Eileen's Business ideas and commercial implications

Eileen began her comments on leadership with the two ideas.  One, leaders must rely on the “success and capability of people.”  And two, leaders must have an “ethical core.”  At this point in Eileen’s talk, I realized we had very similar views on leadership.

A manager only has 24hrs in a day to work with, just like their ground level employees, no matter how powerful they become.  When a manager rises to a certain level on the hierarchy they must learn to shift their focus from solving single instance problems to instead developing the behaviors, standards and thought processes of their employees as a whole.  Through the creation and maintenance of the organizational culture, as Nahavandi points out, the employees can better solve the single instance problems on their own.  The concept can be compared to delegation in that one needs to trust their subordinates to do a good job, but in more macro sense.

Eileen emphasized the importance of ethics and knowing yourself.  The benefits of being ethical include the ability to earn others’ trust and respect.  Also, ethics add to one’s self worth and can provide someone with a life purpose.  It would have been interesting to ask Eileen whether she was a relativist or universalist in her ethical judgments.  She alluded to a strong subculture centered in Newark, New Jersey.  When working with employees from Newark, I wonder if she adapts her ethics to meld with their ethics.

Other leadership traits Eileen mentioned include: knowing the business, adding value, fairness, excellence in the workplace and recognition.  Knowing the business refers to the concept of expert power.  This power is based on others looking to the expert for guidance because of the expert’s knowledge and competence in a specific area.  Eileen also talked about the need to learn all aspects of the business in order to be manager of the organization.  One would be better off if they understood and were able to relate to each of the different business functions.

Two places jumped out at me where I could improve.  They were fairness and excellence in the workplace.  I do a great job of always explaining why I am doing what I am doing to those around me, but I have not done a great job of making the process transparent.  For AKPsi, I need to find a way to let the general membership know what issues the executive team has been working on and the process that led us to our conclusions when we made our decisions.  The benefit: the general membership would gain more trust for the executive team, and be open and accepting of the decisions the executive team makes. 

I can also work on setting measurable performance standards.  I asked the executives to write up what success in their position looked like at the beginning of the quarter to help set these performance standards.  Unfortunately, that exercise did not create these performance standards.  I think I need to take a more participative role with setting performance standards in the future.

Eileen’s explanation of the difference between intentions and actions excited and enthused me.  The idea gave validity to “actions speak louder than words.”  For an honest person, words are intentions, but people judge one on one’s actions.  I will be working on materializing my good intentions into actions in the future.