Aztar LeadershipEssay title: Aztar LeadershipAzter Leadership:An Unsuccessful ModelWhen leadership comes to mind, it comes with thoughts of shining knights, beacons of truth, and unflappable exemplars. As a child, everyone hears the fairy tales of leaders that are able to do battle with evil, alone, and rescue their cause from sure defeat; the media is saturated with stories such as these. However, leaders and leadership can and does come in different packages, sizes, and abilities. It is not always the case that a leader is the unsung hero of a cause and, in fact, this paper will show that sometimes the leader avoids the limelight focusing it on the cause and his followers. A basic understanding of leaders and leadership will be established and then a critique of a modern company will be explained. As this paper will show, just as we have great companies with strong leadership, we also have companies on the slide with no definitive direction or leadership.
A Brief History of Leadership by Richard W. F. Dibs on April 1, 2014. Richard is the President of Leadership Research and Management at BDO.Richard is a retired Air Force Air Corps Commander, currently involved in his fifth year in the Air Force. Richard is also a member of the CIO at Boeing or the Chief of Staff in the Office of Management and Budget at the Office of International Strategic Affairs. Richard’s mission is to develop and advance the business of leadership. Richard served on a number of committees in government, defense, public policy, public affairs, government and business and holds top government jobs in a variety of companies for more than 20 years. Richard is the former Director, Government Relations (BDO) at National Public Affairs for over 20 years. Richard’s most recent book, Leadership in the Air Force: A Manual for the Military and Government , is available now.
By Mark L. Miller, February 20, 2016. A quick quick review of a few highlights from this article. First, we first have to address the issue of trust and who decides how a military career ends in the military. On several occasions, a decision is made about the military’s future, and some are forced into military life for which they could reasonably be expected to remain loyal while serving the country as an officer of the service. That is why I argue that the decision to enlist in an American military service should be made without hesitation, but never made lightly. There are still a couple of issues regarding the military life of many individuals serving in the field of military administration: First, how individuals make their decisions relative to being a person within the national army and its military staff. While the military has been under full control of the Department of Defense over the last seven years, the staff of the military has been remarkably small in recent years. Second, the military is not just a military bureaucracy. There is a very large contingent of civilian and military command and control staff on the ground in various military jurisdictions around the world. For instance, the Department of Homeland Security currently employs more than 30,000 full-time military personnel and is expected to employ 1.5 million in the 2015 fiscal year. But even after the recent change to a program instituted by the Obama Administration, the U.S. military remains out of compliance with U.S.’s commitment to protect the American people and homeland security. The United States continues to maintain an active presence on the world stage as it does in the region and abroad, but without those important resources and in service engagements. Second, even at present, the Army and Air Force have no plans to change their active-duty plans. As a result, this organization has become a sort of “secretary of defense” to the president at the highest levels of military leadership, and is working on some of the largest changes the Army should implement. This allows the President and the Army to implement their respective plans in an orderly and consistent manner with both the public and private markets. Indeed, as this article points out, there is absolutely no need for this administration to change the Army’s plans. It seems that with the formation of an Army, the government must continue to operate in line with and implement programs which will serve the entire military family while respecting the military families of American lives and those of their civilian and service members. While the Army’s policy has been in such a state of flux that changes to the Army’s plans are often made in a “stuck state” of affairs the Army has been able to maintain an active-duty capacity through the last few years. As the Army’s operations and operations training include the same three-fold operations and missions and operations plans, the Army must ensure that all units and units of the Army know how to best integrate and operate effectively with each other. Therefore, the
Two fundamental things about leadership must be understood prior to critique a company. First, leadership is a trinity that relies on leaders, followers, and situational cues. Second, leadership, as a practice, has many aspects which can be learned; however, an equal, and an equally important, number of aspects cannot be learned. A superficial understanding of leadership would have us believe both that leaders simply exist and that they exist without training, knowledge, or extrinsic influence. However, a deeper and more thorough understanding must be had in order to fully examine the strengths and weaknesses of a companys leadership.
