Introduction
Timely encouragement is the key to effective leadership in community building. According to Kouzes and Posner (2012), leaders have to make sure that all the members of the collective body they work with are being paid attention to and are being valued for their contribution into the company success (p. 318). Below, specific strategies aiming to promote this type of celebratory culture will be addressed.
To begin with, Kouzes and Posner (2012) argue that an efficient leader is first of all, a human capable of caring about one’s subjects needs. To foster the sense of teamwork, a good leader not only provides supervision, but also cares for the fellow-workers’ well-being and encourages their hearts by means of providing rewards and showing appreciation. As a result, all the participants of the working process are motivated to do their best in order to ensure high level performance of the company.
Further, as stated in Kouzes and Posner (2012), effective leaders understand the importance of celebrating cultural diversity in the community since cultural intelligence promotes an organization’s ability to achieve its goals. Celebrating diversity is critically important for the successful entrepreneurship since it presents additional business opportunities due to the influence of fresh ideas coming from employees with different world vision.
In addition, Kouzes and Posner (2012) state that community building is closely connected with such virtues as respect, ethics, and justice. This means that discrimination and bias on any ground are unacceptable for a contemporary leader. Prejudice is to be avoided in any filed, beginning from promotion and payment and ending with task allocation.
Creation a Sense of Community in Other Countries
In other cultures, leaders also see the creation of sense of community as a central objective. To illustrate, in France, top managers pay a lot of attention to increasing employee’s participation in the company development. In this vein, workers acquire an extra opportunity to access community information and power to offer their own strategies for the company efficiency improvement. Thus, people feel motivated to labor out of their full potential because they carry out the instructions they have elaborated on their own.
In Germany, leaders work hard to provide a personal model of effective performance. They position themselves as the living examples of commitment, self-discipline, and the can-do attitude. Consequently, employees feel motivated to demonstrate the same loyalty to the company as their managers.
In Japan, people in charge make an emphasis on a shared vision development. They encourage elaboration of common values among the members of the collective body and inspire people to unite around a powerful idea or mission. Thus, employees develop a sense of community motivated by a clear vision of the business process.
The Examples of Contemporary Leaders Using Contingency Theory
Contingency Theory finds its wide implementation in today’s market conditions when the global market is vulnerable to the negative impact of political instability and economic upheavals. The essence of this theory is the idea that external environment should be the primary factor that affects the leader’s choices concerning management strategies and organizational structure (DeRosa & Lepsinger, 2010).
Modern leaders who work in a global context implement Contingency Theory in their daily practices. Schachter (2011) makes an overview of global companies effectively utilizing this theory. According to Schachter (2011),
A prime example was Southwest Airlines, which despite fuel shocks, deregulation and crippling recessions thrived in an industry where many airlines went bankrupt, garnering a stock market return 63 times the market as a whole, even beating Wal-Mart and General Electric. The other six companies were: Amgen Inc. (biotech), Biomet (medical devices), Intel Corp. (digital technology), Microsoft (software), Progressive Insurance and Stryker (surgical equipment) (para. 7).
The leaders of the above-mentioned companies have one common trait which makes their success outstanding. All of them count on team work and render the plenitude of power to teams. As a result, teams are given autonomy, have freedom to act creatively, and are able to make important decisions. As a consequence, they have enough flexibility to access the scarce resources promptly and win the competition.
Personal Experience of Cooperating with a Culturally Diverse Team
In the past year, I had an opportunity to participate in the Internet-based business project uniting people of different cultural, gender, and even linguistic backgrounds. This experience definitely became significant to me in regards to effective collaboration in diverse teams. The participants of the project had different vision of business practices in the Internet environment. Initially, this circumstance prevented us from achieving financial success we expected. However, the situation changed dramatically when we took time to conduct an on-line business discussion and elaborated a strategy that included some aspects offered by all the members of the team. Eventually, every participant was able to see one’s contribution to the team vision and mission. The positive outcome of such an approach was our increased profits, winning loyal customers, and our agreement to continue cooperation in similar projects.
Community Building Practices Implementation
Based on the information learnt this week, I decided to take more efforts to promote diversity within the collective body of workers in my company. I realized that I did not pay enough attention to such an effective way of self-motivation development as appreciating cultural differences, celebrating varied approaches to work, and offering more space for creativity (Northouse, 2012). Since my primary objective is to increase financial profitability of my company and the amount of daily earnings of each individual in the team, I have to invest more energy into encouraging cooperation between the members of the team. The information leant from Kouzes and Posner (2012) helped me notice that I was focused on my supervisory function, but failed to perform well as a leader. Now, I plan to offer more freedom to my subjects to allow more space for decision making. Besides, I will devote more time to establishing personal contacts with all the members of the collective body as I aim to support them and encourage their hearts.
To measure the effectiveness of this new approach, I will utilize the multi-angled strategy. First and the most important, I will have the numerical indicators of my leadership advancement since I prefer checking company financial reports on a regular basis. In addition, I am going to check the financial performance of each member of my team to make sure that employees have acquired new tools and new options to make their work more viable. Finally, I plan to conduct an anonymous questionnaire to learn what my fellow-workers think about the novelties, whether they share my optimism about the new arrangements, and what else they would want to have to increase their motivation level and profitableness.
References
DeRosa, D., & Lepsinger, R. (2010). Virtual Team Success: A practical guide for working and leading from a distance. New York: Wiley.
Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2012). The leadership challenge (5th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Chapter 11: “Celebrate the Values and Victories”
Northouse, P. G. (2012) Leadership theory and practice. (6th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Schachter, H. (2011). How great leaders make their own success. The Globe and Mail. Web.