Leadership in Human Services
Main models of leadership practice
Leadership involves the act of creating motivation for a group of employees in the act of achieving a common goal for an organization. In this context, it involves directing the employees and colleagues with a certain strategy that meets the organization’s needs. A leader needs to have certain core values to ensure that the leadership he/she is offering meets the standards of making certain practices successful. Some vital skills that the leader ought to have included proper and effective communication, self-awareness, honesty, relationship building, innovation, just to mention a few. There ar4e various leadership models that are very explicit in leadership practices. This includes;
Adaptive leadership practice; This is a practical leadership portfolio in which the leader assists the group of employees or colleagues he/she is leading to adapt to a certain situation in an organization. It emphasizes on thriving in a challenging environment but meeting the needs that the organization is requiring. It always takes a meaningful both individually and collectively process of change. The kind of leadership always organize, motivate, orient, and focus their attention on the other sin addressing and resolving changes central to their lives.
Authentic leadership; This kind of leadership framework is a management style in which the leader is very genuine, transparent, and self-aware of the practices he/she is performing. The Authentic leader always initiates trust and loyalty to his/her group or colleagues. This kind of leadership always gives the actual situation based on the employee’s performance. This leadership model is important since the employees give all their hearts and mind to the cause of a particular issue and team up in the organization, thus resulting in high morale in producing extraordinary morale.
Distributed leadership; This kind of leadership model is mainly concerned with practicing general leadership rather than focusing on specific leadership responsibilities and roles. It can also be equated with the shared, collective, and extended leadership practices, which builds upon the capacity for changes and improvement of the organization. The main purpose of this leadership model is to always increase the leadership capacity within an organization in that the organization can improve and grow in a genuine manner with not tricks a game playing.
Ethical leadership; This leadership model is always tied to the ethical beliefs and values in ensuring dignity and right to other employees in an organization. The leaders always try to acknowledge the ethical principles in managing a group of employees or their colleague, thus ensuring that all the operation within their areas of interest is performed genuinely and ultimately meets the organization’s goals. A good example of an ethical leader is Mahatma Gandhi, who provided a series of motivations to others through the patient he was displaying to other individuals as he worked towards improving world conditions.
Servant leadership; The main idea in this leadership model is that the leader always has the principle mind of “serving first.” The leader always has that natural feeling that he/she needs to serve first rather than focusing her/his interest. This promotes the welfare of the group or colleagues of the leader since it creates motivation in the organization, which spearheads the success of the organization. This leadership context always gives the employees a chance to express their ideas, thus necessitating teamwork leading to the organization’s overall success.
Structured leadership; This leadership framework is more critical and requires more of the professional knowledge as an added advantage. Structural leaders tend to be more analytical in their thinking and decision-making in improving the organization’s operations through cohesive procedural changes. Standard operating procedures and process details are one of their core skills.
Situational leadership; This kind of leadership style is mainly dictated by the situation at hand of the organization involved. The leader needs to be very flexible to fit in such situations. This kind of leadership is when the leader of an organization has to adjust to his/her normal style of leading the employees to fit in the new changes and fit the development level od the group of employees under his/her mandate. This promotes a lot of teamwork since it creates a common ideology as well as improving organization performance.
How is leadership in the Human Services (HS) influenced by a particular circumstance of Human services sector
Take a particular instance where a leader has just finished training the newest member of the team. He has already started working within the organization, and thus he is well conversant with the workplace. The leader is then supposed to perform some data entry work to the company database, but unluckily, he is held up as he is supposed to attend an urgent meeting. Therefore, he gives the task to the new member since he is the only one who can handle the task at that time and urgently attends the meeting. On returning later after the meeting has ended, he found out that the new member has not done the task. The leader at first didn’t know what exactly to do since he didn’t have the threshold confidence of asking for any help. A lot of hours have been lost than cannot be recovered, and in as much the leader is blaming the worker for failing to perform the required task as earlier agreed, the blame is still on the leader since it is his responsibility. This is a crucial task since databases of an organization always need constant updates and monitoring to ensure that the organization’s overall operation is timely executed. The result of such unethical behavior would put a lot of questions to the group, with the leader taking a great share of the blame. The leader is always expected to organize his team in different operations that he is assigned to, thus accessing the organizations’ operations. The protocol id followed; thus, the leader will be the first to be responsible before the worker assigned the task of data entry in the company database. This is a situation where the leader needs to be composed of the situation at hand and ultimately adjust his leadership to fit the context. In this type of situation, it needs the leader to adjust to the situation, thus enabling him to handle such an ethical dilemma.
What kind of leadership practices lend themselves to the Human services context
In respect to the context above, it is clear that situational leadership is the most relevant since it would allow the leader to figure out the decision to be made. According to Blanchard and Hersey on leadership styles that can be adapted to fit a certain situation, they outlined four basic leadership styles that can fit the situation. This includes;
Telling (S1)- This is where the leader gives a clear outline of how different tasks ought to be performed. The leader needs to tell the employees what can be done in a given task and how they can navigate on doing the task. In this context, the leader ought to have told the worker what should be done and how he can input the data into the database since he is still new.
Selling (S2)- Thus, style in where the leader provides some cupful information and easy direction to the employees on a certain task. Besides, there ought to be constant communication to assist the employees in cases they are faced with difficulties. This should have exactly been applied in the incident above so that it will not lead to any inconveniences at the end.
Participating (S3)- This is where leaders focus more on the relationship rather than directions. The leader will, therefore, work as a team and shared decision-making responsibility.
Delegating (S4)- This is a framework where the leader passes most of the responsibilities to the group he/he is leading to perform a particular task.
The most appropriate for this context is definitely S1 and S2 styles since it is more focused on getting the task done. However, the most appropriate style to apply depends mostly on the members’ maturity level under a certain leader. Workers with limited skills, low or medium maturity, need to be told what to do and directed on how to do it to avoid any form of inconvenience. In addition, the leader constant assessment to ascertain the validity of the task. If this was taken into consideration by the leader, it would have minimized the inconveniences that arose.
Reference
Golensky, M. and Hager, M.A., 2020. Strategic leadership and management in nonprofit organizations: Theory and practice. Oxford University Press.
Vito, R. and Sethi, B., 2020. Managing change: role of leadership and diversity management. Journal of Organizational Change Management.
Sankaran, S., 2013. Strengthening leadership capability of not-for-profit organizations in Australia: An open-space exploration in the ALARA community. ALAR: Action Learning and Action Research Journal, 19(2), p.25.
Howieson, B. and Hodges, J., 2014. Public and third sector leadership: Experience speaks. Emerald Group Publishing.
Hudson, T.E., 2020. If Sages Worked in Tech: Ancient Wisdom for Future‐Proof Leadership. Journal of Leadership Studies, 13(4), pp.43-47.
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