Assignment: Leadership for Good: Part 1
This Assignment features one of the Business Skills for Good that you will learn more about and develop throughout your MBA program.
Submit Part 1 of your leadership profile as follows:
Part 1: Perspectives on Leadership/Leadership Values (4–5 pages)
For the first part of your leadership profile, you will describe how you can/will apply positive leadership skills in pursuit of social change, be it in your professional or personal life. Be sure to incorporate the following:
Emotional Intelligence
- Analyze the importance of the five elements of emotional intelligence in being a strong leader: self-awareness, self-regulation, social skills, empathy, and motivation. Specifically:
- How do these elements affect the leader-follower relationship?
- How do they improve a leader’s ability to promote change?
Developing a Diverse and Inclusive Environment
- Analyze the interdependency of diversity and inclusion.
- Examine what diversity and inclusion look like in the workplace, as well as the benefits of having/developing a diverse working environment.
- Summarize how you have worked/will work as a leader to promote diversity and inclusion in your work environment.
The Power of Networking
- Based on your personal and professional experiences, examine the relationship between establishing and maintaining a professional network with your own leadership.
- How can a strong network benefit both a rising leader and an established leader?
- How can the use of networks enhance one’s ability to become an agent of positive social change?
Solution
Perspectives on Leadership/Leadership Values
Emotional intelligence
The importance of five elements of emotional intelligence in being a strong leader is self-awareness, self-regulation, social skills, empathy, and motivation.
Self-awareness– Self-awareness can be considered the foundation for personal growth and success. It means to recognize and understand their own emotions and the person has the power to control their emotions. Self-awareness is one of the important elements of emotional intelligence
Self-regulation– Self-regulation is important because it helps to choose the person to how to respond when the person is facing strong emotions (Brimhall & Mor Barak, 2018, p.480). Self-regulation helps to understand the person and how they will express their emotion in certain people or situations.
Social skills– The main importance of social skills is how people interact or socialize with other people. Strong social skill helps to interact with other person and build a stronger understanding of themselves and another.
Empathy– Empathy is one of the major elements of emotional bits of intelligence. Empathy allows the person to understand what the other person is feeling. It allows us to understand each other well and helps the person to communicate that they have understood the feelings and its implication.
Motivation– Motivation is an important factor in the emotional bits of intelligence. Emotionally intelligent people are motivated toward their dream, goal, or achievement. Motivation helps to encourage people to attain their goals in the future.
These elements affect the leader-follower relationship as it helps the followers to understand their leaders properly and to get motivated to perform better (Blancero, Mouriño-Ruiz & Padilla, 2018, p.10). In the case of leaders, it helps to understand the followers better and can communicate with each other with empathy and emotions which helps to build a good relationship. These elements help to build a good relationship with each other and help in taking the correct decision at the correct time.
The elements help to improve the leader’s ability to promote change it will be easy for the leaders to understand their followers and to make their decision accordingly. It also helps the leaders related to self-awareness and self-regulation.
Diverse and Inclusive Environment
Diversity and inclusion are considered to be interconnected concepts and they are far from interchangeable. Here diversity is all about the representation or the makeup of the entity whereas inclusion means how well the contribution, presence, or perspective of the different people are valued. Diversity and inclusion both are important for the workplace because it helps in the generation of higher revenue growth, and greater innovation can take place in the workplace. It also helps to increase the ability to recruit diverse talent in the workforce.
Diversity and inclusion look like in the workplace.
Diversity and inclusion are important parts of the workplace. Diversity is the representation of the different people in the organization whereas inclusion ensures that every person gets an equal opportunity in the workplace (Yanagihara et al. 2021, p.20). It can be said that without each other the workplace cannot work properly or smoothly as they are an important part of the workplace.
The benefit of having a diverse working environment
The benefits of having a diverse working environment are stated below-
Increased productivity– The diverse working environment generates more ideas and processes in the workplace. The different talent in the workplace helps to increase the productivity of the company. As there are different types of people who are working in the same organization so they will bring out the different processes of working which will help to increase the productivity of the workplace.
