Content Oriented Leadership (Essay Sample)

Content Oriented Leadership Why is context important for leadership an in an organization? Context-based leadership focuses on achieving the set goals of a firm by establishing suitable environments that aid success. According to Ashkenas, leaders with strong vision get help from high performing teams (Ashkenas, 2010).When individual action and environmental factors come together, opportunities emerge. The most important part to a leader is “come together”. The environment in which a business operates creates unique business context. In this context, envisioned employees are enabled to create new products and services that benefit an organization (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 2011, p. 58). Other people within the firm spot new opportunities of maximizing business profitability. Still, other workers find opportunities of reinventing an organization’s products that are deemed stagnant in the market. Contextual intelligence by a leader helps in transforming the poor performing departments to substantial success (Khanna, 2014). Great business leaders possess contextual intelligence which enable them seize the zeitgeist of their roles. Organizational leaders have to possess certain personal attributes in order to succeed (Khanna, 2014). However, leadership success is defined by the successful application of such characteristics in a given context of work. More focus is required on personal leadership attributes and less focus needed on the situational context (James, 2016). Employing too much focus on an individual may be concealing of a leader by believing that any worker who is good in one context naturally fits in another or new work context. Nobody is good at everything; different people excel in different work settings(Khanna, 2014). In this regard, good leaders assign employees roles in accordance to their expertise, skills, and knowledge. As a result, success in the work setting is realized. The ability to succeed in more than one setting is called adaptive capacity. The attribute of adaptive capacity is not evident to all individuals(Ashkenas, 2010). Good leaders adjust their styles and approaches in respect to organizational context, culture, and condition in order to thrive. How context is created and understood in an organization? Communication is vital in context creation and understanding. Good leaders learn organizational contexts by observing the culture, departments, and structures of a company. The culture of a firm is communicated by its mission, vision, history, and values (Boris and Michael, 2012). The CEO of a firm understands these aspects and communicates them to the team. In this doing, a sense of ownership is facilitated in the team. As a result, the team is motivated to advance performance towards unleashing their potentials. Most organizations operate in various teams supervised by team leaders. Every team is specialized in a particular role(s) in that context. The team leader communicates to the group the targets of the team in accordance to their operational setting (Eccles and Serafeim, 2013, p. 50). In this regard, work contexts are created by senior leadership through team management. The concerns, ideas, and thoughts of each team member are valued and considered in decision making (James, 2016). This collaborative participation of team members in job duties creates a suitable environment in which leadership context is understood by all people. All companies have a mission statement. The mission statement explains the purpose of an organization and its reason for existence. The mission of an organization explains the context in which the business operates (Nohria and Khurana, 2010). The proper understanding of a company mission makes it easy for all employees to understand its setting, goals, and strategic targets. Also, the vision statement and values of an organization help in understanding the context-leadership and settings in which the business runs. A good leader familiarizes him/herself with the values of the company and educates team members to understand the established values of the organization (James, 2016).In this doing, team members get motivated to rise to challenges using the set norms, culture, and settings in an organization. How to transport context to the employees? The most important assets of an organization are employees. As noted above, communication is the right channel to pass information from one party to another. Employees are the vehicles towards organizational success(Ashkenas, 2010). Different companies work under different settings and contexts. For success to get realized, the workforces have to understand the context in which a company operates. Orientation is a good strategy used by leaders in transporting a firm’s context to the employees. Orientation applies to new recruits of a firm (James, 2016). The process of orientation helps in familiarizing the new worker(s) to the history, industry, functions, objectives, and culture of an organization. Good leaders position new employees next to existing staff from whom they can learn from and understand the context in which thebusiness operates (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 2011, p. 62). Training and developme...