Assignment

Subject: Art of Leadership

Q.4 Case study

Question:

1. Given this scenario, what have you been doing wrong

as a leader? If you were the commander of this
organization, what would you do with the Lt?

Answer :

Mistakes in leadership

Explanation:

One of the most important quality of a leader is assertiveness. Especially in this scenario,
it is a military based leadership where discipline and following the orders are of utmost
importance.
- You have been doing wrong is showing your employees who is the boss. You cannot be
the boss just by stating, "I am the boss". Yes, indeed it is good to give chances to people if
they make a mistake. But there is a difference between guiding people and doing their
work for them.
-You need to earn their respect as a leader. You must have the self confidence and
motivation to lead. Do not let the employees find out that you are afraid. Make sure they
find out that those who do a good job will get rewards and those who don't try will be
punished. Job security works as a good threats to make sure that people take you
seriously.

Here’s what I know to be true. Things are almost always worse than you first think they
are. So don’t minimize a problem or blow it off. Fully state the seriousness of the
problem. If you’re going to lean toward overstating or understating a problem, overstate
it.

Think through a time when someone’s let you down and understated the problem. If
you’ve had a team member tell you something is ‘no big deal’ only for you to discover it’s
a bigger deal than they told you, what happens to you inside? I know I feel like saying,
“Do you realize how serious this is? Do you even understand the issue?” And your
confidence in them drops.

I am always thankful when something doesn’t turn out to be as serious as people initially
thought it might be. I’ll bet you feel the same way.
So fully state the seriousness of an issue. Even overstate it if you’re not sure. Great leaders
own problems. Even the problems they didn’t directly cause.

Here’s how I think of my own leadership: If I’m the leader, I’m responsible.

This is difficult, because often I didn’t directly cause the problem. I wasn’t in the room, at
the meeting or even at the event. But if I’m the leader, it’s still my responsibility when
things go wrong.

By owning up to your responsibility, you demonstrate a brand of leadership that is far too
rare.

Part of owning an issue is demonstrating you are doing everything in your power to
diagnosis and remedy the situation.

Rarely will you have all the information you need to make a full diagnosis when a
problem emerges, but bring everything you have to the table every time. Again, this will
increase your boss’s confidence in the fact that you are on it.

Again, if your boss knows you were the first to come forward, you understand the
problem, you’re owning it and you’re working on it, his or her confidence in you rises,
even though you’ve made a mistake.

Because you’re still struggling to some extent with shame or fear, you’ll be tempted to
think, “well since I’m responsible, I have to fix this.” It’s like when you knocked that vase
off the living room end table when you were 8 and tried to glue it back together so your
parents would never know. Those instincts never really go away.

But sometimes you can’t fix what broke on your own. In fact, usually you can’t, So get
help. Be open. Ask for input.

An open leader is a great leader. Great leaders know they have blind spots. So get input
from the team around you (and your boss) on what the issue might be.

You’ll get a better diagnosis, a better solution and a better team as a result.

Don’t make your boss or team members keep asking you whether you’re on it. Give them
updates. Give daily updates if it’s serious. Hourly if necessary. Just remind them you’re
on it. Once the problem has been resolved, go the extra mile and ask yourself, “was this
really a completely unpreventable problem, or is this a systems issue?”

Chances are something in your current system produced the result. As you know, your
system is perfectly designed to get the results it’s currently getting, good or bad.

Go back to your boss or team and now work on the larger issue of how to handle the
systems issues that will help ensure problems like this won’t happen again.