Response: When Followers Become Toxic Opinion Essay

Factors that help leaders from being led astray /mislead

Leadership is an ongoing process in an organization. It results from the dynamic nature of the environment. Use of efficient leadership change management and leadership principles make change management successful and keep followers from being toxic.

First, the leader needs to embrace system thinking in an organization. Besides, they need to integrate the three approaches in system thinking in the daily runningand control of their followers.

The three approaches used in this process are life cycle thinking, stakeholder engagement and complexity thinking. These three approaches make theleadership of change asuccess.

Second, the leader should ensure that there are structured communication channels between him or her and the followers. It helps in disseminating information efficiently to all the parties involved.

The leader should be in a position to embrace change at any time and devise creative ways of communicating the change without causing anxiety. Besides, it is necessary to recognize and prioritize stakeholders’ interests and concerns before making decision that are likely to influence the followers (Bennis & Goldsmith 41).

Notwithstanding, there is need to have adequate skills to manage processes of followers engagements, commitments and reports on the progress of an idea. This should not be done at the time when the leader is experiencing problems with the followers.

Finally, it is necessary to uphold a professional code of conduct and ethics when carrying out duties among the followers to create trust and faith in the leader’s actions.

Thus, the leader should develop an active engagement with the followers from the onset of the idea to avoid conflict of interest. In this way, the leader will stay ahead of the rest and will maintain autonomy in thoughts and actions.

The importance of the autonomous decisions made by the leader

By definition, leadership is the capability to internalize the environmental setting that incorporates and empowers a group to creatively contribute towards definite course of addressing a challenge.

Since leadership is the ability, skills and talent define the capacity of a party to achieve a definite solution to the phenomena in question. The aspect of talent envisions natural skill and ability that has gained proficiency through personal experiences and relevant training.

Despite the fact that talent forms the part of leadership ability, it is not the primary aspect. Rather, autonomy in thoughts may equip a person with the necessary skills that are required in exercising mature leadership characterised by persistence and experience (Bass 21).

Autonomy in thoughts in an individual creates a decision environment characterized byadaptability, empowerment, commitment, contribution, and critical problem solving skills. The aspect of adaptability influences the adjustments that may be required in exercising influence over a challenge.

Through these adjustments, a person exercising leadership may be in a position to model a unique setting that reassures and discerns the wants and desires of the subjects.

The aspect of empowerment involves inspiring self esteem and confidence among the subjects to align their feelings to specific intuition or instinct. Through this leadership, may facilitate the degree of empowerment feeling and faith in solutions given (Bennis & Goldsmith 34).

In addition, autonomy in decision making inspires the need to contribute proactively towards creation of a suitable environment for closing the gap that may exist between a challenge and its solution.

Through autonomy in decision making, leadership is a rich recipe for an imaginative response to stimulation that creates a wider chain of adaptation of viable solutions to a problem.

Do you believe that it is possible to change toxic followers? If yes, then how

It is possible to change toxic followers through interpersonal assessment. Interpersonal assessment assesses human acts which people utilize when interacting with different peoples. This assessment is helpful especially for leaders who intend to know how they influence people and how to communicate effectively in a society.

In addition, leadership skills are normally influenced by situational and personal experiences. Indeed, situational experiences exist in many ways. First, attitude of encouragement is important in a society. Actually, people should appreciate and encourage positive contributions.

Secondly, shared objectives are helpful because they guide community to embrace desired outcomes while discouraging unfavorable attitudes. On the other hand, personal experiences are based on three aspects.

First, past reality that people have experienced influence people to be aware of which human acts have a positive outcome. Secondly, personal attitude usually influences people on how to interact with other people. Lastly, self esteem enables people to develop inner strength in carrying out various actions.

Reflectively, interpersonal assessment, basically, inquires how an individual (for example, a leader) is perceived by others (followers) in a community. Leaders should know how they influence their followersinterpersonally.

Indeed, such assessment is monitored through verifying the leader’s values with the followers’ norms. Actually, the desire to achieve one’s challenging situation is a wish not only to attain individual’s wish but also people’s expectations (Greenleaf, 2002).

Moreover, a challenging experience normally compels a person to examine his attitude. Indeed, an individual will attempt to improve his professionalism to resolve a challenge through internalization of interpersonal assessment that aims to change the toxic mindset into a proactive mindset.

Furthermore, involving in team work with different people will be an effective way to resolve the toxic mindset.

Can toxic follower create toxic leaders? If yes, then how

Toxic followers can create toxic leaders since most leaders would want to appeal to the interest of their followers. Moreover, leadership is meant to inspire trust within the functions of control of a system.

Basically, toxic follower’s mindset is characterised by imitation, status quo, and narrowed focus to an approach towards realising a solution. Therefore, a leader may be influenced by the toxic follower in the process of appealing to the interests of the follower.

Organizations across the contemporary social environment have unique subcultures which define expected behavior and response to different occurrences. Besides, subcultures are unique in terms of beliefs, practices, and communicative gestures or language and define the hierarchy of responsibility and control in a group.

In any group, there is always a laid down structure formulated in order to keep its members within the expected behavior. When the followers control the network and channel for defining beliefs, they are in a position to easily make their leader toxic if they are toxic (Devito 45).

These may be in the form of psychological, experience, value and beliefs, attitudes, and group common interests that are meant to inspire negative energy in the followers.

When these values are internalized into the leadership structure, ways of interaction, commitment at work and confidence of the leader may be compromised and create anxiety and lack of autonomy in decisions.

How could an organization avoid the cultivation of toxic environments

Basing on LPI assessment, an organization can enable its members to develop the following five personal competencies.

First, the members should be encouraged tobe a role model and develop self-confidence by elucidating their own individual values. This will set a good example through conforming to shared values of the community.

Secondly, the organization needs to enliven a common vision to visualize the future through perceiving to achieve pleasant and excellent possibilities (Bass 29).

In addition, the organization should create a desirable environment for interaction with various people to achieve common objectives that are important in society.

Thirdly, such organization should learn through challenging inspirations. In fact, the organization should struggle to get opportunities and whatever needed by members as a way to develop and grow positively.

Moreover, other people like to take risks in order to learn through experimentation since learning is made possible through making mistakes. Thus, such organizations should promote collaboration through embracing team work.

This is helpful not only to restore trust amongst individuals, but also to support people by sharing common objectives. Fifth, such organizations should appreciate and encourage people’s determination and contribution (Bustin 23).

LPI assessment is important because it enables an organization to perceive how people evaluate their leadership skills.

Furthermore, this is a self assessment strategy that enables members of an organization to inquire people’s opinion in order to compare their suggestions with other perspectives as a way to improve the personality and leadership skills.

LPI assessment creates autonomy in decision making which establishes proactive cultural perspective learning based on the premise that organizational learning is done by key individuals in the organization whose actions then influence the organizational change.

Works Cited

Bass, Benard. Bass & Stogdill’s handbook of leadership: Theory, research, and managerial applications. New York: The Free Press, 2000. Print.

Bennis, William & Goldsmith John. Learning to Lead. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Print.

Bustin, Gerald. Take Charge: How Leaders Profit From Change. Irving, Texas: Tapestry Press, 2004. Print.

Devito, Lynne. Human communication: New Zealand Edition. Auckland, New Zealand: Addison Wesley, 2006. Print.

Greenleaf, Ronald. Servant leadership: A journey into the nature of legitimate power and greatness. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2002. Print.