Leadership and Management: A Reflective Analysis of Experience and Differences from Military Leadership

This assignment discusses leadership and management as per experience of working career and in which aspects this is different from military leadership experiences. It introduces a plan of organisational change and suggests ways to maintain a culture of continuous improvement in organisation as well.

Running head: LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT
LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT
Name of the university
Name of the student
Author note

1LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT
Executive summery
The purpose of this assignment is to discuss leadership and management as per experience of
my working career and in which aspects this is different from military leadership experiences.
The entire paper has been presented in a reflective format, which introduces a plan of
organisational change. It has suggested ways to maintain a culture of continuous
improvement in organisation as well.

2LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT
Table of Contents
Activity 4 A................................................................................................................................3
Activity 4 B................................................................................................................................5
Activity 4 D................................................................................................................................8
Activity 4 E..............................................................................................................................11
References................................................................................................................................15

3LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT
Activity 4 A
There are designations of a team leader, a departmental manager, general manager
that can be considered as managerial roles. Further a teacher, parents, coach are some of the
influential characters in our lives who lead us to achieve goals of life. Moreover, there are
instances of national and international leaders who have been helping us to understand the
true meaning of leadership. The concept of leadership and management is wide and multi
layered. There are fundamental differences between these two concepts: leadership and
management. Whereas management is a set of procedures structured for an organisation to
solve issues and to accomplish desired goals, leadership leads towards attaining vision and
mission of a certain organisation. However, in a corporate environment, the interpretation of
leadership is different from a military situation yet both of the sectors have several similar
points to agree with.
While applying for a job it is not appropriate to introduce yourself as unexperienced.
Other than professional experiences, we all have faced several leadership situations in our life
other than a job-based responsibility. My experience of being a state-level basketball player
can be regarded as leadership experience too. Sportspersons know teamwork well and
structure the activities according to goals. Besides, before joining as a professional
advertisement writer I used to be an intern at one of the eminent advertisement agencies.
Practical knowledge helps to create a good impression in entry level. As I had prior
knowledge of the work, I used to solve small queries of new joined employees who faced
confusions while working with advertisement or web designing skills. Managers were helpful
towards me and I learnt how to be supportive and take small initiatives to solve the everyday
issues. Helping team mates and create positive environment can be regarded as leadership
attributes.

4LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT
After working for one and half years, when I was promoted with the additional
responsibility of offering training to five people and to make them efficient for the company
needs, I realised this is going to be an opportunity of learning various means of leadership
precisely. While leading a small team I have learnt four basic attributes of a leader. A leader
does not only instructs or consults with the seniors every time when there is a crisis. Instead,
with the help of creative and professional skills, try to solve problems first. In order to deliver
any kind of bad news or to overcome team hurdle I have a habit of conducting urgent
meetings every week to maintain the synchronisation of team. These kind of small
management opportunities are best to represent skills in front of managers. Next, I have been
promoted with responsibility of team leader after one more year. Maintaining the old
technique of creating team unity and understanding, in a crisis, I like to consider their ideas,
opinions, concerns and suggestions as well. This process has been helping me to come into a
conclusion for solving issues.
Seeking help from immediate superior is wise whenever confusion occurs. I have
realised from my prior experience that maintaining strong relationship with team members
and encouraging them to achieve both the shared and individual goals are strength of
leadership and management in a corporate scenario. The detail knowledge of teammates’
expertise would help to allocate tasks with more perfection. Professionalism is important in
terms of punctuality, efficiency, ethics and understanding teammates as employees would
learn from their managers. As a leader, I realised, if I suggest team members to attain training
and workshops for developing soft and interpersonal skills it will be beneficial for both the
company and employee. I felt motivated when my trainees delivered better performance after
completion of the internal skill development programme. Therefore, I have learnt in my
working career that taking initiative, ability of solving problem, responsible behaviour,

5LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT
strategic vision and experience or ability of learning from everyday challenges are some of
the essential attributes of leadership and management.
There are five basic attributes of military leadership. They always prioritize today and
considers yesterday as easy because it is over. That is how they try to overcome with fatal
consequences of war. Before, leading a team with high cultural diversity and perception a
leader must redefine values of his own first. Journey towards perfection never ends, therefore,
military leaders influence the troop to become better version of them and consider it as a
continuous process. Being humble and trying to develop skills can be regarded as essential
qualities of a military management and leadership. The concept of leadership carries same
meaning in both a military situation and general industry yet differences are identified in the
way militaries execute things. In both the field managers need to understand differences
within human resource as expertise and point of motivation varies from person to person.
Difference is, whether general business focuses on market study; militaries do battlefield
analysis. Business needs market study to predict the profitability and it turns out to be
successful mostly. According to military approach, things do not go as per planning therefore
regular extensive training is required, which is not possible to arrange in business industry
that frequently. While making a decision the leaders evaluates everyone’s individual opinion
before making final call. In a multinational business industry it is difficult to execute yet
some of the leaders consider several opinions before stating decisions. The intensity of stress
is much higher in military profession. Both the industries work by planning, setting
objectives yet the area of execution is entirely different.
Activity 4 B
Recognising the increased trend of social media advertisements, I have proposed a
change, which must be instigated by the company in near future to keep a balance with 21st

6LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT
century business environment. Considering the trend of adapting virtual marketing to
approach wider range of audiences, it will be beneficial for our company if it would start
exploring the opportunities of being a part of companies’ digital marketing strategy.
Businesses use a variety of modes to display advertisement over social media, paid search
and many more digital platforms. In order to circulate product information efficiently and in a
cost effective way businesses have opt for social media marketing to appeal new customer
base, retain the existing consumers, increase the percentage of their revenue. Therefore, I
have proposed to move forward with the objective of approaching the virtual world of
advertisement. Besides, producing advertisements for television and print media, the industry
of social media is advertisement is the most promising in terms of profitability. In order to
propose the change I invited both the operational managers and departmental heads in a
meeting. Frequently, managers come across with various ideas regarding changing or
developing business from executives. Therefore, to make the idea acceptable in front of
seniors, it must address WIIFM feature. With the purpose of initiating a change, leaders
generally make mistakes by only announcing the change with help of executives. They must
realise unlike them superior managers are not familiar with its logical aspects. Therefore, it is
important to make them understand the feasibility of proposed plan of business.
The concept ‘what’s in it for me’ is process of presenting value of some product,
service or idea. The presentation will be successful if managers feel my idea feasible enough
and whatever idea I am offering is worth their monetary resource and time. It is not biased to
ask for profitability as it is going to serve business objectives of a certain organisation. I have
thought for proposing a change to include a different culture in workplace and bringing some
better ways of gaining revenue. Whereas, change is about adopting new roles and
responsibilities transition plays with people’s psychology. It is considered as a phase where
people slowly adopts with the ideas of proposed change. The success of the proposed plan is

7LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT
dependable on organisation’s understanding of its potential. In the due course of proposing
the plan, I must ensure better communication as well to make every stakeholders of the
organisation aware of the upcoming change. While listening to presentation WIIFM feature
is difficult to address because I am presenting an idea to the most experienced officials,
which means they have extensive knowledge on that particular field. It is easy to convince
those who do not have much knowledge in it, as they would depend on my presentation only.
However, who knows every aspects of a particular concept, convincing them is difficult, as
superiors will ask questions if they find any loopholes. It would be better to share the plan
with seniors as they can suggest ideas to make it better and contemporary.
After presenting the proposal and receiving approval of senior management, the next
part is successful implementation of the plan. Moreover, framing strategies and engagement
is necessary to implement the idea into reality. Engagement of the efficient workforce and
monetary resources to increase the trustworthiness of the plan is essential. It is known to all
that, sustainable business operations consistent development of industrial resources are
crucial to accomplish organisational goals in long term. Along with presenting an idea for
change, it must be evaluated by supervisors in respect to strategic asset and budget
management plan. However, it has been observed even after investing all necessary resources
a feasible plan fails at times. According to my learnings and experience, having a new
business idea is not enough. As human decisions are involved with the proposed change and
its implementation, understanding the requirements of stakeholders will be a crucial factor.
In order to implement change management plan successfully, there are several
guidelines available to engage full potential of stakeholders. As per our company profile,
various business organisations who prefer to release advertisements online can be our major
stakeholder. Besides, social media marketers, digital marketers and creative advertisement
writers will be engaged actively to implement the idea. Therefore, implementation of an idea

8LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT
to change the dimensions of existing business it is essential to understand the nature of both
the internal and external stakeholders, verify its potential with the concept of ‘What’s in it for
me?” and distribute the task according to the expertise of employees.
Apparently, organisational stakeholders are divided into three groups mainly.
Decision makers are called economic buyer, technical buyer, user and champion. Among
them technical buyers are the most influenced by such initiatives. It is essential to ensure their
undisturbed involvement as both the success and failure is dependent on them. Resistance or
acceptance of change happens on site level. It is very cliché to listen resisting comments from
the business owners saying if techniques and resources are responding well in terms of
profitability then one should not hamper the balance. With the due of course of this, what
they forget is that business environment is dynamic and to keep a balance with that a business
must adopt practices of consistent improvement in order to ensure sustainability. Therefore,
four basic attributes can be found about the significance of engaging stakeholders in terms of
achieving success. An understanding of the role of external advisors and their influence over
internal stakeholders are important. It is important to make the supervisors understand
through the theory of ‘WIIFM’, why the proposed initiative is important in terms of monetary
gain and brand value. Engaging resources according to the expertise and in its most
appropriate way is important. In order to do that technical users must enhance their capability
and work towards the shared goals of my proposed plan. Maintenance of consistent
communication with the stakeholders are important in order to identify and mitigate
challenges ensuring success of change management initiative.
Activity 4 D
The concept of people empowerment talks about sharing power with every level of
employees to serve greater objectives. As an entry level employee and trainer of a small

9LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT
team, when I got the opportunity to disclose the idea of exploring social media as the most
profitable contemporary platform of business managers found it would be feasible in terms of
organisation’s development. Therefore, an attempt was made to enter into the virtual market
of advertisement by recruiting experienced digital marketers. Trainings have been organised
as well to diverse the employee expertise. It is important to train employees according to the
business needs, which technically fulfils the interest of employees as well in terms of learning
new skills and knowledge. It makes them self-sufficient and enable them to handle
unpredictable situation if there is no one available to help on floor. A well-developed team of
human resource works as a support system behind a successful attempt. In order to make our
project successful I proposed to engage few employees to do the initial research on
companies who are not active or technically possess a weak position when comes to social
media marketing. After making a list, I decided to approach them with our new venture to
deal with us for designing ads online along with print and broadcasting media. Meanwhile,
our digital marketers and ad designers will work on improvement of newfound strategies and
social media pages. Empowering people is not about instructing the responsibilities of doing
something rather than giving someone power to execute the newly given job role. This is the
purpose of training and development.
Empowerment is a process of motivating workforce as well. It provides workers self-
confidence to apply own decisions and gain success depending on their own abilities. While
implementing our plan of approaching companies directly and executing other related tasks
they will work in a self-induced way consistently striving for better performance. Managers
of our company, allow employees to share ideas, solutions or work related decisions while
finalising final campaign idea. An idea in our setting of work never go in vain. Employees
feel free being independent and it helps to keep the stress level low and increases
responsibility.

10LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT
Applying this method of empowering people, we can also explore different ways of
completing tasks. However, it has been observed that most of the successful people have
same pattern of doing work on a regular basis. There are different ways applying which
people can be empowered and motivated towards achievement of organizational goals.
Sharing information of every details of work will be one of them. It has been noticed if there
is complication regarding sharing information or if communication gap occurs between
employees and superiors performance deteriorates. In order to avoid such situations our
organisation practices a culture of having monthly and if necessary a meeting in every two
weeks. It allows employees to come up with best possible solutions against critical situation.
While giving the presentation, and after the approval of the activities, every organisation
must set mission, vision, objectives and both the short and long-term goals. Customers’
satisfaction comes at first so understanding of the virtual advertising market is of superior
priority. This is how I have attempted the ways of change management and experimented
new ways of increasing business. Goals and objectives must be well interacted so that
employees feel empowered and valued while working on shared goals.
Besides, I have learnt that while working on new projects it is normal to make
mistakes and being a part of service industry, it is common to face difficulty to meet
customers’ exact requirements. As a result of it, people complain or try to make us
understand their needs, their concern better. However, in order to ensure less complain and
customers’ satisfaction the culture of learning from mistakes must be included within the
system. It will help them to enhance their competence beside give them lessons on how to
understand customers’ requirement properly. Success and failures are part of work. In order
to maintain a work friendly environment, it must be remembered failure is as normal as
achieving success. In both the cases, we learn. Success teaches us the correct ways to achieve
excellence and gives us encouragement to accomplish better goals both in professional and

11LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT
personal space. On the contrary, as we all know failures are our best teachers. An
organisation, a student, an individual can only grow when lessons are learnt from past
mistakes. This is how supporting an environment of learning within the workplace has been
helping us to increase the competence of employees, ensuring better performance and better
power to analyse situation and acting accordingly.
All of these processes are time consuming and entire procedure is a slow
transformation of both the power and responsibilities and work culture too. Not only
managers but every team members shares responsibilities to deliver a better service and
ensure quality. This due course of transformation is very turbulent for any organisation with a
constructive plan of change. Completion of training, understanding the goals and work
accordingly and a consistent process of learning: these are basic criteria of an effective
workforce. The entire process, according to my opinion, starting from the initial days of
proposed business plan for change, the journey and beginning of achievement requires
immense support in terms of depending on superiors and teammates to take critical decisions
while working on designing advertisements for business organisations. After first five
months, the company achieved ten successful online projects running on social media. It was
so proud moment for me and for the entire organisations. However, there were some issues
with competition. That exists in current situation as well and it is increasing day by day. Yet,
it cannot be ignored the profitability and benefits of exploring opportunities in virtual
advertisement market.
Working towards creating employee empowerment not only has been proven
beneficial in terms of customer satisfaction but it helps to improve confidence and work
ethics of employees also. I believe, practicing all these techniques will help to achieve long-
term goals and sustain success within a competitive business environment.

12LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT
Activity 4 E
 According to Clark, Silvester and Knowles (2013), continuous development itself
means gradual progress. Small areas facing difficulties are needed to address
maintaining a specific time gap. A continuous process of development is possible
when supervisors are aware enough of the risks and difficulties. The first step would
be to understand organisational needs and flaws to implement development process
and determine which benefits the company will gain by entering virtual advertisement
market.
 Experiments are common while proposing a change. Risk factors will be high. Yet, if
attempts are not made to implement ideas marketers will not be able to combat risks
or propose changes for growth. Hence, to manage risk efficient human resource will
be recruited. Necessary training must be arranged for existing employees too.
 Along with the maintenance of existing practices, as per Jasiulewicz-Kaczmarek
(2013), new practices must be adopted to serve the requirement of new business plan.
Instead of thinking for distant future, short-term plans must be made in order to
ensure quick success without disturbing the core operational structure.
 Not only to gain competitive advantage in market but also to implement a plan which
is feasible to the company structure and capability, is important too. Otherwise, it may
damage the existing process of business instead of improvement.
 However, the term ‘continuous’ refers to success of long-term objectives. The aim is
to make use of appropriate industrial techniques towards growth and transformation.
Apart from creating a proper plan and successful implementation of that, it must be
ensured to sell it in front of market. Communicating with the external stakeholders are
equally important as it is with the internals. External stakeholders are customers; in this case,
various business organisations or institutions who are interested for promoting their

13LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT
companies online those are our external stakeholders. Besides, existing customers will be
approached too for exploring the service of virtual advertisements for ensuring better reach of
their potential customers. Therefore, it can be stated irrespective of industries, techniques
used by marketing and sales professionals are more or less based on same principles. It just
needs to be modified with the technicalities of relevant industry. It requires regular
supervision and analysis by which ongoing issues can be identified and necessary solutions
will be developed.
Moreover, the trend of virtual industry continuously changes. Marketing and sales
managers and executives must be aware of the regular changes, which are happening in order
to remain competitive. Further, advertisement industry mostly deals with new designs and
ideas, new tunes therefore no content must be copied or repeated. As online contents are
widely available and accessed, preparing original video content can be the unique selling
point of our company. According to current market trend, technology organisations are
increasing dependent on online contents for making their company familiar in market.
Exploring that opportunity will be convenient with the USP of our service.
So far, we have discussed how our organisation has created their USP to sale our new
services. However, marketing is important as well in terms of awareness of the customers.
Therefore, question occurs how does a business organisation, which help others to market
their products and services, market itself. Transparency must be maintained in pricing
strategies and companies must know how the advertisement company is going to position
them in the market. Apart from direct approaches to existing customers and some of the new
customers, our digital marketers have created and designed our website applying advanced
original contents where the news of new venture has been announced. The ultimate thing is
creativity. Being an advertising agency, it has to deal with same kind of companies, which
offer same range of products in a row. Writers and art directors must have competence to

14LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT
design and think different concepts for every companies with same offerings. Moreover,
managing budget and presenting them to different stakeholders is crucial.
Therefore, it can be stated to run a successful business and ensure excellence of newly
proposed business plan; challenges must be identified and mitigated accordingly. Appropriate
sales, marketing and pricing strategy, originality of the content, consistent improvement;
these factors are necessary to operate and sustain a business irrespective of industry. In case
of advertising agency, it is all about how efficiently the campaign has been planned and
executed on behalf of the customers. For the customers that are business organisations, we
have to present ourselves as the right agency to trust on. After applying these theories in our
industry and while executing newly proposed plan, great differences have been noticed. As
mentioned before, after starting the venture success came just after five months after the
operation started. Besides, existing customers that did not take interest in virtual marketing
previously, trusting on our organisation wanted to explore virtual marketing opportunities.
Our company have arranged an online feedback programme as well and asked consumers to
rate our new service. The result of feedback session was effective in terms of detecting issues
and celebrating success. As it was discussed before, our company has a flexible atmosphere
and culture of learning from mistakes. Occasional feedback sessions are helpful to addresses
issues and long-term success is dependable if that are resolved applying appropriate process
at right time.
Therefore, acknowledging global trend of advertising business and realising the ffective
nature of operating business online, these industrial techniques can be applied to ensure
success on proposed business venture. Strategies can be applied repeatedly to make it a
sustainable practice. In this due course, marketers and superior management must not forget
that advertising agencies are dependent on market trend entirely.

15LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT
References
Clark, D. M., Silvester, K., & Knowles, S. (2013). Lean management systems: creating a
culture of continuous quality improvement. Journal of clinical pathology, jclinpath-
2013.
Jasiulewicz-Kaczmarek, M. (2013). Sustainability: Orientation in maintenance management
—Theoretical background. In EcoProduction and Logistics (pp. 117-134). Springer,
Berlin, Heidelberg.