- STEP 1: Types of Managerial Roles According to Mintzberg, and how they show up in my organization.
Kumar (2015) describes that Canadian PhD Student Henry Mintzberg, in the 1970’s, identified 10 managerial roles that occur in organizations. These 10 roles can be categorized into 3 basic, functional groups: Interpersonal, Informational, and Decisional.
The Interpersonal roles are the connective tissue for all managerial functions in a company and primarily focus on relationships between people.
- The Figurehead describes managers who act as the formal legal and societal personification of the company toward the outer world. These are typically the highest-level managers. Supervisors are Figurehead subtypes that serve as defined go-to persons between top level management and employee-level workers.
- The Liaison role communicates company-internally and -externally to maintain favorable relationships. Again, two different levels are outlined here: executive-level managers use the liaison role to procure new resources, information, and beneficial connections with influential internal or external collaborators to optimize business concepts, while supervising managers would do the same on a lower decisional level to ensure smooth daily operations.
- The Leader role describes a simple, hierarchical role expectation of managers being leaders and employees as followers.
The Informational Roles define what information enters or circulates within the organization, and how much of it shall be distributed where and in what way.
- The Monitor gathers and maintains all current information pertinent to the company.
- The Disseminator handles flow of pertinent information into the company. Again, two levels are seen here: top-level Disseminator managers are authorized to incorporate more sensitive information from outside sources than supervisor-level disseminators, who internally distribute already established, approved information on a lower, daily workflow-related level, or exchange some such information with outside entities.
- The Spokesperson is seen as an expert, who shares information with organizational departments. Top-level spokesperson managers speak to industry standards, while lower level spokespeople are experts within their departments.
Decisional roles use the information introduced into and circulated in the organization to make key business decisions in specific categories.
- The Entrepreneur role is performed by the manager at the helm of new project development or think-tanks within the company, thus inviting and navigating change.
- The Disturbance Handler mitigates risks and threats for the company, such as all types of internal or external crises, disharmony, and conflict.
- Any spending has to be approved by the Resource Allocator, who approves allowances for various projects and departments, within schedule and budget constraints.
- Lastly, the Negotiator makes deals on behalf of the company. On the executive level these negotiations affect the entire corporation; on the supervisory level they manage departments and teams. (Kumar 2015.)
My organization is a medium-sized company of about 250 employees with a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at the helm, supported by a Chief Operational Officer (COO), a Chief Administrative Officer (CAO), a Chief Medical Officer (CMO), a Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, a Chief Financial Officer, and a Chief Development Officer. All of them are Figureheads, Liaisons, and Leaders, as well as Monitors, Disseminators, Spokespersons, Entrepreneurs, Resource Allocators, Negotiators, and Disturbance Handlers.
The next tier is comprised of Board Officers, which hold the office of Chair, Vice Chair, Treasurer, Secretary, a doctor, and a nurse, followed by a Board of 16 Directors. The Board Officers and Directors is a mix of retired or active healthcare professionals, business or research leaders, and community members. (By The Bay Health s.a.) This tier appears to contain mostly Monitors, Entrepreneurs, Liaisons, and Resource Allocators, along pre-determined goals by top tier management.
The next lower organizational level are geographically grouped pods of teams, functioning to cover services across 4 counties, spanning an area of roughly 35 by 80 miles (about 2,800 square miles). Each pod has 2 teams of several doctors, nurses, social workers, chaplains, and home health aides. All teams are supported by two regional teams of schedulers and care coordinators, both serving 2 counties each.
Each team has a leader that can be a nurse or a social worker. these team leaders function as Figureheads, Liaisons, and Leaders, as well as Monitors, Disseminators, Spokespersons, Negotiators, and Disturbance Handlers. They function less as Entrepreneurs, because their main task is to maintain functional workflows, not to think up brand-new pathways. Team leaders handle reciprocal flow of communications: they represent upper management’s decisions to the employee-level workforce and also escalate any concerns that have no fitting workflow to upper management for evaluation, troubleshooting, and resolution.
All tiers fulfill all 3 types of roles, Interpersonal, Informational, and Decisional, with their respective subcategories, although to different degrees of entrepreneurism and executive power. The top tier devises long-term entrepreneurial goals and visions and has ultimate, overarching power of decision, guided by informational feedback from all lower tiers. The second tier is a mix of functional departments and an advisory board, creating detailed scenarios or models to help guide top tier decisions or lateral departments’ actions, regarding legal matters or spending, for example. The third tier, team level management, is strong at disseminating information and collecting feedback that is necessary for smooth daily performance. The fourth tier are the individual employees, who are recipients and executors of leadership decisions, yet are also encouraged to share issues they encounter toward any leadership level of their choosing, which is commonly known as an ‘Open Door Policy’ (Kruse 2016).
STEP 2: Evaluate your own behavior and skills related to Manager´s roles. Use scale 1-10 to evaluate your own skills & behavior related to manager´s roles (1=very poor, 10=excellent). Recognize 3 key managerial roles for you (now and future: 1 year perspective) and create vision for yourself. Create also practical plan – how can you improve your performance related to these selected key roles. Keep it simple and short. Be practical.
