Many companies in recent times have understood the importance of ethical management and employs leaders with impeccable qualities and experience. Companies today do not risk employing leaders with weak capabilities. They need strong leaders who can shoulder the responsibility to take on regular task and expand operations. Leaders and department heads of companies know the level of motivation, satisfaction and why and how people work under them. They understand this because they themselves may have been employees as subordinates before. Also knowing the company’s history and its style of functioning, enables such employees who become leaders to motivate the staff below. The quantum of work usually comes as a positive or negative for achieving objectives of the company. An ethical, moral and strong leader usually knows how to motivate his team and gets work done by allocating the right jobs to the right people and would summon resources whenever required for tasks that may be tough to handle. Such leaders may communicate excellently well with their management /bosses to ensure work never suffers and are focused on job completion all times.
As companies expanded operations around the country and globally the management had to decentralize operations, giving away more power and decision-making authority to the centers far away from the headquarters. This resulted in either the branch heads taking advantage of the situation or being subservient to the management masters. Controlling large number of branches required great management process, sub leaders, excellent IT and engineering systems that support the management in the way they think, behave and work. Management meetings and conclusions meant processes and decisions for working better and delivering results as discussed, decided and dependent on best resources provided. In all this, communication was key. Not only the right message conveyed to concerned managers and staff was important, also with the minimum words and maximum impact needed to be achieved. The emphasis for companies and their HR teams was to look for candidates who could understand the messages and deliver the best as expected of them. Longer stint in an organization meant such employee was valuable and retained for his/her adherence to company policies and being in good communication with the teams in the company.
Companies with a long history of success, profits and high growth owe their success in many ways to team qualities. Some of them are cohesiveness, commitment, work sharing, individual and group growth, skilling up and undertaking more work and responsibilities. For companies that thrive on motivation and leaders’ pronouncement as gospel for doing things in completion always will try to tread the path of transactional leadership doctrine. Companies know at the lowest unit level it is the executive and his supervisor who can make or break the overall success of the company. The transactional process of leadership involves in either a temporary or medium-term promise of reward and compensation that always catches the employees’ attention. The leaders or team head or supervisor apart from communicating the management objectives has also has to talk and motivate the employees for the rights actions and efforts all the time. The consequences of a bad or ill-time communication always has been disastrous. While the leadership skills in communication are always tested, it is tested more when the company is challenged to increase sales /production against agreed norms and targets. The employee (s) who then achieve the targets either in commitment or motivation or both as many studies are carried out, concludes and identifies the basis of motivation, commitment etc. among employees.
Organizations always seek planned and scheduled activities to be completed without any loss of time, cost and resource. While the rigorous and routine activities are done with required level of quality control or administratively decided qualifying parameters, situations do arise in companies that requires quick thinking, smartness, quick response time, experience if any, latest resources with knowledge skills, and above all a little luck to face challenges. While the experience in various situations always helps the leaders and show their effectiveness, yet in companies which are involved on critical operations and have high risks like refinery, chemical factories, airlines industry etc. always need a little bit of luck favoring them. This is a fine aspect that is understood by all companies and they run businesses assuming nothing major and wrong will happen. As part of the norms and conditions of running a business, safety kits, safe environments, facilities to dispose of waste and keeping the working spaces clean including providing for disaster management resources like fire-retardants, escape stairways, etc.
Assessing of leadership effectiveness could be done in two ways. One is by the profitability that the team achieves for the company and the other by the way the team behaves and correlates its activities with the leadership qualities of the leader. In many instances, we find that company is through various types of achievement of objectives: one where there is high profitability but the relationship between the team members and the team leaders are strained. We may also find company is not doing well in terms of profitability or in its turnover but has teams and leaders in a very cohesive Spirit. In the likelihood of companies measuring effectiveness of leadership through metrics, such metrics could be turnover, profits, individual contribution for the goals, time spent on projects, cost of the project- across teams etc. In the non-metric attributes, leadership qualities could be studied in the way of leaders’ attitude, behavior, discipline, focus, Command of their team, camaraderie and the mutual respect the leaders have with the team members. Between the metric and non-metric comparison is where the management of companies across teams decide and identify future potential leaders who will manage the overall operations of the company.
