Abstract
Leadership brings together followers and leaders. It also influences organisational objectives and missions. Considering this indispensable function, it is important for all organisations to develop effective leadership. Drawing from this theoretical proposition, this paper discusses leadership development using UPS Company as an example. The paper describes the UPS’ background briefly before examining leadership skills that make Jovita Carranza effective. Jovita Carranza is UPS Air Operations’ Vice President in Louisville. It also discusses the Vice President’s spiral of experience before discussing her leadership traits.
Company background
Currently, UPS has operations in the excess of 200 nations. The company has more than 357,000 people and it enjoys the status of being one of the best organisations across the world in terms of appreciating people’s diversities. For instance, The Fortune rated it amongst the top 50 companies with the best policies for minorities (Carranza Minicase, n.d). The company invests heavily in training and development to ensure career progression of its employees.
It spends “$300 million annually on education programs for employees and encouraging promotion from within” (Carranza Minicase, n.d, par.1). During promotions and investments in training and development programs, UPS treats all employees equally provided they have the will, knowledge, and skills necessary for development. These non-segregating policies explain the upward mobility and career progression of Jovita Carranza from a part-time clerk to her current position as the UPS’ air operations vice president in Louisville, Kentucky.
Leadership skill making Carranza effective in her work
Gaining competitive advantage in the modern organisations requires effective leading of people to achieve organisational goals, objectives, and visions. Carranza is a vision carrier. Indeed, only effective leaders successfully enable their followers to achieve the set out vision in the organisational strategic directions (Polychroniou, 2009). Carranza’s leadership functions to inspire followers to work collectively in achieving specific goals at UPS.
Carranza embraces any learning opportunity with positivism. She sees any emerging opportunity within UPS as a chance to learn new things. She categorically states that her success mainly stems from her unselective skills when looking for opportunities (Carranza Minicase, n.d.).
When they come, she always accepts all of them. This aspect contravenes other people’s approach, which involves selecting some opportunities while ignoring others. Carranza notes that such people risk losing learning opportunities as presented by all new challenges (Carranza Minicase, n.d.). From her approach to new opportunities and considering that she has successfully led UPS, it is evident that learning and leadership cannot be divorced (Ibarra & Hansen, 2011). Learning allows her to visualise and evaluate all environmental dynamics before taking the appropriate action.
Leadership develops through a number of processes, viz. actions, observations, and reflections (Ibarra & Hansen, 2011, p.71). Arguably, from the manner in which Carranza approaches her leadership tasks, she is incredibly skilled in these processes. She explores all opportunities in an attempt to frame her expectations in a positive manner. Research demonstrates that leaders’ anticipations influence their actions, which influence the manner other people (followers) behave (Sakiru et al., 2013). By examining all opportunities presented to her, Carranza ensures that her decisions and directions influence her followers in the direction consistent with opportunities that correspond to the UPS’s strategic goals and visions (Carranza Minicase, n.d.).
Apart from offering direction informed by existing opportunities, Carranza possesses organisational skills. Lussier and Achua (2004) assert that working with people from different backgrounds coupled with exploring differing agendas and perspectives avails an important opportunity for leadership development. Consistent with this assertion, Carranza works with people from different backgrounds. Organisational skills are evident in her ability to make things done through people from diversified backgrounds. For instance, she states that she likes surrounding herself with people who apart from being capable, are skilled, committed to achieving results, and loyal to the organisation (Carranza Minicase, n.d.). She also believes that interactions and teamwork coupled with staff development are the pillars to success.
Achieving the above concerns is unsurmountable without proper management of organisational diversity to reduce diversity-related work conflicts, which hinder interaction and growth of teamwork cultures (Lussier & Achua, 2004). Carranza appreciates the view that perpetuation of the UPS’ organisational culture and realizing it through people is the only way to achieve success (Carranza Minicase, n.d.). Therefore, she ensures that UPS’ organisational culture focuses on diversity integration as opposed to segregation of people along their diversity differences.
