INSPIRED LEADERSHIP VERSUS COMMANDING LEADERSHIP

722 Words2 Pages

A leader who motivates and inspires passion in a team while streamlining the operations of their department is truly an effective leader. The opposite of this would be a leader who instills anxiety and fear by commanding, while expecting high performance from their direct reports. We all have a choice in the leader we want to be and from this class, have been provided the tools to build a positive path for this journey. As a new leader, my ultimate goal is to create more leaders to share this journey, not just to have more followers.
Five years ago, the director of my department retired. A new person was brought in who had the education, the experience and the highly proclaimed ability to make our department more productive. For the sake of privacy, she will be referred to as Patty. As a team of about 60, we were excited for a fresh start. Unfortunately, that fresh excitement faded as reality set in. The new director was just that, a director. Patty’s leadership style represented all the negatives and very few of the positives that have been taught over the course of the last eight weeks.
Patty spoke of the values of our organization, but she did not model these values. Her behaviors were inconsistent with achieving the organization’s quality and personal experience goals, yet she encouraged the rest of us to “just get it done.” Patty laid the groundwork early on about the rules that needed to be followed with regards to staffing, assignments and training. Our days were filled with “mandatory” this and “mandatory” that. When there was deviation in the rules as written, there were trips to her office to sit in the “hot seat.” As an employee who was not afraid to speak up about inefficiencies in the des...

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