‘It always seems impossible until things are done.’ This was what it was like to me before attending the Dynamic of Leadership course. After endless days and nights of riding intellectual waves and devoting hours of mental and emotional energy on this course, it finally came to an end. Thank God for everything and now, as we have reached the end of our course, I have recorded my thoughts and reflections of this learning journey.
Do feel free to enjoy reading snippets of my thoughts.
Th concept of Level 5 leadership, created by Jim Collins, is unique as it is based on empirical evidence of a five-year research. Collins’s discovery was based on a hierarchy of capabilities and traits discovered during his study. Level 5 leaders display a powerful mixture of personal humility and indomitable will.
What I have learnt
Level 5 leadership is an essential factor to distinguished a company from good to great, but it's not the only one. There are multiple factors that deliver companies to greatness, such as the environment, the followers and the market. It takes a handful of considerations to take a team beyond remarkable.
To become a Level 5 leader, one needs to have the skills and capabilities found in each level of the hierarchy above.
Level 1 : The Highly Capable Individual. Effective productive workers who are talented, knowledgeable and skilled.
Level 2 : The Contributing Team Member. Workers good at working with others, notably proficient at reaching objectives together with team members.
Level 3 : The Competent Manager. Competent managers can effectively oversee people and resources, helping to achieve predetermined goals.
Level 4 : The Effective Leader. Effective leaders can steer their companies toward well-defined, compelling goals and ensure that their organisation functioning at high levels of performance.
Level 5 : The Executive.Executives have the unique capability to develop a company’s greatness through what Collins identifies as “a paradoxical combination of personal humility plus professional will.”
🏆Elements of Level 5 Leadership🏆
First Who, Then What
People first, strategy second. Before addressing to tactics and strategies, find the right people for the organisation and get rid of the wrong ones.
Stockdale Paradox
“Life couldn’t be worse at the moment, and his life would someday be better than ever.” -- Admiral James Stockdale. Accept difficult situations and believe that one day we will rise.
The Hedgehog Concept
A comparison between the abilities of a hedgehog and a fox, derived from an essay by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Foxes are characterised as knowing a little about a lot of subjects, while hedgehogs know a lot about a single thing. Be like a hedgehog, focus on essentials and ignore the rest. Know capabilities, effectiveness and passion of people and organisation.
Technology Accelerators
Carefully invest in technologies that help contribute to its mission.
A Culture of Discipline
Disciplined people eliminate the need for hierarchy. Disciplined thought removes bureaucracy. And disciplined action eliminates the need for excessive control. Together, all three result in extraordinary performance.
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Here's what I thought...
Level 5 leadership is the leadership style I admired the most amongst all style. In my opinion, a leader should have a model to follow despite all the environmental factors and other factors. The Level 5 leadership is such an interesting concept. logical and reasonable.
As a four-year experience primary school teacher, I think I am now in the Middle Leader Team (MLT) and I am currently on Level 3, trying to reach Level 4.
Let's start from Level 1. The novice Level 1 me years ago was trying very very hard to just survive without causing any trouble to my colleagues. I am always trying to learn more and equip myself with more knowledge of subject matter and pedagogy skills to be a good teacher to the children and a good team member among my colleagues.
In time, Level 2 me became more competent working on my own and I was able to help a friend and to complete tasks together with my team.
There I think I am reaching Level 3.Slowly, I was given more important tasks to lead small groups and complete targets. I learnt attributes of a good leaders, how to work well in SMTs, how to take charge sometimes when necessary. I think I grow to love this already.
As of this year, I was given more important role. I was assigned as the head of panel for the English Panel. It was an honour but I am feeling a little nervous and a little worried. Am I going to be a Level 4 Effective Leader? How am I going to do this?
See, being an Level 4 or Level 5 leader doesn't mean that one has to hold super important or super high stake jobs. I can be a Level 5 leader of my small team in my organisation. We will be the little screw that makes the machine works well.
Other than the above, I was very attracted to the idea of Stockdale Paradox.It describes me in my current 'young life crisis' where I find a lot of things confusing and hard to accept. Life isn't rainbows and sunshine. The perfectionist me feel hard to love this fact that life can be a constant struggle. The melancholy me tells me to sulk in my sorrow. But I must stand strong and continue. To be the leader of my life, I need to take control of my emotions running wild. As the Stockdale Paradox suggest, it is going to be fine in a while. Just take some time, continue to be like a hedgehog, focus and do what we do always. Survive and strive. 💪💪
The transformational leadership approach encourages, inspires, and motivates employees to innovate and create the change necessary to shape the future success of the team.
Here's what I have learnt...
Transformational leadership focuses largely on the leader’s vision rather than on follower attributions. Transformational leaders are known for moving and changing things “in a big way,” by communicating to followers a special vision of the future, tapping into followers’ higher ideals and motives. They seek to alter the existing structure and influence people to buy into a new vision and new possibilities.
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Charismatic VS Transformational Leadership
Charismatic Leadership : not wanting to change anything and only focused on themselves than anyone else.
Transformational Leadership: has basic focus of transforming the organisation and their followers.
