Evelyn Gustafson’s leadership style
Evelyn Gustafson has developed situational and participatory leadership skills in managing customer services at the Mountain West Health Plans. The main characteristics of Gustafson’s leadership style include adaptability, empowerment, commitment, contribution, and proactive participation in motivating the customer care agents at the organization.
The aspect of adaptability influences the adjustments that may be required in exercising influence over a challenge. Through these adjustments, Gustafson was in a position to model a unique setting that reassures and discerns the wants and desires of the customer care agents, while ensuring increased efficiency in serving customers. Besides, she inspires self-esteem and confidence among the staff to align their feelings to specific intuition or instinct in her proactive concept.
The strengths of Evelyn Gustafson’s leadership style include the ability to strike a balance between creativity and participatory skills to serve competing interests in the relatively changing economic landscape, following the rapid growth of the company through modeling efficiency units in the customer care department.
Since Evelyn Gustafson’s leadership style inspires the need to contribute proactively towards the creation of a suitable environment for closing the gap that may exist between employee performance and customer satisfaction, she was able to inspire the employees to perform optimally as evident in the 10% turnover rate during her tenure.
Gustafson made it her responsibility to establish social welfare amenities for the employees to win their trust and full commitment to his growth strategies at the Mountain West Health Plans Company. Besides, Gustafson was competent in teamwork and a keen believer in collective responsibility.
Evelyn Gustafson’s leadership style had weaknesses such as poor planning, unstructured motivation, and positive behavior management, and inability to balance the cost-profit matrix for the organization. Despite being proactive in the interaction with the customer care agents, most of her actions are very informal and done through personal perception, rather than following organizational motivation and efficiency policies.
The sources of Evelyn Gustafson’s influence are personal experiences in the same position as those she is managing. Instead of adopting the intrinsic leadership approach, Evelyn Gustafson is motivated by the need to make the employees feel comfortable and appreciated at the expense of efficiency as a result of self-pity from past experiences in their position.
Erik Rasmussen’s leadership style
Erik Rasmussen’s leadership style as he tried to effect change can be classified as transformational and task-oriented. This style of leadership inspires the need to contribute proactively towards the creation of a suitable environment for closing the gap that may exist between service provision and the efficiency matrix.
Erik Rasmussen uses creative leadership, which is a rich recipe for an imaginative response, to stimulate and create a wide chain of adaptation of viable solutions to the demands of the organization on efficiency and customer satisfaction through the proposed cost-cutting initiative.
Erik Rasmussen has organized the management function of the organization into independent units with different performance orientation for the employees while putting the interests of the company and the customers before those of the customer care agents.
Through proactive management, Erik Rasmussen has successfully rolled out an organized process within the organization that involved setting, planning, managing customer demands and deploying assets to achieve specific goals and objectives such as offering competitive prices and convenience to customers in the most efficient and cost-effective manner.
Since management is about reproducing an action plan and implementing the same, Erik Rasmussen developed solutions that addressed the concerns of the company’s diverse customers and the spiraling costs. This strategy was successful since Erik Rasmussen inspired efficiency in terms of employee performance in the long-range perspective of serving the interests of the customers and the company.
Rasmussen’s form of leadership style has the merit of internalizing task orientation in practicing a proactive balance in self situational leadership management. Also, this leadership style ensured that the operational and direct service delivery strategies are formalized in the performance contract as a remedy for sustainable performance.
The weakness of Erik Rasmussen leadership style includes lack of direct employee engagement in the process of transforming the Mountain West Health Plans Company into an efficient and optimal entity in customer service delivery. Despite an improved period of keeping customers on hold, lack of direct employee motivation negatively affected the turnover rate, and it declined from 10% to 30%.
Besides, this leadership style lacked strategies for keeping the customer care agents in healthy and stable mind, which determine the sustainability of every performance strategy. As reported, despite the improved employee efficiency, the level of employee motivation dropped after Erik Rasmussen managed to control the spiraling costs.
The source of influence in Erik Rasmussen leadership style is the modern organizational leadership strategy of optimal functionality through the creation of systems that close loopholes responsible for inefficiencies. Besides, Erik Rasmussen’s young age could have motivated him to develop the implicit rationalization of performance as impacted by the balance between inputs and output in an organizational setting.
Modifications in Erik Rasmussen’s leadership style
If I were Martin Quinn, I would recommend several modifications in Erick Rasmussen’s leadership style to ensure that the Mountain West Health Plans’ organizational behavior is positive and efficient for long term business sustainability.
To create strong leadership structure at the Mountain West Health Plans, Erick Rasmussen’s leadership style should embrace the element of participatory leadership since it provides an opportunity where employees could be motivated to give the desired output, thus meeting set targets.
When Erick Rasmussen embraces the principles of participatory leadership, it becomes easy to convince employees to be flexible to change. These skills will turn around the current problem of lack of responsibility and ownership of customer service due to a lack of motivation.
Erick Rasmussen should strive to strike a balance between task orientation and transformational skills to serve competing interests in the relatively changing economic landscape, following the rapid growth of the company through modeling efficiency units with the full support of the employees.
Reflectively, a self-initiative in transformational leadership plays a significant role in setting up the leadership environment for situational occurrence management from external factors. It recognizes the relationship between these responses and cognition ways to test the validity of the relationships among the staff members. Besides, it provides measures to apply to substitute distorted thoughts with more realistic situational redress.
From the current successes and challenges that Erick Rasmussen is facing, he is likely to make these changes since they will directly determine the sustainability of the current cost-cutting initiative. To effect the proposed changes, the Mountain West Health Plans’ customer care department should create a healthy work environment, and personal growth perspectives that apply to all situations since all the vital controls of the department are within the control of Erick Rasmussen.
Through centralized and properly designed training procedures, talent promotion, and motivation, productive behavior internalization among the employees will present the best alternative ways of solving the current problem in role execution as a result of low morale. Unless employees take a positive attitude to embrace change and create an environment that motivated change, quantifiable change may just be a dream.
The physical structures of the Mountain West Health Plans’ organization culture should be modified to promote a positive relationship between favorable and effective job performance and work environment as attributes of motivation and congenial conditions. The recommendation encourages security, comfort and safety, and prevailing physical convenience among the employees in executing their duties.
Internalization and formalization of motivation measuring factors such as interpersonal relations, working conditions, support and trust, welfare provisions, and work environment will greatly contribute to the organizational effectiveness as well as the optimal performance of the employees.
Therefore, Erick Rasmussen should reintroduce employee training and other monetary rewards based on performance to ensure that the current cost-cutting initiative does not negatively affect the performance of the employees. The facilitation strategy is summarized in the table below.