In the beginning of the training, the new employees will be warmly greeted and their importance for the company will be emphasized. The training will start from a short introduction about the differences between management and leadership in a form of presentation. This part of the training aims to develop the idea about the importance of adopting a leadership, rather than a managing style.
Presentation: Management and Leadership
Although the roles of a manager and leader might sometimes be similar, there are also strong differences between them. According to Caroselli (2000), while a manager is responsible for maintaining the status quo, a leader should create positive changes within an organization. A leader is not satisfied with the status quo and is always in the process of looking for space for improvement. In addition to this, unlike a manager, the key characteristic of a leader is his or her skills in terms of influencing. The ability to influence is the result of a high level of honesty, integrity, and the good communication skills of a leader. In addition to this, in order to be able to influence employees and create positive change, a leader should have a deep understanding of company’s mission (Shaffer, 2015). It is important to understand that managers can also motivate employees and encourage integrity, yet management is usually associated with autocracy.
Servant Leadership and Autocratic Leadership
This part of the training will start from an exercise in order to help the participants understand the effectiveness of relationship-oriented leadership. The training method used for the exercise will be traditional because it will help the participants develop a situation similar to those that they are likely to experience in their working life. The participants will be divided into two groups and a person will be assigned to each of the groups who will perform the role of a leader. The group will be given a task that it needs to complete in half an hour. The leader of the first group will demonstrate autocratic leadership, while the leader of the second group will be more relationship-oriented. After the completion of the task the participants will discuss their experience of being a part of the group.
This exercise will be followed by a short presentation regarding the nature and benefits of servant leadership.
Whilst in the past autocratic leadership was perceived as the most effective, recent studies show that companies with the type of leadership that is more relationship-oriented reach better results, especially in the long term. Spears (2002) defined ten characteristics of servant leadership. These are:
listening (a leader should possess good listening skills);
empathy (empathize with the problems and concerns of others);
healing (repair emotional wounds);
awareness (the ability to reason and find solutions to problems);
persuasion (use persuasion to achieve goals);
conceptualization (the ability to envision goals and company’s mission);
foresight (the ability to foresee the outcomes);
stewardship (emphasize openness and trust within a company);
commitment (a servant leader should be committed to the idea of growth of every single individual within a company);
community (the ability to build a community within an organization) (Spears, 2002).
Cultural Sensitivity in Leadership
This part of the training aims to develop participants’ understanding of applying a cultural approach to leadership. It will start from a small exercise that uses the traditional training approach. This training method was chosen because it is the most effective one in terms of encouraging group dynamics and studying the topic of culture.
The participants will be divided in two groups, each of them with its unique ‘culture’. The participants will be asked to ‘travel’ from one group to another and try to understand the norms and values of another culture as a result of these visits. After the exercise the participants will be asked to describe their experience. The exercise shows that actions and exchanges can be misinterpreted in case an individual is unfamiliar with someone else’s culture.
The exercise will be followed by a short presentation.
Recently there has been a sharp development of multinational companies as a result of globalization process. This brought the topic of the importance of culturally sensitive approach to leadership. In addition to this, leaders often face the problem of building a cohesive team from individuals with different cultural and/or religious backgrounds. It is therefore important for leaders to appreciate diversity. A failure to achieve this might result in negativity and internal conflicts that will negatively affect the functioning of a company. Appreciating cultural diversity helps to collect different perspectives and thus expand company’s potential.
In addition to this, the famous work of Hofstede (1980) emphasized the importance of developing different leadership styles in different countries that would take into account cultural differences. Namely, certain characteristics of culture such as individualism and collectivism, the level of uncertainty avoidance, power index, long term orientation vs short term orientation, masculinity vs femininity, and indulgence vs restraint should be taken into account when developing a leadership strategy.
Leadership Skills Assessment
The training will end with an individual exercise. The participants will be asked to assess their leadership skills by writing them down. Later they will discuss in front of other participants whether or not these skills will be effective in terms of enforcing positive change. The participants will also receive an assignment of writing down the ‘blank spots’ in their leadership style that they need to improve as a part of their homework.
- Caroselli, M. (2000). Leadership Skills for Managers: McGraw-Hill.
- Hofstede, G. (1980), Culture’s consequences: International differences in work-related values, Sage, London.
- Shaffer, B. (2015). leadership and motivation. Supervision, 76(1), 9.
- Spears, L. C. (2002). Focus on leadership: Servant-leadership for the 21st century. In L. C. Spears (Ed.), Tracing the past, present, and future of servant-leadership. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
