Introduction
A leader has leadership roles to play. In this case study, Ted is charged with the responsibility to motivate, empower, communicate, and develop his employees. This essay looks at how he can act as a team builder, manage cultural diversity, and give a plan he can use to create structural empowerment.
Ted’s Role as a Relationship Builder
Employee work output depends on motivation levels (Emerson, 2014). Types of approaches are the difference between motivated and unmotivated employees. Ted has the duty to schedule time to meet all employees. Face-to-face discussions with disgruntled middle-level managers and employees show that the company supports them. Finally, Ted has to invest in employees and involve them in decision-making to prevent them from the push to engage unions.
Empowerment gives employees a feeling of recognition and helps boost their ego. Women currently constitute around 80% of total workers in Ted’s company. However, senior managers are barely represented and Ted is tasked with the duty to promote some of them to top positions to reflect gender balance.
Good communication is an important practice in business organizations (Emerson, 2014). Direct communication is better than indirect communication as it makes people connect better. Ted needs to interact with his employees directly. He needs to find time to talk to production workers, especially at their place.
Finally, Ted has to develop the skills of his workers. He can train middle-level managers on management qualities to afford them the chance to get a promotion and also improve the technical skills of workers to make them feel competent.
How Ted Can Deal With Cultural Diversity
Cultural diversity is ever-present in most modern organizations. It can be both beneficial and disastrous to the business. Cultural diversity can be in the form of race, religion, political affiliation, geographical location, or gender (Lewis, & Gates, 2005). Ted’s company does not consider gender balance in top-level management positions. Most of the managers are male despite the fact that this company is composed of a majority of females.
To deal with cultural diversity, five strategies can be applied: recognition, fairness, focusing on oneself, employee assessment, and promoting interaction (Lewis, & Gates, 2005). Ted has to recognize that females will not relent on getting promoted and should show them by designing a plan to overcome this challenge. He has to show fairness by trying to reflect the proportion of employees in management positions. Ted has to focus on himself to identify any prejudices and avoid projecting them to his employees. He has to assess employees and encourage interactions.
How Ted can Create Structural Empowerment
Ted can start by allowing workers to vent out their issues and encourage them to explain their feelings. He should ask female employees in junior management positions to give detailed responses on what they feel has happened to them, how it has particularly affected them, and other possible problems that have resulted from a gender imbalance. He should do the same for other disgruntled workers. Ted must ensure that he does not solve issues for some employees while ignoring others. He must plan for several sessions with particular sessions involving discussions between managers and certain sets of disgruntled employees.
The next step is to come up with a summary of problems employees have in the workplace (Emerson, 2014). In the summary, Ted will have to state again facts drawn from employees. It should also include consideration of the degree of feelings attached to some challenges. Ted already understands that women are bringing problems relating to representation but does cannot quantify the real impacts they have on productivity. He needs to examine worst-case scenarios for a company that he has worked for since the age of five. He can then get back to disgruntled parties to confirm that his summary includes all facts discussed.
The next step is to assess the desired outcomes of certain courses of action (Lewis, & Gates, 2005). Ted will have to request female workers to give responses to plans of action and state whether they believe true change will be achieved. This will help him to determine how resolutions made will impact the company in the future. Things to consider are how women will relate with managers and even their male counterparts, and how workers’ attitudes to tasks assigned to them will change. Ted should seek to know if there are shared interests to help in choosing certain courses of action.
Ted can then look at all the possible range of solutions available and then state again outcomes female employees and other workers think the resolution will achieve. He can then ask to know which particular solutions will achieve the outcomes. It is not possible for a manager to please all parties, and one will have to be selective in order to avoid taking too much time resolving conflicts and building a strong team (Emerson, 2014). He can save time by examining how various quarters respond to suggested solutions or sets of solutions.
If there is no agreement then he will ask how solutions will have to be redesigned. Ted will then be obliged to record the agreements for purposes of future reference. Finally, Ted has to set up a time frame for which certain outcomes may be visible. For instance, he can give a target of 4 months to promote 2 women to senior management.
Conclusion
Ted needs to take up the role of a leader and request to meet women and junior employees separately. This act will enable them to talk about their issues and give them the freedom to explain how they think their situations can be improved.
References
Emerson, B. (2014). Lecture on Building Teams and Communication. University of Maryland University College, College Park, MD.
Lewis, R. D. & Gates, M. (2005). Leading Across Cultures. Nicholas Brealey.