Reflective Analysis of Leadership

THEMATIC REVIEW
(REFLECTIVE ANALYSIS) OF
LEADERSHIP
BMO 6050 Assessment 3
Seah Chooi Kheng s4598974

Part 3.a
This report aims to discuss and apply some of the concepts learnt from leadership journal
articles and classroom activities to my leadership experience, mainly in the context of
organisation. My leadership experience is mainly when I was an audit assistant supervisor in
an accounting firm, but it is also applicable to some of the functions that I have took up in the
current role as group accountant, for instance leading a new system implementation project.
The structure of the report will focus on the foundational theory and the three main themes
(context, dynamics and social architect) of this subject. In this report, I would also like to
stress on the importance of women leadership as I have had both man and woman as leaders
and there are notable differences between both leadership styles and this can be analysed
through a group article that was discussed during the group participation activity in the class.
This report will then conclude with the main lessons learned during the class that can be
applied to my current and future career and also other activities such as social activities.
The very first lesson of leadership is to understand the concept of leadership itself. We know
that the research on leadership is not going to stop anytime soon as it has become one of the
most influential topics that researchers would not miss. Leadership is important in any
century due to the complexity of people. In other words, the differences in people in
anything, such as preferences, attitudes, risk appetites, generation and so on made leadership
essential in an organisation. It is not a difficult task to identify the differences between a
manager and leader once leadership is understood; ask “in your company, who do you think
of as a leader?”, most people will be able to tell a name right away unless there is no true
leader in that company. In my case, I can easily identify a few of the management that are
leaders, such as my general manager who is able to lead top management from different
departments and they all have things in common; they trust, learn, follow and work all of
their capabilities to this leader. Managers on the hand, are usually task-focused where they
get the jobs done. There is less emotional content in a manager-subordinate relationship while
leaders usually are concerned about the relationship between them and their followers. One
point that I learned in class which I think is very true is that leadership is a practice of an art
while management is a practice of a science, there is no one best way of leadership but there
are standard techniques for management. There is also a discussion of whether leaders are
born or made. In my opinion, many leaders are born due to their specific characteristics but
they can also be made through life experience. Again, this is very true in the case of my
general manager. When he first joined the company, he is a quiet and observant type of
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people, without much clear contributions. After some time when he understood the
company’s culture and system, he began to give many suggestions in improving the business,
such as changing the ways of clubhouse maintenance, refurbishment of clubhouse facilities,
new inputs on golf course maintenance and monthly management meeting with club
managers from different clubs to learn from each other. This shows that given time and
opportunity, anyone can be a leader; the question is whether the person is willing to learn the
leader’s ways. For me, the five most important elements of a leader are interpersonal skills,
trustworthy, motivator, developer and also all rounder and I will be focusing on these in
crafting my leadership direction.
Coming to the theme of context, we look into the scope of leadership and how culture is
closely connected. Anyone in any level of the organisation can be a leader and this is
especially the case when I was in the audit field. Audit juniors are trained to handle an audit
engagement in the early stage and those with sufficient skills will be able to take a lead in a
full audit process. This is also achieved through the adaptive work principles of the audit
partner. The six principles of leading adaptive work by Heifetz & Laurie (2001) were
practised as he would be on the ground to observe for people who are willing to learn
(observe) , ask questions to grasp the knowledge level of the people (ask), provide an
environment that people can learn (balance), maintain the focus of the people on their goals
(focus), support the people when they need assistance (trust) and finally listen to the voice of
the people. This has been helpful in developing people who can adapt to challenges in the
early stage. Furthermore, some of the basic leadership styles by Goleman (2000) are also
clear from the audit partner. He is demonstrating about three of the styles mentioned by
Goleman. He has an authoritative style whereby he will define goals that have to be met and
expectations are clear to the people. He also has democratic style where he will listen to the
suggestions of the people before making a decision. Finally, he also demonstrates coaching
style, encouraging people to take up challenging audit engagement and guide them to learn
through on-the-job training. According to Goleman (2000), mastering at least four styles
would improve the ability to achieve better performance and to practise new style, emotional
intelligence competencies must be acknowledged and improved first. Therefore, to learn
affiliative style, the audit partner would have to improve his social awareness skills, i.e. being
able to read others’ emotions and aware of their needs, then he will be able to build stronger
relationship with the people and this can lead to improved employee retention. Next, women
leadership is a topic that is very relevant to my current job as my direct superior and reporting
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manager are both female. In a research by Nelson (2012), some of the public perceptions
toward female include empathizers, less competitive, more risk averse and focus on long term
perspective, less prone to overconfidence and more sensitive losses. While I would agree that
some of these are true for my superiors, some may be the opposite case. From my
observation, both of my superiors are not empathizers as they would focus on getting the jobs
done in a most detailed and perfect manner, which then lead to the need to do overtime to
complete the jobs. Furthermore, they are very competitive in terms of their own performance
as they strive for perfection. Therefore, in the world of gender equality, I believe that women
have evolved from the past and they can now lead an organisation as good as men can do
through greater attention to details and competitiveness. Other than that, we have also done a
classroom activity on looking at how leadership is shaped by culture, based on some of the
dimensions of GLOBE study. In my current role, looking at decisiveness, subordinates can
give suggestions but usually managers make final decisions based on their own preferences
of how things are done. From performance orientation perspective, the managers focused on
getting the job done within budget and there may be a lack of innovation culture as people
prefer to be inside the comfort zone. From teamwork perspective, the teamwork between
different departments is not very apparent as head of departments would finish their works
first before working with others. From all of these, I think it is quite clear that there is a lack
of leadership practice in my current organisation, with only the general manager that I can
regard as a leader and the rest are managers.
Next on the theme of dynamics, my focus is on motivation, emotional intelligence and power
of the leaders. Motivation is a very important concept mentioned in almost all kinds of
management theories and practices. It is an underlying factor that drives people’s reactions to
different situations and since leadership is to deal with people, leaders must understand what
motivates people to perform at their best. Performance is defined by Armstrong (2006) as a
function of Ability (A) + Motivation (M) + Opportunity (O) whereby the achievement of
employees’ expectations can lead to the achievement of desired organisational performance.
From this function, ability can be trained through ways such as on-the-job training, off-the-
job training, job rotation and so on. Opportunity should be given by the leaders through
understanding of the career needs of the employees. The most complicated factor in the
function is motivation; how do leaders improve and maintain the motivation of the employees
in bringing out their best performance? Many theories such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
and Vroom’s expectancy theory have been developed in the past to provide guideline for
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