Show Leadership In The Workplace

2nd December 2011

Show leadership in the workplace

Show leadership in the workplace
Issue
Recently I was employed as a Senior Administration Manager for a construction company I work for. Their office procedures were not structured and communication between Senior Managers, Project Managers, Estimators and Accounts were disintegrating due to lack of procedures or procedures being nonexistent. Every person had their own way of working, work schedules were nonexistent, there wasn’t any communication between departments, bills weren’t being paid and invoices weren’t being sent out after a job was completed. It was a real mess and the Director of the company was at his ‘wits-end’. I was employed with the expectation of implementing a change
This proved impossible, no one was interested or willing to participate and attend. I enquired with the Director if he was willing to fund a ‘hump-day’ bbq lunch on the Wednesday which was approved and this actually got everybody interested and willing to stay/come to the office. I organised with each member to bring a plate of something to accompany the meat. After everybody had had some food and quite content is when I took the opportunity to bring up my findings from my investigations. The environment was quite accommodating (not sure if it was the beer) and all were willing to receive my findings and open for some change to take place. The ‘hump-day’ bbq increased input of ideas that actually formed some solutions to initial existing problems within the departments. Each team member shared responsibility for the decisions and the outcomes. In fact the majority of issues were the fact that no one really knew what the other person’s role was and where they sat within the firm! I believe that each member started to enjoy working with one another and started to cooperate with each other. From that one bbq, a brainstorming workgroup was formed and some processes were put in place and the majority of staff actually stayed well into the evening to complete some job tasks and processes. I took on the role of facilitator and couldn’t keep up with some of the
I grouped the Administrator and Accounts Clerk as one group and the higher management in another to start creating other work ideas to improve our processes further. Since this firm is quite small I didn’t need to factor into the technique the voting rule as it wouldn’t have been done anonymously due to the number of people within the group. However, the benefits that came out of these small group meetings promoted commitment to the final decisions as each participant contributed equally. Within these small group sessions I introduced the Cause and Effect Diagram. Each group collaborated a list of possible causes contributing to the issues. Each cause was recorded on a fishbone diagram; growing out of the spine of a ‘fish’, with the main issue as the head of the fish. The diagram allowed for the separation of issues from those factors that are, in fact, symptoms of the