Case Study- Developing Leadership Skills
Introduction
Currently, Eduardo, who was recently promoted to the position of manager, is having a disconnect with his team regarding his style of leadership. Notably, he is extremely intelligent, gets solutions to problems ahead of others, and quickly implements them when the rest of the team lags behind. Additionally, he becomes impatient and opts to do all tasks by himself, resulting in him missing out on other team members’ input and failing to garner the team’s support for the vision. Eduardo believes that he knows best, and thus he often does not listen to others nor inspire confidence in his team. This professional arrogance has resulted in creating more of a dictatorial leadership style producing adversarial relationships internally between him and the rest of the team.
As a result, his supervisor is concerned that the disconnect might spread to the external partners, eventually leading to continued loss of talent and a negative impact on the organization’s performance. This essay explores leadership skills such as strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, and communication skills and explains why it is critical for Eduardo to develop them. It also recommends steps he can take to help in transforming his leadership style.
Leadership Skills that Are Critical for Eduardo to Develop
There are several leadership skills that are critical for Eduardo to develop to transform his leadership and inspire confidence in his team. These include, strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, and communication skills. First, strategic thinking skills comprise of the ability to develop intuitive, visionary, and consistent skills, concepts, techniques, and styles to enhance an organization’s survival (Goldman, 2012). Strategic thinking entails interpreting complex information and developing appropriate strategies to be adopted to improve an organization’s processes and systems (Goldman, 2012). It is concerned with the directional, systems-oriented, opportunistic, and conceptual process of discovering new and creative strategies to be adopted to use intent in consistently guiding resource allocation, motivating employees, and sustaining enthusiasm by providing room for individual and group contributions, allowing organizations to optimally utilize their capabilities and resources (Dionisio, 2017).
According to Wang (2018), strategic thinking skills are significant in enhancing leaders’ flexibility and mental agility to look into the future and anticipate possible threats, and perceive potential opportunities. Thus, developing these skills would enable Eduardo to develop the ability to objectively look at the broader picture and use creativity in perceiving opportunities and threats that might not be obvious to other team members (Wang, 2018). Moreover, Goldman (2012) observes that strategic thinking is critical in developing managers’, such as Eduardo’s, holistic understanding of their organizations’ environment and creatively envisioning their organizations’ future. Second, emotional intelligence, which is characterized by motivation, self-awareness, empathy, self-regulation, and social skills, is critical in allowing managers to understand better their own emotions and those of others to move them towards achieving organizational goals (Serrat, 2017). It comprises the ability to know and manage one’s emotions, motivate oneself, recognize others’ emotions, and handle relationships by identifying, assessing, and managing one’s emotions, and those of others and groups. According to Serrat (2017), emotional intelligence entails the ability to perceive accurately the emotions in self and others, assimilate the emotions to facilitate thinking, understand the emotions, and manage and regulate one’s emotions and those of others. Therefore, developing emotional intelligence skills will be significant in helping Eduardo to connect with the team members and motivate, inspire, and challenge them to achieve the team’s vision and create a productive and positive working environment (Hess & Bacigalupo, 2013). Furthermore, Serrat (2017) posits that Eduardo will be able to promote understanding and relationships, moderate conflict, and foster harmony, continuity, and stability, thereby reducing occupational stress and improving organizational performance and success.
Last, communication skills comprise a manager’s ability to read, write, and converse accurately both in face-to-face and over-the-phone conversations with subordinates, superiors, colleagues, and other external stakeholders and to effectively deliver a clear and precise messages (Hargie, Dickson, & Tourish, 2017). Communication skills also comprise the ability to listen to the opinions of others and feedback regarding various issues affecting employees’ productivity and organizational performance (Bell & Martin, 2019). They are significant in making information related to a team’s vision and the strategies to accomplish it well understood, which enhances the probability of realizing organizational goals. By developing excellent and effective communication skills, Eduardo will be able to share his expectations of what the team has to do to accomplish its vision and the set organizational goals (Bell & Martin, 2019). Additionally, he will be able to inspire his subordinates to pursue the team’s vision and follow identified competitive strategies.
