Effective leadership practices and approaches are a stepping stone to organizational success and teams’ performance excellence. However, the individuals in leadership positions do not always exhibit adequate skills and strategies to lead their subordinates efficiently. In fact, poor leadership is often the main reason for project failure and organizational underperformance. This essay is designed to illustrate the pivotal role of leadership in an organizational setting by providing an example of poor leadership experience in the human resource department and its analysis.
One of my worst first-hand experiences of poor leadership occurred approximately a year ago. The human resource department where I work was launching a new workforce evaluation project, according to which the employees of the human resource department had to undergo observations and tests to reestablish their compliance with their positions. The project lead initiated this intervention in response to several employees’ occasional lateness for work. The project lasted for two weeks, during which the leader intentionally gave the employees additional tasks and micromanaged their completion. Moreover, any drawback in performance was recorded but not communicated to the employees for correction.
Ultimately, as the project was completed, the leader initiated a meeting of all the staff, in which they announced that five employees would be demoted to lower-ranking positions due to their poor performance in the evaluation. All of the terminated employees were young women with children, who had concerned the leader the most due to the risks of their eventual poor performance due to their family duties. However, the demoted employees were skillful and competent; their absence from the completion of their prior duties caused work overload for other employees, which resulted in untimely and poor-quality completion of essential human resource tasks for the organization.
The reason why I selected this example for analysis in this essay is that this situation vividly demonstrates several layers of poor leadership performance of the project lead with both short- and long-term adverse outcomes. The failure of the leader to handle the conflict with several employees has led to their discharge from their former duties and ultimate long-term adversities in the whole department’s performance.
The leader presented in the example lacked some pivotal leadership traits that would have secured effective teamwork, trust, and performance excellence of the human resource department. In particular, the ability to delegate was lacking because the leader micromanaged the task completion of the employees. Moreover, the leader failed to demonstrate effective communication skills, conflict management traits, and transparency (Iordanoglou, 2018). Indeed, since the evaluation was initiated only to undermine the performance indicators of the employees toward whom the leader had a biased attitude, mere face-to-face communication to avert the crisis and resolve the conflict would have sufficed.
To compensate for the lack of direction in the presented example, I might have exhibited several leadership traits capable of motivating employees and resolving workplace issues in a timely manner. In particular, since the leader demonstrated unfair and biased management, I would exhibit tolerance, active listening, self-awareness, stress management, analytical skill, and empathy (Iordanoglou, 2018). These traits allow a leader to eliminate biases and explore alternative opportunities to reach an understanding and connection with employees. Moreover, building trustworthiness and integrity would help the leader to prevent similar situations from happening.
In conclusion, the analyzed example of an experience of poor leadership has demonstrated that diminished self-awareness, delegation, trustworthiness, and communication traits contribute to inadequate team management. A leader should exhibit tolerance, active listening, self-control, and integrity to prevent the escalation of conflict with the employees. Ultimately, when handling the correctional work in the form of evaluation, the leader should have used delegation, empathy, analytical thinking, and stress management to ensure that the outcomes of the intervention do not hinder the department’s performance.
Reference
Iordanoglou, D. (2018). Future trends in leadership development practices and the crucial leadership skills. Journal of Leadership, Accountability & Ethics, 15(2), 118-129.