All transformational leaders are charismatic but not all charismatic leaders are transformational.
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To make transformation in a team, a leader often take actions in 4 behaviour dimensions, according to Bass and Avilio. These for dimensions include 4 I's, which are idealised influence, inspirational motivation, individual consideration and intellectual stimulation.
The process of transformation process often starts from 1making a compelling case for change, follows by 2inspiring a shared vision, 3leading the transition and lastly, 4implanting the change.
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Transformational VS Transactional Leadership
Transformational leadership creates an enduring long-term future of organisation with vision-oriented leaders who wants to change the status quo.
On the other hand, transactional leaders are task and reward oriented and they love creating stability in organisation thus the nature of their leadership style is transitory.
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Stewardship VS Servant Leadership
This is an extremely informative topic that gives me a lot of insights about leadership style.
What I thought...
This is an extremely informative topic that gives me a lot of insights about leadership style.
Transformational and charismatic leadership are like making choices between working own self towards the goal or influencing followers to rally towards a shared goal.
Comparing transformational and transactional leadership, transformational seemed to work with visions and future while transactional ends when leader-follower relationship ends.
Stewardship and servant leadership is even more interesting. It involves level of equality and reward between leaders and followers in a group. I am not a big fan of stewardship as I think all should be equal, and reward should be given according to effort, not rankings.
Talking about transformational leadership, I was reminded of a famous movie character and his characteristics. He is the famous boy who lived -- HARRY POTTER.
In his long journey battling Voldemort, he never stops believing that good will triumph over evil. He was humble and most of the time, selfless. He organised secretive magic classes to teach and develop leaders to lead the Dumbledore army in one of the episodes. His sincerity towards his goal were shared by many and his influence towards the others were long-lasting and vision-oriented. Team Harry Potter, have common goal to defeat the evil. Harry Potter is undeniably a transformational leader.
When thinking of my own experiences with these leadership style, I think I enjoyed working under a transformational leader like my previous guru besar. She was a fierce and charismatic lady. Working with her was always like the 'fast and furious🔥🔥'. However, She shared her visions with us and convience us about what we are doing so that we are always working towards the same goal. Although she did not have the best temper in the world, I thought working with her was quite a pleasure because I have learnt a lot under her leadership. To me, being in the 'understand' is very important because everything we do, we do it for a reason. With the reason being crystal clear, only then we will be motivated to pull out full force to it.
Be like Harry Potter, embrace transformational leadership. :)
Self-managed team can be a high performance team with full autonomy, when set up properly.
In this lesson, I've learned about the nature, the benefits, the characteristics of SMT; the stages of group development and distributed leadership in SMTs.
What I have learned...
I've drawn a mind map while attending the class and studying the notes. Below is the summary of what I have learnt.
What I thought...
Self-managed team. It sounds very 'atas', pretty complicated. However, when you read more about it, the concept is pretty simple and straight-forward.
🏁A same goal🏁
👩👨A group of people👨👩
💞Shared leadership responsibility💞
As I have mentioned previously, I do not have any interest being a leader. My passion is with children. Learning about self-managed team is an eye-opener to me. I can blend being a teacher and a leader without sacrificing my passion for teaching or stifling my personal or career growth. As a primary school teacher, I have had several self-managed team experience. I often work with teachers of same level, towards the same goal.
For instance...
(1) When training a child for a district competition(common goal), a group of teachers (leaders) will share the responsibility to train and get the child (follower) ready.
(2) Weekly discussion for teaching and learning activities are conducted among teachers (leader)who teach the same year to ensure quality of teaching (common goal).
There are listless examples happening everyday. That's pretty normal for working adults.
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What I felt interested about this topic is to introduce this leadership style into classrooms among children.
Is it possible to introduce this leadership style into classrooms among children?
How to nurture young leaders in self-managed teams?
After a quick brainstorm, there's one major point to be considered ...
If I were to make SMT work among kids, same proficiency kids need to be grouped together. SMT will not work well in mixed-ability group, because children too advanced will naturally take lead while weaker children will happy to be followers.
If I were to change now, I need to break my mixed-ability group and regroup them according to similar proficiency. I should not be doing this now, because they are used to one another and peer teaching seems to work well among them.
If I were to make new changes to my grouping system next semester, this may not be a good choice because weaker group in the class will have high chance to be left behind. Unless I have known the class already, and have better way to relocate the weak kids. Also, it would work, if my class is of same ability.
All these years teaching, I am always thinking of the weak kids and how to help them. Today, learning about SMT broaden my views. I think SMT will definitely benefit advanced learners. With shared goals and a lot of autonomy, I think I will be able to see a lot of creativity from the little ones.
Although this is still an immature idea, this will for sure be something I consider next semester when a new year starts.
Discussion Question- How many members should a self-managed team have?I think 4 to 5 is optimum as too many members may hinder good communication. A group too many members will easily have 'passengers' too.
Discussion Question- What is the role of a champion? I think don't think there will be any champion in a SMT because leadership roles and responsibilities are distributed. Everyone is a champion in a SMT.
Just a piece of my thoughts. Thank you for reading! 😏