Carranza’s spiral of experience
Carranza started at UPS as a part-time clerk in 1976. She then went through a spiral of experiences as she took the roles of planning manager in LA, Metro, and later Texas district’s HRM, Illinois district’s HRM, and then Miami district HRM (Carranza Minicase, n.d.). After working at Wisconsin in the same capacity, she was ready to take roles as the American region overall manager before proceeding to assume her current position (Carranza Minicase, n.d.). While serving at these different locations, she recorded continuous success.
A wide range of spiral of experience enables leaders to make evidence-based organisational decisions. Such experience enables Carranza to have a general oversight and evaluation of decisions, which work in different operational regions by considering that she already knows the characteristics and the attributes that consumers of the UPS’ products and services look for in different market segments. Consequently, her spiral of experience acts as a source of justification for actions taken to enhance collective success for the organisation across all centres of operations.
Knowing the likely outcomes of some actions in different market segments provides a mechanism of evaluating the likely impact when a general policy is implemented homogenously in all market segments (Lussier & Achua, 2004). Therefore, Carranza’s spiral of experience facilitates the development of her transformational leadership.
Carranza mainly focuses on enhancing success of UPS by surrounding herself with the most skilled and talented people (Carranza Minicase, n.d.). She also likes working with people who are committed to the organisation’s strategic visions and missions as stipulated in the UPS’ organisational culture. The culture “values diversity, encourages quality, integrity, commitment, fairness, loyalty, and social responsibility, among other values” (Carranza Minicase, n.d.). From her spiral of experience, she appreciates the need for transformation of teamwork members to align them with her principles of success, viz. learning, skills, and knowledge development. In this sense, Carranza’s spiral of experience is essential in the development of her transformational leadership skills.
Leadership skills showcased by Carranza
Carranza depicts impeccable skill in managing people. She listens to all people and welcomes all opportunities indiscriminately. Since UPS employs people from diverse backgrounds, such opportunities emanate from people from diverse backgrounds. Carranza’s success has been achieved through work teams. Therefore, she possesses high skills in managing people from large spectra of diversity.
Scholarly research evidences the capacity of diverse work teams to increase organisational results. For instance, Ibarra and Hansen (2011) argue that leaders should have the capacity to merge diversities in workforce in a manner that ensures that an organisation takes advantage of what each diversity element can provide. Carranza has such capability as evidenced by her ability to unite people along the organisational culture so that their diversities do not constitute a mechanism for the work teams’ dysfunction. All work teams are guided by the vision laid by Carranza consistently with the goals, mission, and purposes of UPS.
Carranza has profound skills in transformational leadership as evidenced by the capacity to set visions coupled with inspirations necessary for the follower. Leaders possessing transformational leadership skills assess situations to facilitate the formulation of strategies for increasing growth and overcoming operational challenges (Sakiru et al., 2013). The skills also enable leaders to ensure adequate and effective communication of success strategies and visions to all organisational stakeholders. This advantage aids Carranza to handle challenging external and internal situations at UPS.
Carranza depicts emotional intelligence leadership skills as evidenced by her good communication skills. Communicating effectively require leaders to have qualities such as the ability to listen effectively to others, have the ability and willingness to speak honestly and kindly, be approachable, and have the capacity to make well-informed decisions (Polychroniou, 2009). Carranza advises leaders to not only listen, but also observe before speaking. She states, “You learn more by not speaking” (Carranza Minicase, n.d, par.9). From this assertion, she pinpoints the importance of listening as a critical trait for effective communication and an aspect of emotional intelligence skills.
References
Carranza Minicase: Developing leaders at UPS. (n.d.). Web.
Ibarra, H., & Hansen, M. (2011). Are You a Collaborative Leader? Harvard Business Review, 89 (8), 68-74. Web.
Lussier, R., & Achua, C. (2004). Leadership Theory, Application, Skill Development. Minneapolis, MN: Southwestern Cengage. Web.
Polychroniou, P. (2009). Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Transformational Leadership of Supervisors: The Impact on Team Effectiveness. Team Performance Management, 15 (8), 343-356. Web.
Sakiru, K., Lawrence, J., Othman, J., Silong, A., & Busayo, A. (2013). Leadership Styles and Job Satisfaction among Employees in Small and Medium Enterprises. International Journal of Business and Management, 8 (13), 34-41. Web.