Leadership Assignment

Part 1

You have been given the task of hiring for a new position at your workplace, which is comprised of 73% white males. The candidates have been narrowed to two. Choice 1 is a highly-educated white male with a decade of experience. He is personable and comes highly recommended from a neighboring agency. He interviewed well and will not need much, if any, training to perform the job. Choice 2 is younger, has much less education, 3 years of experience and, although likeable, will need lots of training before being ready to perform. This person did not interview as well as Choice 1, but would add diversity to your department. Who do you choose and why?

Part 2

1. As leader of your organization, you have recently noticed that employee morale is at an all time low. Your company has undergone several drastic changes in the past few months including new management and equipment along with adjustments in scheduling and production demands, and you feel that these changes have a lot to do with the decline in morale. Use the advice offered in this unit and your own research to explain some of the actions you would take to increase employee morale.

2. You have been appointed as the team leader of a new project in your company. After a few weeks in the position, you start to notice there are distinct positive and negative members on your team. A few of your team members have been listed below along with a description of their group behavior. Decide which positive or negative member role they are displaying and explain how you would deal with each member to either encourage or diminish their behavior. Suzanne has trouble letting members of the team speak freely. She is constantly interrupting others with her longwinded explanations. She wants every idea to be seen as hers, and sometimes she tricks other members of the team into sharing their ideas with her so she can present them as her own.

3. John does a great job at paying attention to the topics discussed in the meetings and taking notes. Last week, a member of the team, Sally, was sick for a few days, and John was able to catch her up to everything that the group had covered. He is very good at explaining problems in a clear and concise manner and can help team members that are perplexed with anything the group is involved in.

4. Beth is not fond of the task that the team has been asked to complete. She thinks that the group meetings are a waste of her talents and spends most of the meetings discussing her daughter's soccer games or how her husband never helps out around the house. When she is not talking, she is busy balancing her checkbook or working on her novel instead of taking notes.

5. Charlie cannot stand to be wrong and is very expressive when he is frustrated with the group. Last week he presented the group with some financial statistics that were incorrect, but instead of claiming his mistakes, he blamed Beth for distracting him while he was calculating the numbers and then claimed that John must have accidently changed some of the figures when he was printing copies from the electronic spreadsheet.

6. Sally is a member you can really depend on. When you cannot make it to a meeting, you can rely on her to act as team leader. She is very organized and effective at distributing work amongst the group. She knows what needs to be done and can set deadlines for all of the tasks. She encourages new ideas from the team and motivates them to follow through with those ideas.

7. Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs is an excellent tool for understanding human behavior. Complete Exercise 12-1 "Characteristics of the Self-Actualized Person." Where do you stand in terms of progress? Do you agree with the results? If necessary, what are some changes you can make (or changes you are already making) in your life to improve your score?