Introduction
The failure or success of any organization depends on the nature of the adopted leadership style. The contemporary workplace is dynamic with workers being drawn from diverse backgrounds, and thus leaders should work creatively to inspire everyone for the achievement of the organizational goals. Some of the important leadership objectives include maximizing productivity and ensuring quality together with achieving both customer and employees’ satisfaction.
As such, leaders should partner with workers through shared responsibilities to realize the set objectives including profitability and sustainability. In the light of this understanding, it suffices to argue that leadership is a function of teamwork as opposed to being the obligation of a single person. In essence, leaders provide change and adaptability, initiate organizational transformation, create a vision, and where necessary, engage in management aspects.
Main Body
This project is a report on interviews involving several leaders working in different companies in Dubai. The objective of the interviews was to understand the major issues that organizational leaders face in their day-to-day activities. These leaders were chosen due to their extensive experience in the field having worked for different companies for several years. The report starts by giving background information and a brief description of all the leaders’ profiles.
In the second section, the top two issues – motivation and development of employees, are discussed. Reasons why these two issues are more important than others will be outlined. The third section highlights the solutions to the mentioned issues that the leaders gave. In the fourth section, one solution for each issue from academic literature will be given before ending the report with the conclusion and recommendation sections.
Conclusion
Leadership plays an integral part in the success of an organization. Out of the different factors of production, labor contributes significantly to the profitability of a company. However, the current work environment has become dynamic and diverse due to globalization, and thus workers come from different backgrounds. Therefore, contemporary organizational leaders should be multicultural on top of being prepared to manage for diversity as a way of creating a competitive advantage for their firms.
After conducting the interviews, two issues emerged as the most important aspects of leadership in companies. The first one is inspiring or motivating employees. The interviewed leaders agreed that employees’ motivation contributes significantly to the success of an organization. One of the issues where the leaders held a common opinion is that motivated workers love their jobs, and thus they perform exemplary, which in turn promotes the overall organizational performance.
Unfortunately, it was noted that most leaders in the modern workplace lack this important ability, and thus the affected companies perform averagely. One of the ways to ensure that employees are motivated is to guarantee job satisfaction. The leaders opined that while extrinsic motivating factors like monetary rewards may produce positive results among most workers, it gets to a point where such an approach yields diminishing returns.
However, the leaders noted that intrinsic motivations, such as job satisfaction, accomplishment, responsibility, and knowledge, are lasting. Consequently, intrinsically motivated employees are highly likely to have a long-term impact on an organization, which adds immense value to the overall goals and vision. According to the interviewed leaders, one of the best ways to ensure employee motivation is through engagement. To achieve this goal, leaders should have a caring attitude, empower employees, and promote teamwork. Empowered employees take responsibility for their work while teamwork involving workers and leaders arouses the urge to learn and share knowledge.
The second issue that came up after interviewing the leaders is the development of employees. This exercise involves mentoring and coaching workers to improve their skills and obtain new knowledge. Leaders in any organization should assume the responsibility of creating an employee career development and growth program for the overall performance of a given entity.
Employees that have benefitted from such development programs are likely to be highly useful to the organization through assuming leadership roles and coming up with innovative solutions, which would be ultimately profitable for an organization. Some of the noted strategies that can be adopted for the development of employees include job shadowing, mentoring, coaching, giving projects, and stretch assignments. However, many leaders face different challenges when developing their employees. For instance, people tend to become rigid, and thus they oppose change especially after working in the same position for a long time.
Additionally, workers set their boundaries and any form of new training may be taken as a sign of mistrust. Such employees may accuse the leadership of lacking confidence in them and doubting their capacity to execute their duties, which may lead to high turnover rates. However, one of the ways to ensure employee development is by creating innovative teams. Most employees have novel ideas, but if not given a platform, they cannot bring forth their creative genius and translate it into executable strategies. From academic literature, another way to motivate employees is through offering opportunities for advancement (Sung & Choi, 2014). On the other hand, learning to delegate plays a critical role in the development of employees (Sung & Choi, 2014).
Recommendations
The first recommendation for future leaders is to ensure that they are multicultural and prepared to manage for diversity. The interviewed leaders emphasized the changing and dynamic contemporary workplace where employees are being drawn from different cultural backgrounds across the world. As such, leaders should be prepared and armed with the right skills to create an integrated work environment where every employee feels appreciated. This move will ensure that workers perform optimally for the overall benefit of the organization.
Secondly, future leaders should learn the different ways of inspiring employees. Motivated workers exploit their talents and capabilities optimally, thus increasing the productivity and profitability of the firm. However, leaders should balance between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation for better results. Money and material rewards can motivate employees to a certain level. However, intrinsic motivation is lasting and it influences organizations in the long-term.
For motivation, employees should be empowered to exploit their potential. Encouraging teamwork also contributes significantly to the motivation of employees. Ultimately, employees should be treated as human beings, and thus leaders should show that they care about their workers.
Finally, future leaders should come up with employee development programs. Mentoring, coaching, and training increase the employees’ skills and impart new knowledge, which is useful for the overall performance of an organization. Job shadowing and stretch assignments are some of the creative ways that leaders can use to develop their employees for lasting impact. Additionally, leaders should create functional innovative teams whereby workers can exploit their potential by coming up with novel and creative ideas addressing different customer and organizational needs. Companies that promote innovativeness benefit from satisfied customers and loyal employees, which ultimately play a central role in the success and profitability of such firms.
Reference
Sung, S. Y., & Choi, J. N. (2014). Do organizations spend wisely on employees? Effects of training and development investments on learning and innovation in organizations. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 35(3), 393-412. Web.