It’s crucial for companies today to create an ongoing learning environment. This increases organic leadership and motivation within employees. This research will highlight a short overview of the case study CH2M HILL: Reinventing Organizational Careers and an assessment of the challenges of organizational leadership faced by CH2M HILL in both historical and current contexts. In addition, this research will describe what Walstrom should do to address the problems and what I would do to manage my own career if I were an employee of CH2M HILL. Leadership theories will be used to support the assessment and the discussion of strategies Walstrom should employ.
The case study highlights the problem CH2M HILL faced in regards to high new employee
…show more content…
Within each business group is a matrix organization to support project based work (Newman, 2013). The organizational structure culture of CH2M HILL is very laid back according to the Little Yellow Book, however, senior management is unaware of it (Newman, 2013). Prospective candidates are attracted to the company due to the exciting projects and the chance to directly have an impact on making a difference in the environment. Historically, CH2M HILL has achieved its growth and success as a small engineering consulting firm. The CEO at the time strongly believed in developing its own people rather than hiring top positions from outside the company. As time went by, the company grew through mergers and acquisitions. CH2M HILL became a world leader in engineering, consulting, construction, and operations. The main problem Walstrom must address is employee turnover, especially with new employees, and a lack of senior leaders who were promoted from within the company. Walstrom identified a lack of growth opportunity and support from management and as the root cause of the problem. These causes are manifested by the company hiring employees for the technical skills, not interpersonal or leadership skills and also due to a lack of a culture that encourages a continuous learning environment. Employees who 've been with CH2M HILL between three to five years claim to have less opportunities for advancement, recognition, and direction than …show more content…
The company chose Walstrom to reduce turnover and increase growth opportunities for current employees. The culture and structure of the organizational is very unique with much room for improvement in regards to leadership. Since it’s an engineering consulting firm, many employees encompass technical skills to get the job done, however, they lack leadership skills. Walstrom proposed a learning environment that required the managers to act as mentors to understand the strengths and career goals of their subordinates with the goal of creating excitement for the job and thus, decreasing turnover, allowing more opportunities for career advancement. I would suggest implementing Situational Leadership since CH2M embodies professionals of various skill sets and coaching needs. I would also suggest breaking down the hierarchical structure to open up lines of communication. Visionary leadership and a democratic approach is crucial, especially for Millennials who expect this type of supportive
“Without change there is no innovation, creativity, or incentive for improvement. Those who initiate change will have a better opportunity to manage the change that is inevitable.” William Pollard’s, a 20th century physicist, words show us the power of being proactive, and igniting change to strengthen a company’s productive climate (Sellers, Boone, Harper, 2011). Acme Airlines flight attendants lacked incentive to improve the quality of their work, as a result of distrustful management and overall frustration within the company. Acme took successful steps to rebuild their FA program into a more relationship oriented work environment. Through an understanding of effective leadership, we will use the
Burke and Litwin’s collaboration to understand how to bring change at BA resulted in the creation of the Burke-Litwin model depicted in Figure 1. They divided the model into transformational and transactional dimensions. For example, the top half of the model is associated with transformational factors (i.e., external environment, leadership, mission and strategy, organization culture, and individual and organization performance). While the bottom half of the model describes the transactional factors (i.e., management practices, structure, work unit climate, systems, individual needs, motivation, task requirements and individual skills, and individual and organizational
Yukl, G. (2002). Leadership in organizations. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. p. 1-19. Retrieved from http://www.blackdiamond.dk/HDO/Organisation_Gary_Yukl_Leadership_in_Organizations.pdf
Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge is an organizational management book written by Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus for those who aim to become better leaders. The authors emphasize that having executive positions or being a manager does not automatically make one a leader. A leader is one who inspires his staff, help them find purpose in their work, and effectively implement their plans. They separate the book not quite into chapters on different topics, but rather by four strategies that they have determined are vital for any leader to take on. The strategies are effectively concluded as attention through vision, meaning through communication, trust through positioning, and the deployment of self. A prominent feature of Leaders is the various
Leadership at times can be a complex topic to delve into and may appear to be a simple and graspable concept for a certain few. Leadership skills are not simply acquired through position, seniority, pay scale, or the amount of titles an individual holds but is a characteristic acquired or is an innate trait for the fortunate few who possess it. Leadership can be misconstrued with management; a manager “manages” the daily operations of a company’s work while a leader envisions, influences, and empowers the individuals around them.
This case study demonstrates a young woman leader, Toby Johnson, who used to serve in the military as a pilot and attended Harvard Business School, joined PepsiCo’s Leadership Development Program (LDP), and was working in the management team at the Williamsport plant. She determined to forge ahead, and led the plant to achieve the Level 3 CI and also won the Doolin Award, which the Williamsport plant had never achieved before. The problem that Johnson encounters currently is that if the plant should continue to forge ahead and achieve the ultimate Level 4 CI, which will cost huge amount of money and efforts with the risk of her sudden leave of plant.
