Expert Answer
The Situational Leadership style of a Manager: While other leadership styles are based upon the traits and approach of a leader, situational leadership is based upon how the leader adopts him/her according to the requirements of the situation. This means utilizing different styles and skills of motivations that employee needed in a situation. This type of a leader realizes that culture plays a significant role in teamwork and cooperation within the team. They also establish special focus to retain top talent and make sure to develop an individual for the organizational success. The same can be applied in this situation where the director can use situational leadership to resolve the differences that he has observed that wait staff differs in the level of service they provide to residents.
The director can also two different ways of managing tasks based on the situations that are task centricity and people centricity. The reality is directors need to have a combination of these two categories based on the situation.
Task centric: Here the director generally aims at the list of task, activities, jobs to be completed and the protocol to be followed in order to achieve the work. He seldom shows concern for people or the resource who delivers the work. On the other hand, he will be concerned about technical challenges and its solutions in order to achieve the set objective. Mostly he’ll be logical, analytical, eye for detail, job oriented procedures and protocols.
People-centric: Here the director understands the significance of job, however, spends a good amount of time to understand the needs of the people who do the task and their motivation for the job. He recommends pay hike, incentives, bonus, perks and other motivational requirements for his team members and spends time with the individuals to understand their strength and weakness. He also believes in order to build positive productive environment, people need to work with positive attitude etc.,
Suggestions that I offer the director to help facilitate the change process:
Changes to the business are inescapable… When there are customers constant changing demand, organizations need to position them self in a differentiating their strategies which is inevitable.
It modifies based on the customer demand, customer behavior, market situations, risks of new entrants; competitor’s strength etc., In order to support these strategic initiatives of the business, the leadership needs strong support from their middle managers, the entry-level managers and from all the employees.
We cannot have an objective to achieve this without a clear modification to the culture of an organization. Cultural change in the organization is related to Behavior of their employees, thought process of all the staff during change management process, acceptance criteria etc., In order to understand the culture shift in an organization. When we look at modern organizational conditions, diversity is the first and the foremost area that companies bring in from the organization’s culture perspective.
Let us consider the following example:
A Content organization wanted to position them self in the market as a leading player in providing content to worldwide customers. For more than a century, this organization has been established in printing and supplying content even before computers were invented. Currently, it is based on the application that was invented in 1990’s using C language. With the latest advancement in technology, the data curation of the content is all done through various automation technologies like Natural Language Processing – NLP techniques, Auto Abstraction and Auto Curation of data, Entity extraction etc., by various different technology based organization.
Our organization in this case study is a pioneer of the various list of content giants. However, they lack technology specialization when it comes to automating the content. Here, the company decides to procure the latest technology from one of the IT based company. Here the organization needs enormous support from its staff whose vintage is as old as the inception of the first programming language which is almost 30 years old. Change management for these staff is one of the high ranked challenges for this organization.
So the company needs to prepare for this change. Which means 90% of the time to be devoted to planning? 10% to be devoted to implementation, monitoring & execution of the planned strategy. Hence, during the planning stage, organization need to prepare, how it is going to communicate this change to its staff, what/when/where aspects of communication to its staff… While doing this, what are the possible questions staff might have a need to be planned as well. Since this involves automation, there is a high probability that few staff might lose their current job. Which means what is the alternative to this? How do we manage all this?
Is cost of making this change beneficial than the current landscape of the process etc., need to be planned well and provide a complete cultural shift to the existing organization which will result in the seamless execution of the newly planned strategy. Change is always a predictable situation in any project. So well-planned projects with the details of how best to handle change request situations will result in the whole process becoming much easier to tackle.
The director shall follow the following steps:
1.Project Change Request document
2.Change log to be updated
3.Assessing the priority of the change request – In this case, if the contractor’s interest in the change order situation is a nice to have or must have or critical to have (Urgent & Important task) which drives the sense of urgency on planning the corresponding impact.
4.Analyzing the change – It is always useful to assess all change requests against the criteria it was chosen for and the purpose is just to make a decision of selecting or rejecting. In this case, since it is in favor of contractor’s interest in the change order situation, the assessment should prove contractors interest favoring the project requirement.
5.Decision making on the change: approve or reject the change request.