The trinity of leadership previously mentioned is described in Dafts textbook on leadership. He expresses that leadership cannot exist is a vacuum. Leaders must have followers to lead in a situation that requires a direction. And these followers and directions are often times not the same. This is illustrated when Daft (2005) says:
The central focus of research [is] the situation in which leadership occurred. The basic tenet of this focus [is] that behavior effective in some circumstances might be ineffective under different conditions. Thus, the effectiveness of leader behavior is contingent upon organizational situations. There is no one best way of leadership (p. 81).
Prior ideas about leadership dictated that there were hard and fast rules. As mentioned above, this cannot be the case due to a number of factors. The contingency approach to leadership expresses that the lowest common denominators of these factors are leaders, followers, and situations. These three factors are interrelated with each affecting and contributing to the others.
Leaders must recognize that they are but a part in the process of achieving goals. Without followers or a situation in which to lead, the leader plays no part. However, assuming that both followers and a situation await leadership, there are two major approaches to which the leader should subscribe. Task oriented leadership implies full commitment to the job at hand. Relationships are formed, structure is oriented, and followers are lead solely in the direction of completed task. People oriented leadership implies full commitment to those who must complete the job at hand. Work is delegated and employers are focused in the direction of employee satisfaction; those that feel well, work well.
Achievement and Participation in Work
The work of a leader is more of a work of passion, but it has advantages and disadvantages. In my opinion, participation in a leader’s work is equally important. For example, if someone’s job is to perform a new task, they have to provide input, feedback, advice. The role of the leader is to give advice and help guide the leader toward the completion of the new task. When you are in the role of a leader, you’re responsible for:
Establishing a culture
Providing leadership leadership training
Recognizing that a specific role-playing experience is required
Supporting the leader in his or her work
Provide feedback to the leader in case he or she fails to provide it
You have to work to keep your role-playing culture in check. As you lead, you have the option of making changes to take the role of the head-man to the next level, or allowing other people to do their part. In a leader’s own words, “You are responsible for: the work you make, the opportunities you receive, the people you help, and the places you work, and you are responsible for your work.”
One caveat, of course, is that leader’s role often requires more than just being the head-man. Think of the role of leader as having a role in providing the leaders with guidance, helping provide leadership advice, and helping others. Those who do best, are often the ones who inspire the leaders to become leaders. There are different roles associated with these roles but it can be a useful approach to manage success in the face of failure.
So to talk about the role of leader as the main role is a pretty good approach. In this section, let’s take a look at how leaders are expected to look at the role they play in.
How Leadership Decisions are Made
If you want to know how leadership is ultimately made, you need to understand people. There are thousands of employees working in the various fields they do their jobs in. However, there are also the individuals who work in the actual businesses, who can provide advice, help, and even direct criticism to the leaders within the company, as well as who make decisions about leadership. The person who advises on where the leaders go to get their recommendations on the right things and how they think about their career options is the person who actually makes the decision on how those issues or priorities will be reviewed and made final.
In traditional leadership, everyone is set in his or her own role. That is why this is so important. If you haven’t learned the importance of an actual job with no one to help and give you direction before you enter your new position, there’s
Followers must also recognize that they are part of the process and, as Daft explains, the best leaders often make the best followers. As leaders must be receptive to the followers and situation, so to must the followers be receptive. Daft explains this dichotomy when he writes:
The nature of leader-follower relationships involves reciprocity, the mutual exchange of influence. Many of the qualities that are desirable in a leader are the same qualities possessed by an effective follower. Both leader and follower roles are proactive; together they can achieve a shared vision (p. 256).
This reciprocity often involves the following group knowing its limitations. A cohesive, mature group will be able to achieve more together than an alienated, immature group. As mentioned in class, a bunch of superstars put together is a group while a bunch of average stars working together is a team (R. Robinson, Lecture, 2004). The group must recognize their weaknesses be they alienation from not previously working together, or immaturity from not having a depth of understanding of the task at hand.
Finally, the situation is a part of the process that no one can predict. Business models can forecast and attempt to calculate trends which make the situation easier to predict; however, the dynamic nature of both the leader and followers and the situation greatly diminish the effectiveness of forecasts. The very idea that situations