Leaders benefit from building a team to create and implement change, this is a key theme in the Kotter model of change. This teambuilding engages employees throughout the process. Allowing employees to be a part of the change process gives them the opportunity and trust to be creative moving toward the future (Cochrane, 2002). Leaders can create opportunity for employees and leaders to dialogue about the change, which can help troubleshoot the process. Leaders who engage employees throughout the organization from various levels of the organization will receive perspectives from the entire organization helping them make better-informed decisions. Employees want to be allowed the opportunity to help an organization they believe in, in a way that enhances the
The only way to develop the kind of leaders a changing organization needs is to make leadership a critical criterion for promotion, and then manage people’s careers to develop it.
Hall, Peter, & Norris, Peter. (1993). Learning for leadership. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 14(7), 35. Retrieved August 25, 2011, from ABI/INFORM Global. (Document ID: 81758).
To become a truly effective leader, one must encapsulate the various behaviors related to the aforementioned course learnings in his/her persona and demonstrate such behaviors daily. This course has allowed me to identify four behaviors that all leaders must portray to be effective. The first of which is that a leader must be inspirational. To do so, a leader must set the appropriate vision and direction for the organization and provide a path to achieving defined goals. Additionally, a leader must induce the proper levels of motivation so that each employee has sufficient incentive to work towards the organization’s goals. As discussed in the class, motivation can be accomplished by factors such as rewarding hard work and providing the correct opportunities to employees. While these are motivating in that employees desire to be fairly compensated and to be doing work they deem valuable, inspiration comes more from organizational culture. A leader will be inspirational by setting a tone that appreciates each employee’s contribution, no matter how small in scale it is. Further, employees are inspired when they work collaboratively in a group setting and can capitalize on individual strengths to drive organizational goals.
Chapter 3: Cultivate managers who share your vision was the most important chapter to me. It talks about putting the right managers in the right positions. Welch says, “What we are looking for…are leaders… who can energize, excite, and control rather than enervate, depress, and control” (p. 35). Managers in a company should bursting with energy and are able to develop and implement a vision and not just talk about those visions. They must also know how to spread enthusiasm throughout the entire company. One of the keys to being a great business leader is getting employees excited about their work. One of the ways to get employees excited about their work is to allow employees more freedom and responsibility then they have now. In order to make this happen, middle managers have to be team members and coaches. They need to facilitate more than control. Managers should be energizers and not enervators. Welch suggests that the only way to last at GE is to get on board, to become a team player, and to adapt oneself to the company’s values and culture when describing the different types of managers that will or will not succeed. The first type of manager delivers on commitments and shares the company’s values. The second type does not meet commitments and does not share the company’s values. The third type misses commitments but does share the company’s values. Welch himself cares more that a manager sticks to the company’s values than meets the numbers. The fourth type delivers on the commitments but does not subscribe to the company’s values. Welch broke these managers into three categories, type A, type B, and type C managers. Type A managers were defined as team players that subscribe to the company’s values. People trust them; they make impacts on decisions, and are leaders who seek to develop high value in other...
Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2012). The leadership challenge: How to make extraordinary
Northouse, P. (2010). Leadership: Theory and practice (5th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.
Matthew R. Fairholm states, “Our leadership perspective defines what we mean when we say "leadership" and shapes how we view successful leadership in ourselves and others.” (Pg. )Therefore, change and modifications of desired behaviors must first stem from leadership, in order to achieve success. Follett does consider the challenges for “old-fashioned employers,” they have a difficult time transitioning and comprehending that training and employee is much different from providing orders. Therefore, these types of employers express their frustration with employees who are unable to complete tasks, when in actuality the employee is at a disadvantaged as they are not trained and new habits were not created and reinforced. Follett affirms that lack of training, is a deficiency in education. Therefore, it is crucial for leaders and employers to develop and plan ahead for modeled behaviors to gain the desired responses. Follett asserts psychology has a significant involvement because depending on the delivery of the order and how it is elicited can be the control of how responses are given
To achieve equilibrium, H&M encourages open communication and employee engagement within the company to satisfy both goal and needs. They came up with an “open book principle” granting every employee the right to express their thoughts on work related issues directly with management. They, too, reinforce the Human Resource Management system by having performance appraisal, a method to evaluate job performance. H&M has done it by using the method of providing feedback as they believe in learning through their own mistakes. Besides, to ensure workers’ work-life balance, the company strongly discourage overtime work and endorse flexible working hours. Everyone in the company is given the opportunity to schedule around their personal and working responsibility. The company also provide comprehensive fringe benefits for their worker which includes staff discounts, incentive bonuses, maternity leave and many more. This is because the Human Resources in H&M emphasise more on job satisfaction rather than title or pay structure. Analysis indicates that H&M has incorporated job enlargement into their business whereby they increase task variety by combining two or more task for more experience working. However, the volume of task to be done is too gruelling for employees causing their company to be listed as one of the highest employee turnover and lowest labour morale in 2008. This shows they have poor job