Leadership Skills in Human Services```` of a Children's Home

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Leadership skills and styles are essential to any career profession and especially in the human services field as it relates to things flowing effectively both internally and externally. According some researchers it is said that leadership skills are determined from a person’s personality traits. Whereas, others may say that becoming a leader is a growing process that is affected by the events and/or issues that may surround them. However, while studying human service and community service organizations we were able to determine their leadership styles based off the information we know about a particular organization by using the Leadership Matrix.

Therefore due to previous interaction, I decided to study the leadership of the Brantwood Children’s Home here in Montgomery, Alabama. Brantwood is a well-known children’s home that provides a place of stability, safety, and structure for abused, neglected, and at-risk children (About Us: Brantwood Children's Home, 2013). There are several types of residential programs that are available through Brantwood such as the basic residential treatment program; the transitional living program; and the independent living program. For each individual program there are age group restriction along with other restrictions. Brantwood also have an on-site educational program for grades 5th through 8th grade. According to the text book from my understanding, Brantwood is an example of the fourth type of organization that was presented.

In reference to the theoretical model that was created by Hasenfeld containing two axes, task-oriented/people-oriented and internal/external, is used to determine the type of leadership skills an organization may have. However, although task-oriented interna...

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...duate studies, I was able to use the Leadership Matrix to determine the leadership style of Brantwood. Therefore in conclusion, the Brantwood Children’s home has more of a task oriented external leadership style with is very realistic within Brantwood. Although they remain grounded to their mission they also depend highly on outside resources such as the Alabama Department of Human Resources (DHR). Not only that, Brantwood also receives a lot of outside funding from federal, state, and local grants. However, with the task oriented external leadership style being more prominent the other three styles were equally rated.

Works Cited

Hasenfeld, Y. (2010). Human services as complex organizations. Thousand Oak: Sage Publications, Inc.

About Us: Brantwood Children's Home. (2013, 12 29). Retrieved from Brantwood Children's Home: www.brantwoodchildrenshome.org

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