Leadership Reflection - Part 3

Part 3 - Leadership Interview

      The Writing Center serves the entire 5000 students of the CU, its tutoring staff are students as well but has at least a 3.2 GPA. The Center has its academic mission to empower its student clients to improve in their individual writing project and to provide information & resources for their specific writing projects, but its tutoring objectives “recently changed from helping out school assignments to address higher-level academic concerns (Fang, 2018)”. Plus, its new director Dr. Pom is a completely different style director compares to its former director’s homey easiness style. The curiosity is if Dr. Pom is the leader who can lead the Center to accomplish such upgraded objectives?

      When Dr. Pom started her job as a director, she discovered the Center has a status quo of “welcoming, inclusive, loose-tied hard-working, freelance scheduling, assignment finishing focused, and enthusiastic, but disobedient ethical norms (Fang, 2018).” She also had concerns regarding Center’s informality that her opinions as the Director of the Center were often corrected by student-tutors publicly, and Center’s tutoring services had lacked accountability, etc. With the question if Dr. Pom can adapt to the Writing Center’s status quo, and if her student tutors are capable to achieve the Center’s service objectives, the author of this report interviewed Dr. Pom over the phone in the summer of 2018.

Summary of the interview

Dr. Pom has worked in the Writing Center for only a year when this interview was conducted. During the interview, Dr. Pom was very frank about challenges in her way and was very proud about what she had accomplished.

Dr. Pom stressed her understanding that the Center is “an organization which should be a composes of its tasks and its designed structures…Accountability is crucial to achieving a goal, and professionalism is the key to reach a higher level of service (Fang, 2018)”.

With this understanding, Dr. Pom took the initiative to promote business formality after she confirmed her thoughts with her boss. Dr. Pom first requested tutor service schedule-ing to be accountable on time to promote business delivery of Center’s tutoring service. Dr. Pom said she was very comfortable about her being a workplace manager in a school writing center, that her honest thought has been “it is important to prepare these in-school student-tutors for the workplace professionalism culture”. She even shook up the tutoring staff to let go those who were not comfortable for tutoring services’ business delivery requirements.

Next, Dr. Pom promoted the concept of the Writing Center is a Student Community. She requested her student tutors to reach out in campus to encourage everyone to stop by at the Center if need any help on writing-related resources or tutoring. Dr. Pom said she can imagine a lot of students may need all kinds of supports even though herself was not an off-home student in her college years. Dr. Pom said she believes creating a student community is what the Center can do to reach out to those off-home students in the process of providing tutoring services.

Dr. Pom was also very frank about challenges she was facing, which are limited funding, limited spaces, and resources, but higher objectives to provide academic writing tutoring services. Dr. Pom said she is very proud that the Center can provide such welcomed good quality services with such limited space, and she was confident that the Writing Center Community that has already been happening can help to provide even better supports beyond the Center’s limited space.

Leadership Theory and Behaviors Used

Leadership Theory

      Situational leadership model was introduced by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard, the fundamental principle of which is “Effective leadership is task-relevant, and the most successful leaders are those who adapt their leadership style to the performance readiness (ability and willingness) of the individual or group they are attempting to lead or influence (Wikipedia, 2018).”

      The model relates leadership style and followers’ performance readiness as two variables for leadership effectiveness matrix. It categorized leadership behaviors into four types as Directing, Coaching, Supporting, and Delegating style, and Blanchard’s Situational Leadership II categorized situations into four development levels, 1) low leadership competency with high task demands, 2) low-middle leadership competency with low task demands, 3) high competency with low task demands, 4) high competency with high task demands. (Wikipedia, 2018)

      Based on the concept that effective leaders need to be adaptive to the situations, Blanchard SLII recommends “leadership training to define, design, implement, and evaluate a successful learning engagement… and a leadership development plan that solves problems and achieves desired impact (Blanchard, 2018)”.

      In leading the Writing Center to improve its service, Dr. Pom identified the major situation in the Writing Center was it lacked an organization’s structure formality in achieving tasks and in compliances. According to Situational Leadership model, Dr. Pom is a leader has directing style, but her tutor students are low in performance readiness for Center’s objectives to upgrade service, which is a level 4 situation in SLII development matrix.

Behaviors Used

 Dr. Pom started her change by step 1) aligning the Center’s business structure to demand compliances, step 2) specifying business casual dress code to enhance the formality, and step 3) improving tutoring scheduling to request business delivery.

Also, Dr. Pom adapted herself into the Writing Center to be supportive to promote Community for CU students. She required her tutor students to do presentations during class breaks in campus, addressed her tutor students to pay attention to their student clients’ emotional turmoil and to report to her upon discovery, and she recommended consoling services for some students who could not cope with situations in their student lives.

Conclusions

Dr. Pom had successfully changed the Writing Center to be an accountable tutoring service provider, with a casual business atmosphere that prepares students for their work lives, and a community to support each other’s students’ lives.

Being a situational leader, Dr. Pom is directive style manager who had achieved such high tasks demand by setting achievable objectives with clear instructions to her low-performance readiness tutor students.


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The PPT from the same interview but for MBA503 (Leading the Organizational Change), I attached reasons for Change Models I selected.

*Note 1 (Slide 4)

Dr. Pam believes an organization is a composes of its tasks and designed structures, so I chose Nadler and Tushman’s model because it emphasize the formality of an organization is the basis of its tasks.

Other change analysis models:

Sherman's stresses the growth is dynamic and nonlinear, 

Quinn's competing model addressed that it needed to be both flexible and controllable. 

Greiner's model detailed how organizations grow from creativity and struggle through its imbalance of flexibility and controllable to dynamically congruent with its environment. 

Stacey's argument is to guide this struggle with a strategy to dynamically connect individuals and organizations to foster some self-organization as well as alignment among parts.

*Note 2 (Slide 8)

I chose to use "Give Voice Values" which emphasizes the change happened through paying attention to the ethical/moral values.

Other change process modules:

Lewin's outlined what the process stages are in a change process,

Kotter's detailed what managerial operation tasks are in the change process,

Duck's is about what human resources alignment tasks are in the change process.

Beckhard & Harris is about on-going momentums' recognition as well as migrating to the existing status quo in the change process,

The Changing Path is about how to strategically shape the changing path in the change process.

References

Wikipedia (2018) Situational Leadership theory. Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situational_leadership_theory

Ken Blanchard Company (2018) YOUR PATH TO CREATING THE WORLD’S BEST MANAGERS. Retrieved from: https://www.kenblanchard.com/How-We-Work-With-You

M Fang (2018) M Fang’s Final Project – Organizational Assessment Week 7 (PPT). MBA513 Organizational Change. MBA. The University.