventually fail to provide a solution that is acceptable for me and the other party or the disagreeing parties. A successful negotiation requires the two disagreeing parties to come together as well as come up with a solution that is acceptable for both of them. I tend to believe this often happens since I lack good communication skills, which I am currently working on.
The last area that I should improve on is conflict resolution, which I also believe is closely related to my poor negotiation and communication skills. One of my greatest challenges as a leader is resolving conflicts especially when I find workers arguing, or not speaking because of interpersonal conflicts. Resolving interpersonal conflicts between workers is often a major challenge not only for me but also for the majority of leaders. For the majority of these leaders, they use the authoritarian conflict resolution style where they give the solutions with minimal participation of the subordinates.
To improve the resolution of conflicts and negotiation skills, I aspire to challenge the process by the authentic leadership strategies that enable participation and dialogue. Based on the authoritarian culture of conflict resolution, the leader makes the final decisions in negotiations and conflict resolut