Actionable Steps that Eduardo Should Take towards Developing These Leadership Skills
There are two actionable steps that Eduardo should take towards developing leadership skills such as strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, and communication skills. These steps include, first, setting up leadership development goals (Cherniss & Roche, 2020). These goals should be focused on enhancing Eduardo’s leadership style and improving his weaknesses. Moreover, setting up leadership development goals will help Eduardo to develop critical skills such as self-awareness, social awareness, self-regulation, and motivation. Acquiring these traits will be crucial in reducing stress, setting the team’s goals, and making decisions affecting the performance of the entire team. The second actionable step towards developing these leadership skills entails monitoring the emotional climate within the organization to understand and become aware of his own emotions and those of other team members (Cherniss & Roche, 2020). Monitoring the emotional situation will be critical in helping Eduardo to actively and purposefully look for subtle signs of emotions influencing the course of events at the organization, and taking prompt action to eliminate and manage any arising problems.
Utilizing the Flywheel Effect to Transform Eduardo’s Leadership Style
The flywheel effect refers to how individuals can put a lot of effort into something or a project without much recognizable effect until one day, the breakthrough moment occurs, and the flywheel starts to rotate (Collins, 2011). Once the flywheel starts running, it rotates faster and faster with any added effort and increases the returns for invested efforts (Collins, 2011). Likewise, Eduardo can utilize the concept of the flywheel effect to transform his leadership style by making small but incremental efforts to change his leadership style. Although changes in his leadership style might not be noticeable in the first few days, his efforts will become noticeable once he starts changing some of the undesirable leadership traits and develops critical leadership skills such as emotional intelligence, communication, and strategic thinking skills.
Some of the tasks that Eduardo should perform to promote gradual improvement that provides tangible evidence that his strategy is yielding results include learning to listen more to others’ opinions. By learning to listen more, Eduardo will communicate more effectively with his subordinates and understand better ways to support them in realizing the team’s vision (Cherniss & Roche, 2020). As a result, there will be reduced conflicts among the team members, considering that they will be able to understand better what is expected of them in accomplishing set organizational goals. Another significant task for Eduardo to perform entails assessing his emotions and those of his subordinates to understand better how they affect the team’s working environment and, eventually, overall organizational performance.
References
Bell, R. L., & Martin, J. S. (2019). Managerial Communication for Organizational Development. New Jersey: Business Expert Press.
Cherniss, C., & Roche, C. (2020). Leading with Feeling: Nine Strategies of Emotionally Intelligent Leadership. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Collins, J. (2011). Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t. New York: Harper Business.
Dionisio, M. (2017). Strategic Thinking: The Role in Successful Management. Journal of Management Research, 44-57.
Goldman, E. F. (2012). Leadership Practices that Encourage Strategic Thinking. Journal of Strategy and Management, 25-40.
Hargie, O., Dickson, D., & Tourish, D. (2017). Communication Skills for Effective Management. London: Macmillan International Higher Education,.
Hess, J. D., & Bacigalupo, A. C. (2013). Applying Emotional Intelligence Skills to Leadership and Decision Making in Non-Profit Organizations. Administrative Sciences, 202-220.
Serrat, O. (2017). Understanding and Developing Emotional Intelligence. In O. Serrat, Knowledge Solutions: Tools, Methods, and Approaches to Drive Organizational Performance (pp. 329-339). Singapore: Springer.
Wang, V. C. (2018). Strategic Leadership. Charlotte, North Carolina: IAP.
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Question 
Scenario
As a director of leadership and learning, you collaborate with many different employees throughout the prosthetics manufacturing organization you work for. You were recently contacted by Eduardo, who was promoted from an individual contributor to a manager four months ago. Eduardo is seeking your advice on developing his leadership style after receiving his first quarterly review from his supervisor.
Case Study- Developing Leadership Skills
Prompt
Given the case, as described, analyze Eduardo’s situation as it currently exists and recommend steps he can take to transform his leadership style.
Specifically, you must address the following rubric criteria:
Define the following leadership skills and explain why Eduardo should focus on developing each of these:
Strategic thinking
Emotional intelligence
Communication skills
Describe two actionable steps Eduardo should take towards developing these leadership skills and explain how each step might help improve his situation.
Explain how Eduardo can utilize the flywheel effect to transform his leadership style and identify the tasks he should perform to promote gradual improvement that provides tangible evidence his strategy is yielding results. Support your response.