Throughout history, managers have been charged with the responsibility of guiding and developing employees in order to improve their individual performance and that of the organization in general.
As a manager, it is important to ensure that employees are shown the need to acquire desirable qualities such as professionalism, mutual trust and respect for others. It is also important that managers offer support to employees in their desire to improve their performance.
As a manager, there are various things that one can do to ensure that employees acquire these traits and become better performers. A manager can therefore come up with an employee development program designed to help develop such cultures among employees.
Such a program would help educate employees on the need for such cultural values and on the need to conduct oneself in a professional manner at all times. Such a program should be incorporated in other training programs of the organization and made mandatory for all employees1.
Management of organizations should ensure that there is a strong organization culture and that the organizational values are clearly communicated to employees.
Organizational values are able to help employees identify with the organization, find meaning in their jobs and consequently align their individual goals and efforts to those of the entire organization.
A manager should therefore ensure that professionalism, mutual trust and respect for others are some of the core values of the organization and that they are well communicated to all employees. Culture has been described as the theatre of life and that it is a major part of an individual.
Influencing culture therefore has the ability to initiate change in the behavior of a person for the best. A manager should set high standards of such cultural values in order to ensure that employees see the need to acquire them2.
Leaders are expected to influence their followers to perform their jobs willingly. It is therefore important for managers to focus on their roles of influencing employees to improve their performance in order to achieve organizational objectives.
Leadership focus is important in helping employees to work towards the attainment of organizational goals and objectives. A focused leader will ensure that employees are well motivated and they direct all their efforts towards the attainment of the organizational goals and objectives.
The international business environment is becoming increasingly competitive and therefore a leader needs to be focused on business issues such as tasks, business, organizational objectives, employee welfare and improvement and on individual growth.
This will ensure that everybody in the organization is focused on delivering the best service to the organization3.
Adaptation to change has today become a common objective of organizations and management is charged with the responsibility of guiding this process in a manner that results in improved competitiveness of the organization.
Leaders are also the people who create and design change and are therefore expected to change their leadership styles to be able to guide the change process. Change management is today regarded as one of the core competencies of management across the globe.
Transformative leaders are generally credited with being able to guide the change process in an organization in an effective way.
Such leaders are able to generate the energy required to guide the change process, are able to adopt a systems approach, are able to use vision to lead and are able to carry out the process in a systematic manner that will lead to the attainment of the overall organizational goals and objectives4.
Bibliography
Kearney, K., Guiding Improvements in Principal Performance. Leadership, vol.35, no.1, 2005, pp. 18-21
Martin, J. Organizational Culture: Mapping the Terrain, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2002
Spillane, J.P. Distributed Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006
Footnotes
1 J, Martin, Organizational Culture: Mapping the Terrain, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2002
2 Ibid.
3 K, Kearney, Guiding Improvements in Principal Performance. Leadership, vol.35, no.1, 2005, pp. 18-21
4 J.P, Spillane, Distributed Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006