Team Leadership
Bryan Channell
MGT/521
March 8, 2015
Mary Jo Moran Team Leadership
As part of defined strategic plans, our organization has created a new department as part of a broad strategy to facilitate entry into new market segment that is critical to the success of our strategic plan. Within this new department will be a new work team comprised of myself, Claire Hogue, and Tonya Williams. My role as team leader will be to quickly blend the three of us into a successful team capable of delivering consistent results that drive sustainability into the broader efforts of the organization and supports key strategic initiatives. There is a clear sense of urgency to deliver results from our team as organic growth within our organization is stagnant, which has resulted in the creation of the new department designated as the organizational leader in developing new markets. Our work team is based off the “product departmentalization” organizational design as our unit will be working on a product for entry into the targeted market (Robbins & Coulter, 2012, p. 267). Our small unit will make it difficult to utilize the preferred method of control, “feedforward” control as this style requires significant upfront structure to define guidelines that control the process. Instead, I will rely on the “concurrent” method of control which will play well off my people skills and creativity. We will be more successful adjusting processes during actual application rather than the feedforward method designed to control processes in hopes of preventing issues (Robbins & Coulter, 2012, p. 494). I believe this management style will support the work team culture utilized for our small work team.
Between the three of us, there are two personality styles as evaluated using the Jungian 16-type personality test. My leadership style is ENFP, which indicates my personality traits are people-oriented, creative, and highly optimistic (Marcic & Nutt, 1989). The personality test also reveals several fields of vocation which my personality score suits, but one vocation in particular stood out when considering management and leadership – conflict mediator. Test results for both Claire and Tonya placed them in the INTP personality classification. This personality analysis identifies both of them as socially cautious, highly conceptual, and good at problem-solving (Marcic & Nutt, 1989). The last element is one that will likely play very strongly in the development of our newly created team designed to facilitate support of the new department created by our organization as identified in our strategic planning.
I believe our team will come together with Claire and Tonya playing off their personality strengths to deliver results based off highly conceptual work which has been shaped through their ability to problem-solve issues at hand. As they run into a constraint or roadblock along the way, my creativity, optimism, and people skills will allow me to support them in their efforts to deliver results to the business. I believe the three of us, while being a small team, have proven to be quite successful at blending our different styles together and achieve targeted deadlines with very positive results. Our strategy of leadership is to utilize a “shared-leadership” theory which is founded on an objective where each team member plays a leadership role within the unit, leveraging peer and lateral influences along with possible downward or upward hierarchical influences to achieve the team objectives (Pearce, Conger, & Locke, 2008, p. 623). In the discussion of shared leadership theory, there are multiple theories around the strategic vision, whether it is a collectively crafted team vision, or a central vision derived from the viewpoint of dominant team members whose leadership style appoints them a prominent role within the unit. Capitalizing off