 Hi everyone, this is Dr. Laura Portales and I'm here to discuss some of the main concepts in Unit 5 and the course managing people. Let's go ahead and get started. Our course managing people is divided into eight units and in this video we're going to be talking about Unit 5 which is about leadership. Oh, it's important to consider the learning objectives in each unit that you're studying in this course and that's because all of the course material as well as the exam questions are tied to the learning objectives. So let's take a look at the learning objectives for this unit together. The first one is categorized behavioral styles such as laissez-faire, autocratic, democratic, transformational, transactional or charismatic and models of situational leadership using the contingency approach. Our second learning objective is characterized as leader effectiveness based on theories and traits of leadership such as behavioral theory and modern trait theory. Assess the effects of leadership on human support systems and workforce planning to ensure employee well-being and achieve high organizational performance. Compare the characteristics of trustworthy leaders such as fairness, role models, trust in followers, passionate, inspirational, alignment of values and actions to those of unworthy leaders such as narcissistic, abused power, irrational leaders. And finally, explain the benefits of organizational trust and its role in conflict management and creating a collaborative culture. So now that we've discussed the learning objectives, let's take a look at the major topics that we're going to be addressing. The slide here lists the vocabulary that we will be discussing throughout this video and also words that you should know and be comfortable with to get yourself ready for the practice exam. The major topics in this unit include examples of behavioral styles of leadership. We'll also discuss approaches to leadership and trait leadership styles. We'll talk about trustworthy versus untrustworthy leaders. We'll discuss workplace planning and leadership and we'll also address leadership trust and collaboration. One of the major cornerstones when we look at leadership styles is whether a leader is task-centered or whether they're employee-centered. A task-centered style is really focused as the name suggests on getting the task done. So they're focused on what that end goal is and what the team should achieve in getting the work done. An employee-centered style is more focused on relationships and how to build relationships, building trust and development of the employees. Usually we'll see that the best leaders have a combination of a task-centered style and an employee-centered style. And one isn't necessarily better than the other as we'll discuss a little bit later in this unit. We like and should consider taking a situational approach. So depending on the situation we may tend to use one style or another. It also could depend on the personalities of our employees, the task at hand and many other variables. But the important thing to remember here is that the task-centered style is focused on getting things done while the employee-centered style is focused on the relationship building and the relationships. When we look at leadership styles we have three main styles that we can consider. The first is an autocratic style and in this style this is when the leader makes all of the decisions and they don't get input from employees. And while this sounds negative in some situations it might be consider some decisions that a manager or a leader has to make where they need to be autocratic. So that could be salary decisions and where there's maybe a process already in place. So there are some decisions that maybe in an emergency you don't want to get input you need to just make a quick decision and go with it. So again depending on the situation the autocratic style may be a fine one to use but in general day to day management one of these two other styles based on the situation better to be used and a little bit more motivational to your employees. The next style is democratic and democratic refers to participation and allowing employees to participate in the decision making process. This is good because a lot of times when people are allowed to have a say in the process they tend to have more buy in into the task that needs to be accomplished. So this is an ideal style in a lot of situations but as we've already addressed not necessarily all of them. In a laissez faire style the leader or the manager tends to let their employees make all of the decisions. And again based on the situation this can be a good thing if the employees are very well trained, very experienced it may be fine to let them make a lot of the decisions but you as a leader may still have to make some of the decisions. So as you can see from the discussion of these it's really based on situation when as a leader you may want to use a different style one versus the other. But generally speaking it's a good idea to involve your employees in decisions and gaining their input as they probably have a lot of valuable insight that you could gain from. One of the interesting theories that this unit happens to talk about is the idea of the path goal model. And if you look at the figure located here you could see that there's leader behavior as well as situational factors that ultimately are combined to influence the outcomes they hope to achieve. So those outcomes for subordinates or employees would be satisfaction, high performance as well as motivation. So when we look at leader behavior we look at whether or not the leader is supportive or maybe they use more of a directive type style of leadership or participative. And then we also look at the situational factors that go into that which really is based on the work environment and the individual subordinate or employee characteristics. So for example if an employee is very new you're probably not going to use much of a participative approach. It might need to be directive until they learn their job. So in other words what this model tells us is that depending on a situation we want to think of our own behavior as a leader the situational factors combine those and figure out the best way that we can influence the outcomes that we want which include motivation, satisfaction and performance. As we continue to talk about leadership styles there are a few other styles that we should address that were discussed in unit five. And one of those is a transformational leadership style or transformational leader. And these are the leaders that inspire others. They're very passionate. They have a lot of vision for the future. When you think of leaders like Steve Jobs of Apple you see them standing on a stage and they're very charismatic and inspirational. This is a transformational leader. This is someone that motivates people based on their own passion and their own vision. And when we look at the somewhat of the opposite of that we can look at transactional leaders and transactional leaders ultimately are that more task centered style that we talked about earlier. They're focused on getting the job done getting the tasks complete in order to meet the goal. Now it's important to note that one style is, well let me say this, necessarily it may not be one style or the other. You may have someone that's a great transformational leader but they're also a good transactional leader. You may have someone or a leader that's not very, that doesn't have a ton of vision and they're not this great speaker but they're really good at getting the job done. So just keep in mind one necessarily isn't better than the other. Oftentimes it depends on people's individual styles and their abilities and personality of course. The last definition here is the idea of servant leaders and when we hear of a servant leadership style that type of leadership style is not very task focused but instead is focused on serving the people that work for them and helping individuals when growth. So these types of leaders tend to be very supportive. They try to create opportunities for people to grow and learn and continually do better and better within their job. Theory X and theory Y is a fairly classic style and this is more geared toward the trade idea of leadership rather than behaviors. So when we think of theory Y and X we want to think about this is how the leader thinks and internalizes things and therefore their actions probably follow the way that they think. So our theory X leader will