Every organization has a mission and a vision statement that explains what they are doing and where they are heading in the future. For a large part of the initial part of the company’s growth, it’s mostly the owners and the top management that lead the efforts and design an organization chart to simplify hierarchy and organizational communications. But, as the team size begins to grow and the head counts begin to fill up the workplace, business owners realize that managing people and their work is something that would require a different set of skills and attributes. What they actually seek is a leader—a people’s manager who understands the goals of the company and builds a bridge between the top management and the bottom line to get work done in a simple and effective manner. But, there is a problem with this structural or transactional form of leadership. It doesn’t work anymore in the modern workplace where expectations from people and systems have changed so much. There is a serious degradation of the organizations because of leadership or you may call it a lack of leadership that forces employees and teams to jump ship before the storm comes. As per a recent report on how business owners perceive leadership strategies in their companies, only three percent of the survey respondents said they have a very well settled leadership team and the rest are either disappointed with the efforts or they are hoping things will change if the leaders are changed. In short, 97 percent of the business leaders think their leadership strategy is a dysfunctional one!
Wouldn’t you like to know more about why this is dysfunctional and what it would take to change things on its head? Let’s attempt to do that through this article.
Transactional leadership
The best way to fail with a team is to have a transactional leader reining the efforts. The transactional leadership style is highly controlling and relies on the traditional concept of rewards and reprimands to get work done. There is absolutely no scope for transactional leadership styles in the modern era where organizations are spending so much to keep people on board and run the projects. If leaders are ineffective with their sense of reward, their mode of meting out punishments would be even more atrocious. In best leadership training programs, transactional leadership attributes are identified and studied through real world lenses.
If you believe in rewards and punishments for getting work done, you should be in a law and order management role, not a corporate world. It doesn’t work well for leaders with strict boundaries when dealing with people.
Ignore Change
Things change and the rate at which they change is beyond the control of leaders that run the systems. For that matter, even the outcome of the best known systems is not known when people are involved. Ineffective teams are led by leaders who are unable to understand that change is necessary to grow and progress. They would rather continue with a time tested formula and expect the same results than do something new and bold and hope better results are achieved in the process. But no, leaders who hate change stop others from embracing change too, and that’s when the ineffectiveness of the whole team begins to show. In programs related to leadership training in Bangalore, you will find countless case studies where change brought in positive influence and allowed opportunities for new people and systems. If done with a purpose, change management could become the force to drive forward in uncertain times, much like what happened to the top global companies that survived the pandemic through leadership and leadership alone!
Leaders get replaced for unknown reasons
Leaders that are getting promoted for doing work, and then getting replaced for not getting the job done satisfactorily can hit anyone very hard. But, that’s not how best workplaces are created. Organizations that change their leaders too often are seen to be extremely autocratic in outlook and functions. According to a survey of worst workplaces in the US and UK, C level executives like CEOs or CTO wouldn’t last for more than 1 year in 75% of the cases. Even at team levels, the leaders were replaced with more alacrity leaving no room for others in the company to gel and get work done with better communication and delegation. The fault lies squarely on the people or the board that hired such C level executives. Without any doubt, leadership training could be useful.
