A successful leader
My personnel experience as a successful leader takes me back in the year 2014, while I was working for an electronic company in Baltimore. The company operated both retail and wholesale. I was the company’s distribution coordinator. The distribution department was responsible for most of the logistics from pulling orders and delivering merchandise for shelf stocking. At the time, I assumed the position the company’s daily deliveries were limited to four trucks due to the inefficiency of the team at the time. I embarked on training my side and then placing them in the right position depending on their acquired skill sets. The efficiency of the team improved tremendously, and the total daily deliver trucks moved up to nine trucks.
To achieve this growth, I applied the charismatic style of leadership. As a charismatic leader, I used persuasion, eloquent communication and force of personality to change the inner working of the department. Also, it helped me delegate duties based on the skill set of each team member. Besides, I worked with my team side by side, inserting myself in the process. I would be part of the people loading the truck or pulling the truck order, which motivated the employees to get the job done.
Other than charismatic leadership, transformational style of leadership much guided my success. As the definition suggests, this style motivates employees to have a say in the direction of the team. I allowed employees to air their opinions hence encouraging innovation. In my case, I would always present the scenario together with a few possible solutions and then deliberate on them. It allowed me to get opinions from the experienced employees and always to make them part of the solution. Besides, this gives employees a sense of ownership and independence at the workplace that translates into increased productivity.
The UWEAR-PALEDENIM merger scenario presents two entities that are productive in different ways. UNWEAR have a get the job done and go home attitude while PALEDENIM has a culture of working together-one for all and all for one approach. The leader must be able to pull both sides and stimulate them to a shared culture to ensure a successful merger. Transitioning employees into one single culture is hard, given the massive difference between the two organisational cultures.
The merger scenario can be considered as a crisis type move due to the culture change required. There is a polar difference in the way the two organisations get the job done; hence; the best leadership style in this case is authoritarian leadership. As the definition suggests the autocratic style of leadership demands an error-free outcome. Although it is the least popular, it is the most recommended given the scenario. As a leader, I would develop the most desirable plan and policy and then outline the steps that need to be followed to pull the merger successfully. All the tasks will be delegated accordingly depending on the skill sets of the employees. An authoritarian style of leadership is a quick fix which is effective within the short term. Once the employees have adapted the new culture, the autocratic leadership should be abandoned because it is detrimental in the long run. It lowers the morale of the employees in the long term hence leading to a failed culture. The most important thing is to have a new culture up and running in the short-run then establish a long-term strategy for the organisation.