Assessing your own leadership capability
Understand leadership styles within an organisation
1.1 Review the prevailing leadership styles in the organisation
There are a range of leadership styles that can be adopted by organisations in order to try to achieve their goals. Each of these is often suited to certain situations and has drawbacks preventing any one style being the best style of leadership for all situations.
Even within organisation different styles of leadership can be identified with this being more prominent in larger organisations with a longer chain of command. One “study suggests that differences in the leadership styles practised by managers may be blurred in organisations with short chains of command, while it will tend to be pronounced in organisations with long chains of command, other things being equal.” (Oshagbemi T & Gill R, 2004)
Within Dacorum Borough Council there are different prevailing leadership styles present at different levels of the organisation. On a corporate level senior management are trying to adopt a transformational style of leadership, which would reflect the changing nature of the organisation. However a trait style of leadership is far more prevalent, with this being of a task orientated nature. This is due to that although ambitious new projects are planned and underway, often work is set in a very formal manner or very inflexible due to the demand of the politicians who have a large influence on how work is undertaken. This is reinforced by the way telling, rather than selling, or preferential gaining true buy-in, has been adopted with very little staff engagement within the senior levels of the organisation.
Even since major management changes four years ago when 50% of the senior management team were made redundant the council has still struggled to fully move to the transformational leadership style that it is clearly trying to establish. When the senior management team was reorganised managers were kept who were flexible and could
1.1 Review the prevailing leadership styles in the organisation
There are a range of leadership styles that can be adopted by organisations in order to try to achieve their goals. Each of these is often suited to certain situations and has drawbacks preventing any one style being the best style of leadership for all situations.
Even within organisation different styles of leadership can be identified with this being more prominent in larger organisations with a longer chain of command. One “study suggests that differences in the leadership styles practised by managers may be blurred in organisations with short chains of command, while it will tend to be pronounced in organisations with long chains of command, other things being equal.” (Oshagbemi T & Gill R, 2004)
Within Dacorum Borough Council there are different prevailing leadership styles present at different levels of the organisation. On a corporate level senior management are trying to adopt a transformational style of leadership, which would reflect the changing nature of the organisation. However a trait style of leadership is far more prevalent, with this being of a task orientated nature. This is due to that although ambitious new projects are planned and underway, often work is set in a very formal manner or very inflexible due to the demand of the politicians who have a large influence on how work is undertaken. This is reinforced by the way telling, rather than selling, or preferential gaining true buy-in, has been adopted with very little staff engagement within the senior levels of the organisation.
Even since major management changes four years ago when 50% of the senior management team were made redundant the council has still struggled to fully move to the transformational leadership style that it is clearly trying to establish. When the senior management team was reorganised managers were kept who were flexible and could
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