Positive reputation– It can be said that a company that has a diverse workplace often hires better employers. All the employees are from different backgrounds which helps to bring out new opportunities in the workplace and all are fairly treated by the employers which helps to create a positive reputation in the market.
Increase creativity– As all the employees who are working in the workplace are from different cases and religions with different backgrounds and work together for the betterment of the company. So the opportunity also increases in the workplace which helps to increase creativity in the workplace. All the people have a different perspective of solving the same problem so the creativity level also increases in the company.
Increase in marketing opportunity– As the company has a diverse workplace where there are different types of people in the same organization exist the marketing opportunity of the company also increases (Joseph, Ahasic, Clark & Templeton, 2021, p.15). Using the advertisement shows that different variety of people is working whether mature-aged or differently-abled which encourage other to apply in the organization. This helps to increase the marketing opportunity in the workplace.
Working as leaders to promote diversity and inclusion in the work environment.
Communicate with each employee– Proper communication with each of the employees helps to create diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Proper communication helps to understand each other well and helps in the growth of the company.
Provide the proper training- The proper training should be provided to each of the employees who are working in the workplace together. The proper training will help them to understand the work properly and helps to increase the productivity of the company.
Promote pay equity– The main thing which should be taken care of is that the leaders should provide the proper pay equity to all the employees to increase diversity and inclusion in the workplace. It helps to encourage others to join the workplace.
Acknowledge holidays of all cultures– A good leader is a person who acknowledges the holidays of all cultures properly to maintain diversity in the workplace (Rao, How & Ton, 2018, p.145). A variety of people are working together so all the cultural holidays are important in the workplace
Make it easy for the people to participate together– The main work of leaders is to help the employees to work together to participate in the workplace and make them easy to communicate with each other so that they can know each other and get familiar with the working environment.
A strong network benefits both the rising leaders and the establishing leaders
It can be said that the strong network helps both the rising and the establishment leaders in the following ways-
Firstly, strong networking helps to connect people from different parts of the world, and company growth can take place.
Secondly, the reputation of the company can also be increased as the company can be known to the major part of the world.
Thirdly the strong network helps to advertise the product in no way which helps to generate more income as a variety of people want to invest in the company.
Fourthly due to the high social network, people know that the company is not a fraud but the genuine one and will connect with the company for the work.
The use of the network enhances one ability to become an agent of positive social change
The use of the network helps the agent to strengthen positive change in the workplace. Firstly, it helps to communicate with a variety of people and helps to understand well related to the requirement (Osborne & Hammoud, 2017, p.30). Secondly, it helps to motivate others and bring positive outcomes within them. Thirdly the use of the network helps to know the social condition and the standard of living of the people and helps to understand them.
References
Blancero, D. M., Mouriño-Ruiz, E., & Padilla, A. M. (2018). Latino millennials—The new diverse workforce: Challenges and opportunities. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 40(1), 3-21.
Brimhall, K. C., & Mor Barak, M. E. (2018). The critical role of workplace inclusion in fostering innovation, job satisfaction, and quality of care in a diverse human service organization. Human Service Organizations: Management, Leadership & Governance, 42(5), 474-492.
Joseph, M. M., Ahasic, A. M., Clark, J., & Templeton, K. (2021). State of Women in Medicine: History, Challenges, and the Benefits of a Diverse Workforce. Pediatrics, 148(Supplement 2).
Osborne, S., & Hammoud, M. S. (2017). Effective employee engagement in the workplace. International Journal of Applied Management and Technology, 16(1), 4.
Rao, S., How, P. C., & Ton, H. (2018). Education, training, and recruitment of a diverse workforce in psychiatry. Psychiatric Annals, 48(3), 143-148.
Yanagihara, R., Berry, M. J., Carson, M. J., Chang, S. P., Corliss, H., Cox, M. B., … & Wiese, T. E. (2021). Building a Diverse Workforce and Thinkforce to Reduce Health Disparities. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(4), 1569.
