BUS 4405 University of The People Leadership Learning Journal Essay – Description
INTRODUCTION
“if your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader” John Quincy Adams
Strategic leadership starts with becoming strategic in our private lives: planning ahead while being cognizant of our values.
In this unit, you will learn strategic analysis and leadership-related learning skills and apply them first to your personal development. This will allow you to advance your learning as a leader who is aware of his/her development needs while you become more aware of the needs of teams and organizations.
You will learn to define, build, and apply your strategic leadership skills (read ‘33 characteristics of super inspiring leaders’ by Larry Kim at https://www.inc.com/larry-kim/33-characteristics-o… and ‘how leaders inspire cracking the code’ by Brain Brief at http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/how-lead…). These skills are relevant to your growth as a future business leader/collaborator in any organizational unit. They include following a systems approach described in the following five steps: assess the needs, design the response, develop it, implement it, and evaluate it.
Becoming strategic also means self-awareness, planning, organizing, leading, and monitoring the outcomes of your work. The tasks associated with developing these skills in this unit will include writing mission, vision, and values statements for the most important leader in your personal and professional life: YOU. Next, you will replicate the same process and develop a mission, vision, and values statements for an imaginary company.
Moreover, in this unit, you will notice some organizational factors that have a strong impact on teams, organizations, and possibly societies. You will learn how becoming strategic can be drawn upon while learning. You will notice that educational settings might work in a range of situations and structures as learning can become a strategic approach to change and to leading in general.
The leader’s work is never done, thus you will continue to draw linkages and feel more comfortable to assess the needs, design, develop, implement, and evaluate a variety of interventions that would be strategic and refer to continuous learning. All in all, you will begin to use continuous learning as a strategic approach for you and your future employer or company.
READING ASSIGNMENT
Central Intelligence Agenc.y (n.d.) About CIA – Mission and values. https://www.cia.gov/about/mission-vision/
To see an example of a clear mission, vision, and values statement of an organization that uses a learning approach, but is not in the field of learning.
DeCarlo, S. (2010, April 21). The World’s leading companies. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/2010/04/20/global-2000-lead…
To see what could happen when mission, vision, and values are well-aligned and read about leading companies. What lessons could be learned from these examples?
Guillot, W.M (2005). Strategic leadership defining the challenge. Air Power, 2(1), pg. 113-128.
Read the document to familiarize yourself with a military approach to strategic leadership. Pay special attention to the questions and answers provided by the author of this text. Note similarities and differences between the military culture and the cultures with which you are familiar. What is different? What is the same?
Horwitch, M. and Callahan, M. (2016) How leaders inspire cracking the code. Bain and Company. Retrieved from http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/how-leaders-inspire-cracking-the-code.aspx
N.A. (2012). JISC. Defining and articulating your vision, mission, and values. Retrieved from https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/vision-mission-and-values
Machiavelli, N., & Wootton, D. (1995). The Prince. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co. Available through the Gutenberg Project: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1232/1232-h/1232-h.htm
Read Chapter 21
Paine, N. & Masie, N. (Eds.) (2010). Learning Perspectives. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Read part 1 and part 2 only. Reading Prompt: Pay special attention to the strategic learning approaches described throughout the two chapters of this book. While reading, and instead of making your own notes, consider the existing strategic leadership questions that are based on the text, such as: What problem are we trying to solve? What are we trying to avoid? These questions will become your strategic leader toolbox
Simons, R. (2010). Seven strategic questions: a simple approach for better execution. Harvard Business School. https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/seven-strategy-questions-a-simple-approach-for-better-execution
To further hone your strategic questioning skill, and read about seven strategic questions essential in the business world. In what way do these questions apply to leaders and organizations at the same time?
Learning Journal
Assignment Instructions
Collaborative leadership requires focus on four key areas: connecting people and ideas outside an organization to those inside it, leveraging diverse talent, modeling collaborative behavior at the top, and showing a strong hand to keep teams from getting mired in debate.
Read about the tactics that executives from Akamai, GE, Reckitt Benckiser, and other firms use in the four areas above and how they foster high-performance collaborative cultures in their organizations.
Review the article Are you a collaborative leader? and write an essay to answer the questions below.
Identify and describe the collaborative leadership trait(s) common to all executives discussed in the article. How did this lead to effective team building within the organization? Support your answer with evidence from the article and further research.
Employees who try to collaborate on everything may wind up stuck in endless meetings, struggling to reach agreement. On the other side of the coin, executives who came of age during the heyday of “command and control” management can have trouble adjusting their style to fit the new realities (Ibarra & Hansen, 2015).
In light of this statement, review the article The key to inclusive leadership to describe and evaluate the inclusive leadership and team building strategy of any one firm in the article. Explain if Poignant questioning or Appreciative Inquiry method was instrumental in the transformation of leadership in the firm.
Consolidate your learnings about collaborative leadership from the article and research further about the great industry leaders who embraced the traits of collaborative leadership. Choose any one leader and y write a summary on how the leader transformed a group of employees into a team. Make sure your write-up discusses how the leader created an inclusive environment that energized teams, released creativity and cultivated a work culture that was both productive and helped achieve the planned outcomes?
References
Bourke, J., & Titus, A. (2020, March 06). The key to inclusive leadership. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2020/03/the-key-to-inclusive-leadership
Ibarra , H., & Hansen, M. T. (2015, July 15). Are you a collaborative leader? Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2011/07/are-you-a-collaborative-leader
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