Rachel Adams, the president of the Independent Center for Clinical Research (ICCR), exhibits some transformational leadership traits. Rachel is a liberal thinker and also a positive person who relishes in nuances of life, in addition to being a risk-taker (Northouse, 2016). Moreover, Rachel inspires many women in ICCR, and they consider her a role model. Rachel’s leadership style suggests that she is engaged in transformational leadership.
The swift growth of ICCR has resulted in changes that have affected Rachel’s leadership roles. Rachel has been moving across the country, and she has begun to feel as if she is losing her sway over the company. Additionally, growth at ICCR has shifted planning and decision-making to departmental heads, thereby shifting the focus of the ICCR model to a stratagem opposed to Rachel’s initial strategy (Northouse, 2016). Therefore, the growth of ICCR has adversely affected Rachel’s ideal leadership paradigm in management.
Despite the challenges that the growth of ICCR has posed to Rachel’s leadership, she can still revamp herself as a transformational leader. Rachel should increase her pep talks from two per year to a monthly deliberation. Furthermore, Rachel should listen to the directors’ suggestions of making ICCR be a standard pharmaceutical company dedicated to research and development of new drugs, give her suggestion, and they agree on the best model. Rachel’s charisma is also important in rallying the whole of the ICCR staff around her shared vision of the company. She should also leverage emotional intelligence to acknowledge interpersonal dynamics to spearhead personal and collective performance among all the ICCR and rely on the experts’ advice. In essence, all these efforts will enable her to inspire the members of ICCR to succeed in their roles and make them be part of decision-making.
I would characterize Paul Farmer, the pioneer of Partners in Health (PIH), as a servant leader. Paul has worked to create value for most communities across the world using his medical knowledge. He has also recognized the health problems many poor people might have and has taken measures the prevention and control such illnesses. Truly, these initiatives show Paul’s behavior as a servant leader through his profession.
The essence of servant leadership is to put others first. When Paul moved to Haiti, he volunteered for a small charity called Eye Care despite looking for opportunities that could have enriched him personally. Again, when he receives an amount of $1 million, he does not direct the money to other uses but rather for establishing PIH. Paul was set to do everything in his capacity to cater to the poor’s needs.
A servant leader is also characterized by his ability to get followers to serve. Paul’s followers were the cadre of people who were trained to administer medicines, tutor health classes, treat small ailments, and also discern the symptoms of major illnesses like HIV/AIDS (Northouse, 2016). Paul’s followers became servants to his vision by participating in treatment programs that he had initiated, and a good example was Jim Yong Kim (Northouse, 2016). Therefore, Paul practiced excellent servant leadership, especially to the less privileged in both Europe and Africa through his followers.
Paul’s childhood played a significant role in molding servant leadership in him. His childhood was characterized by poverty, as Northouse (2016) narrates, “Paul had grown up in a family of eight that lived in a converted school bus and a houseboat moored in a bayou” (p. 245). Undeniably, their childhood life combined with his interaction with the less privileged Haitians sparked the need to better the poor’s lives.
Jim Towne’s virtual team lacks some important characteristics of team excellence. The collaborative climate is lacking because Jim’s team has never worked together on any major projects. As well, unified commitment is also needed for the proper functioning of Jim’s team as it is also lacking (Northouse, 2016). Because the professionals are based in different countries, the sense of unity and identification has been lost. Inarguably, the crucial lacking aspects in Jim’s team are automatically making the team less efficient.
Based on the assessment of the team’s effectiveness, Jim should intervene at this specific time. Cognitively, Jim should help the team understand the problems that are confronting it (Northouse, 2016). Jim should take an internal intervention because this helps in the diagnosis of the group’s deficiencies. Accordingly, Jim’s actions should be based on task leadership actions. Therefore, through his leadership skills, Jim can ensure that the team does not veer off the objectives of their organization.
Jim should implement some leadership functions to improve his team professionally. First, he should intervene to clarify the group’s goals and work with them towards ensuring that the objectives are met. Second, he should structure the team through the planning of more face-to-face meetings and delegation of duties. Third, Jim should encourage innovation and consistent improvement in the members of his team to ensure efficiency in service delivery. Moreover, Jim should also inspire team performance by setting good precedents by guiding the direction of the project. To enhance performance in the team, he should also enforce the guidelines of the company to the members to reduce cases of emails being unread by some staff based in some countries. Truly, effective management of a team’s activities requires careful consideration of the specific needs of the group.
Kyle and Harrison wanted to try to effect some changes to Bacchus, which later on affected the beliefs, values, and attitudes of the players. Together, they changed the club team to operate on a more competitive level by bringing in Mario O’Brien to coach the team (Northouse, 2016). The values of teamwork, collaboration, and commitment were inculcated in the players making the team ascend to second place at sectionals. On adaptive challenges, Bacchus faced adaptive challenges because it had a culture that was based on partying characterized by drunkenness and not competition. The team also lacked mentorship programs, which were later induced by the co-captain’s leadership. Notably, the problems of drunkenness and lack of mentorship were alleviated, and Bacchus improved in sports performance.
Kyle and Harrison perfected their leadership behaviors by engaging in the get on the balcony behavior by bringing in a new effective coach. In addition, they also identified the adaptive challenge of drunkenness and took steps to eradicate it. By calling a dinner meeting and advocating for anonymous opinion giving, the captains were regulating the distress. When captains were encouraging their players at the dinner party to do well at the sectional competition, they were maintaining disciplined attention. Through open discussions on matters of Bacchus, they were giving the work back to the team members. The co-captains were protecting the voices from below by inviting all members, including the drunkards. Kyle and Harrison created a holding environment for other team members. The team dinner enabled all the team members to gather, and at the beginning of the event, each player was asked to anonymously submit his opinion about how Bacchus should be. On analysis, the deliberations were successful because of anonymity, the players could give their views without fear of being victimized.
Reference
Northhouse, P. (2016). Leadership: Theory and practice (7th ed.). Sage Publications.