Theme Two:  Leadership style should fit the person, the organization, and the job. It should be situational in nature.

You are the Package Distribution Manager for GDD. It has come to your attention that five drivers in your region have serious errors in their delivery report logs. The delivery report is key to controlling package flow and must be accurate. If not, GDD will not be paid by their clients and would quickly lose their business to Fed Ex or UPS. One of the drivers accounts for 60% of the errors. She is a nice person, reliable but occasionally late to work because of conflicts with getting her kids to school on time. She is a single mother. A second driver accounts for 30% of the errors. This driver is new to the company and while his error numbers are high they have declined from last month. The other driver’s errors hover around 10 to 15%.

After taking the quizzes below and using the course readings to delve deeper into your leadership style, answer the following questions using the style that is indicated in the test results.

How will you go about correcting the problem? Will you meet with the workers individually? in a group? What will you say and how will you get the workers to listen?

After your conversation, what would you do if the next set of reports show some improvement in the 60% employee but none in the 10-15% employees? What would you do then?

What leadership style did you use? Was it easy to use the leadership style? Or Hard? Did you find that the leadership style might not really be helpful in your approach to each situation? Do you believe another style might be better in one or the other of the situations? If so which one and why? If not, why not?