Leadership and Learning: Advice for Developing Leadership Style

Directions Scenario

As a director of leadership and learning, you collaborate with many different employees throughout the prosthetics manufacturing organization you work for. You were recently contacted by Eduardo, who was promoted from an individual contributor to a manager four months ago. Eduardo is seeking your advice on developing his leadership style after receiving his first quarterly review from his supervisor.

The following are the key takeaways from your conversation with Eduardo:

“I’ve been told that I am extremely intelligent and typically get to solutions before others. However, this can lead me toward moving too quickly to implementing a solution when the organization is two steps behind. I was cautioned that this can create a disconnect with my team. I’m told to focus on working alongside my team to better empower them. However, I get frustrated with the lack of responsiveness from the organization and my team. My supervisor says this can create insecurity and frustration, with people feeling they cannot live up to my expectations.”

After your meeting with Eduardo, you follow up with his supervisor to gain additional insight. This was their feedback:

“Eduardo does not leverage his team to create the desired vision. Because he is intelligent and gets to answers faster than most, he loses patience and decides to do all the work himself. By doing so, he misses out on the input of others and fails to garner support for the vision. When he becomes quickly entrenched in his position, he often ignores valid input and alternative points of view.”

“Eduardo thinks he knows best and hence may not always listen to others. Nor does he inspire confidence in his team. As a result, his ‘professional arrogance’ creates more of a dictatorial leadership style, which in turn produces adversarial relationships internally (Eduardo versus everyone). I am concerned that over time this outcome will also spread to external partners. In the end, we will continue to lose talent, which will eventually impact business performance.”

Since the vice president of leadership and learning has asked you to create an adaptive leadership toolkit, these conversations are extremely valuable because they provide specific insight into areas of leadership that can be improved across the organization. Some of the strategies that you recommend for Eduardo’s situation can be used to help inform the improvement of leadership skills throughout the prosthetics manufacturing organization.

Prompt

Given the case as described, provide an analysis of Eduardo’s situation as it currently exists and recommend steps he can take to help transform his leadership style.

Specifically, you must address the following rubric criteria:

1. Define the following leadership skills and explain why Eduardo should focus on developing each of these: • Strategic thinking • Emotional intelligence • Communication skills

2. Describe two actionable steps Eduardo should take towards developing these leadership skills and explain how each step might help improve his situation.

3. Explain how Eduardo can utilize the flywheel effect to transform his leadership style and identify the tasks he should perform to promote gradual improvement that provides tangible evidence his strategy is yielding results. Support your response.