1. post an analysis of the factors involved in developing and leading an effective team.
Identify three important factors for developing and leading an effective team. Also, explain how the environment in which the team exists affects the factors that take priority (e.g., three factors important for leading a collocated team may not be as important for a virtual team).
Use academic justification and two scholarly resources, in addition to those in this Module's Learning Resources, to support your answer.
2. Appropriate Use of Transparency in Organizations
Consider the following two scenarios:
Scenario 1:
Employees work in an atmosphere of distrust and fear. Leaders make decisions behind closed doors. Changes to processes and staffing often occur unexpectedly without warning or explanation. A few select people are given information and guard it jealously. Most employees do not get an opportunity to give input or feedback.
Scenario 2:
Employees work in a small company where everyone knows everything about everyone and the rumor mill runs rampant. Leadership gives both praise and reprimands in public. They frequently discuss employees' personal affairs.
These scenarios illustrate two extremes of transparency in business. Maintaining the right degree of transparency is a challenge for many organizations. Some leaders operate their organizations with an open-book management style. Others believe in carefully maintaining the security of information. Leaders must determine the appropriate level of transparency necessary for their organizations to stay healthy.
To prepare:
Consider your experience with transparency of information and decision making in organizations of which you have been a part, such as a business or a school.
post an evaluation of the appropriate use of transparency in an organization. Explain what you believe to be the most appropriate level of transparency for an organization. Within your explanation, identify any instances in which transparency would not be a good strategy. Also, explain how a leader might exert influence using transparency.
Be sure to include at least one additional scholarly reference to support your response.
3. Selling the Vision
Leadership is not magnetic personality-that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not "making friends and influencing people"-that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.
-Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices
Kotter (2001) identified creating a vision as one of the defining characteristics of leadership. Academics and business leaders alike seem to echo the sentiment. However, each offers his or her own guidelines and advice on how this critical task of setting a vision can be accomplished. As a scholar-practitioner in the field of business, you must draw on the work of others and add your voice to those developing a strategy for accomplishing this crucial leadership responsibility. More than that, you must develop a concrete mechanism for verifying the successful adoption of that vision. Even if you do not occupy a central leadership role, you can use the strategy you develop to help guide others in the field.
To prepare:
Think of an example of a leader who was able to successfully communicate a vision for his or her organization, gain widespread adoption of that vision, and translate that vision into organizational success.
Post a leadership strategy for translating a vision into organizational success. Outline the steps a leader can take to effectively communicate a vision, get others within the organization to adopt it as their own, translate that vision into measurable objectives, and measure whether those objectives have been met.
Get these done and I have several more for you. Trying to play catch up.