Transformational Leadership and Effective Followership

This assignment examines two crucial aspects of workplace dynamics: Transformational Leadership and Effective Followership. The first section discusses the author's experience with a transformational leader, highlighting their ability to inspire, motivate, and guide their team towards success. The second section delves into the importance of being an effective follower, emphasizing qualities like understanding expectations, collaborating with colleagues, and actively contributing to organizational goals. Real-world examples illustrate these concepts, showcasing how both leadership and followership play vital roles in achieving shared objectives.

Running head: PEOPLE AND LADERSHIP
People and Leadership
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author note:

1PEOPLE AND LADERSHIP
Topic 1: Transformational Leadership at Workplace:
While I have always got the experience of working with the most efficient leaders, not
many exhibit transformational leadership traits, and not all of them have ld by example.
However, I recently had an experience of working with a transformational leader, and he
transformed the very way I used to view a leader. First of all, the Manager I am talking about
always believed in transforming his own vision to the organizational vision, and yet he
encouraged all of us, to voice our opinions regarding how can we boost the sales growth. If the
plan works, he appreciates all of us, recognizing each one’s contribution, by taking names, while
if it does not, he embraces the failure with equal grace, and does not play the blame game. He
has always taken full accountability of the failure, and has asked us to be curious about chalking
out new, innovative ways of making things work. He has always communicated each important
business idea, emerging business crisis or poor and good employee performance to all of our
team members, so that we can do something about the problem or stay motivated. The way he
has engaged us in any decision inspired us to participate in the decision-making process, and we
have never felt that he is being too authoritative with us. Once our sales target fell short, and we
were disappointed. However, as expected out of a transformational leader, our manager called us
all, communicated the problem to us, and asked us to work for more than half hour each day.
Though initially we tried to resist the change, he enlightened us why the change in working
hours was needed, and why we needed to dedicate more hours to work.
Topic 2: How to Become a Good Follower:
A leader is expected to lead while a follower is required to follow. However, despite the
simple equation stating their relation, very few fail to be efficient followers at workplace.

2PEOPLE AND LADERSHIP
However, at my last organization, had a co-worker who would never work efficiently, nor will
meet his performance goals, and yet he attended every meeting and interactive session organized
by our manager. However, attending meetings and listening to the words of a leader, does not
make one an efficient follower. It is important here to mention that understanding what the leader
wants such as productivity, cooperativeness and pro-activeness in performing organizational
activities, and adopting fresh skills and aligning one’s expertise with that, consist of effective
followership. While the follower is expected to work collaboratively with the co-workers in
order to enhance organizational productivity in the long run, it is equally important for him to
possess a sense of awareness about what his job role is, and what relation does he hold with his
leader. The co-worker I am talking about, was lacking a sense of awareness about the
expectations the leader had out of him, and hence he would mostly experience disengagement at
workplace, as he would be too less informed and interest to explore new ways of working on a
project. Because of his lack of engagement at workplace and disassociation with the leader, his
own performance as well as the team performance suffered. It helped me realize that the
efficiency of a leader alone does not ensure organizational success, but an equally productive and
responsive follower ensures the same. A follower can make or break a leader.