tend to believe that people don't like work. They need to be coerced into getting things done and they're really not going to take initiative. They need a leader in order to stay focused and move forward. The opposite of this is our theory Y leaders and theories believe that people get inner satisfaction from work. They know that if they're given the chance they're happy to share ideas and participate in the process of decision making. So if we take a step back and we think about these two different approaches probably no leader is extremely one or extremely the other but maybe somewhere in the middle. But the important thing to remember with this theory is that how people think and how a leader reasons is ultimately how they're going to interact with their employees. So when we look at theory X if you assume that people don't like work you're probably not gonna be that motivated to create development opportunities and allow the person to grow as an individual within the organization because that's not your core belief in terms of individuals and how they feel about work. So while this theory is fairly black and white everything sort of falls in the middle and we find that some leaders have some of these characteristics or beliefs but maybe not all of them. So that's the important thing to keep in mind. We've already addressed the contingency theory a little bit and that's the idea that depending on a situation we may want to use a different leadership style and we can look at that through this model contingency model and we can look on the bottom left where it says leader member relations task structure as well as leader position power. So what the contingency theory tells us is that we can look at these three elements whether they're weak or strong, high or low and ultimately determine the best way to behave in a situation. So for example, if we look right where the leader member relations are poor and the task structure is low so it's a little bit ambiguous and people are unsure what they should be doing and then the leader position power is also weak. In this type of situation then we should really just focus on the task because as a leader we don't have great relations we don't have a great position or so therefore we should focus on the task at hand. So what this chart does is it helps inform us about which direction we want to go and what type of leadership style we may want to implement depending on the situation. Now of course, nothing is black and white so this is going to be very situational and there may be some situations where you need to use a combination of approach such as a more directive style in the beginning but a more participative style at the end of a project for example. So the important thing to remember is that any type of contingency theory when we talk about leadership essentially means that we want to look at the individual situation and base our leadership style based on that situation. Our next topic in this unit is about nightmare leadership traits and those have been coined TNT leadership or three nightmare traits of leadership and those three traits are dishonesty, disagreeableness and carelessness. So dishonesty, of course this doesn't create trust for the organization and it doesn't help with satisfaction for employees. So of course this is a trait that we want to avoid. When we look at disagreeable leaders this type of individual will tend to be overly critical, they'll be inflexible and they'll try to create a culture of fear where people only do things because they're afraid of losing their job for example. So of course this is a very negative trait in a leader. Carelessness is the third trait that we will address here and that's where there isn't much attention paid to work, it's sloppy, they tend to be very impulsive individuals. So when we look at these traits they can become part of a toxic trait of leadership which is of course very negative and just about any workplace because we find that toxic don't listen well, they tend to never think that they're wrong, it's all about them, it's all about their ego, they have a need to control everything and really everything that they do within the organization is about their power and their feelings of power. So of course as leaders we want to avoid these traits and we want to avoid being a toxic leader but it's something to consider when you think about your own experiences maybe at a past job or a current job, ways that you can work around these types of leaders which can be a challenge because as you can tell many of them are just simply personality traits that can be difficult. So if we're in a position where we're able to promote people we definitely want to ensure that they don't have these traits if they take on a leadership position. We're now moving away a bit from our discussion on leadership traits and we're going to talk a little bit about leadership and managing people as it relates to planning and strategy when you're thinking about the people that work for you. So it's a circular process as you can see from this figure where first we engage in strategic planning and then we look at our current workforce, the skills and abilities they have and we do an analysis on that. Then next we want to consider future requirements of our workforce. So what kind of skills and traits do we need people in the future to have based on our strategic plan? And then we look at a gap analysis. A gap analysis, here is our ideal state, here is where we're currently at what gaps ultimately exist. Now once we identify those gaps with our workforce then we can focus on planning for action and putting together a hiring plan together and creating descriptions if need be. And then finally we can look at the execution and evaluation of the plan. So once we executed, when we determined from a strategic perspective how many people we need and what type of positions are going to be and then we want to take a step back and then evaluate it later to make sure that we're not missing anything. And then that then again of course starts the cycle over again. There's probably no more important process when you have a managing people as this one and the ability to really look at your strategic plan and tie that strategic plan to what your human capital needs are be. Very, very important process and very important to be aware of. As you can imagine and as we've alluded to a little bit already, when we look at leadership one of the most important components from an employee perspective is having trust within the leadership and we can define trust as the confidence in another person's goodwill. And when we look at the sources of trust in an organization there, for example we could trust someone just because we're familiar with them because we've interacted with them enough. We may have trust because our organization has a set of values and norms and we see that the leader follows that so that creates an environment of trust. Past experience is another method where we can begin to trust someone. We've had a positive experience with someone. For example, they followed through on a promise and that can help build trust as well. Of course of that when we don't trust the leadership in our organization we see that there are productivity issues, communication issues and empowerment issues which of course all of these can lead to an ineffective work environment that is not very productive and doesn't live up to its potential we can say. So trust in leadership is extremely important. Now that we're finished with this unit let's talk a little bit about what you've learned. This unit on leadership we talked about different types of leadership styles such as laissez-faire, autocratic, democratic and transformational and several others. We also talked about leadership effectiveness based on theories and different traits of leadership. We discussed how leadership can help human support systems and vice versa. We also talked about workforce planning. We talked about the characteristics of trustworthy leaders to untrustworthy leaders and made some comparisons on those. And finally we talked about the benefits of organizational trust within an organization especially with leadership. Let's take a look now at what's next to prepare you for the practice exam. I definitely recommend that you do another review of the material, maybe especially some of the material that you had some challenges with. Once you review that material you should be all set to take the practice exam and I wish you the best of luck on that.