Figurehead 7/10
Liaison 6/10
Leader 5/10
Monitor 4/10
Disseminator 6/10
Spokesperson 7/10
Entrepreneur 7/10
Disturbance Handler 3/10
Negotiator 3/10
Three key managerial roles for me are Liaison, Spokesperson, and Entrepreneur, as I love conceiving of new ideas and visions and communicating them to others or utilizing feedback I would receive from employees. To achieve this vision over the next year, I have enrolled in personal coaching to improve my communication style, have started to participate in meditation courses, and am actively exploring my blind spots as a person. As Bill George (2015) states in his book Discover Your True North, a true and authentic leader has used their personal life trajectory of successes and setbacks to enhance introspection and cultivate a level of self awareness that allows others to trust in their leadership capabilities (George 2015, pp. 15, 40, 87).
STEP 3: Leadership styles. The objective of this step is to become more aware of different leadership styles and evaluate how well they fit into different situations. This step includes 3 elements:
A) Read min 1 book & 1 article about leadership styles. & 1 video.
I chose to read Bill George’s 2015 book ‘Discover Your True North’ (George 2015). I read the Harvard Business Review articles ‘What Kind of Leadership Works Best at Your Company?’ and ‘Adapt Your Leadership Style to the Situation’, the Forbes articles ‘Seven Ways To Develop Your Authentic Leadership Style’ and ‘Why Successful Leaders Don’t Have An Open Door Policy’, and the Leaders article ‘Learn the 7 Distinct Leadership Styles’. I watched the video ‘5 levels of leadership’ by John Maxwell (Ancona & Gregersen 2018; Braden 2018; Harvard Business Review 2017; Kruse 2016; Maxwell s.a., Miller 2022).
B) Observe manager(s) behavior in your organization during 3 weeks time period. Consider also previous leadership situations. Integrate theory and practice: use literature to describe leadership styles that are used in your organization. Be practical – give concrete examples. Also comment how different leadership styles work (results, atmosphere, work wellbeing, innovations, teamwork, personnel development).
The Leader role of all leaders at my company appears somewhat blurred, because the company prides itself in keeping leadership non-authoritarian, collegial, and approachable, with an Open Door Policy right up to the vibrant and fun-loving CEO. There was a recent direct email from the COO to employees, asking to participate in a brainstorm zoom meeting. The actual idea-finding activity was broken up into small pods of semi-randomly composed teams. There was no feedback to employees after the meeting, what ideas were proposed.
According to Kruse (2016), Open Door Policies in business can erode successful leadership. He acknowledges that the policy appears liberal and attractive on the outside, but cites harmful outcomes, such as employees and managers getting fired over employees speaking up; employees becoming overly dependent on management; decline of managerial productivity; high-functioning employees leaving, due to erosion of chain of command; an unhealthy blurring of boundaries; and disregard for the burden of risk and responsibility borne by authority figures. Kruse also states that most employees will not speak up for fear of adverse consequences, making the Open Door Policy ineffective to begin with. (Kruse 2016.)
A recent event illustrates some of the weaknesses of the Open Door leadership style: my employment status was suddenly terminated without providing reasons, although my immediate manager and I had just agreed on ways to solve some problems we had both identified, my manager clearly acting as a Negotiator. Miller (2022) would probably classify my manager as having a servant leadership style: he was genuinely interested in coaching me and seeing me succeed as a valuable team member (Miller 2022). However, the Human Resources department leader suddenly stepped in as a Disturbance Handler, overriding my manager’s plan of action without stating a reason. Firing me wasted 3 months of complex job training, caused worsening of staff shortage for the company, as well as trauma to my perception of self-worth as an employee, and it eroded trust in the company among my coworkers, according to some of my colleagues’ comments. Comfortingly, an article by Ancona & Gregersen (2018) describes early termination of new hires as a fairly common occurrence in modern ‘problem-led‘ leadership styles, where utmost fluidity in determining best fit between employee and company is key (Ancona & Gregersen 2018).
In a prior job I held for 4 years, management attempted to lead by ‘dominance and prestige‘ (Harvard Business Review 2017). Dominance was exerted when managers diligently hunted down employees who made workflow mistakes, deducting punitive points during frequent evaluations, putting the employee at risk for disciplinary action. On the other hand, leadership would have a suggestion box on the wall and once a year ask for very detailed online feedback from all employees, which was highly promoted as a prestigious and democratic act. Supposedly the feedback would be kept anonymous, but the process required the employee to log on with their work credentials to fill out the questionnaire. It failed to create a liberal, collaborative, trustworthy environment after employees were lead by dominance most of the year. At this job, the feel was ‘us versus them’, meaning management and workforce were opposing forces that only collaborated because they had to. Miller (2022) would have correctly labeled this leadership style as ‘Transactional‘ (Miller 2022).
According to Miller (2022), there are seven concrete leadership styles: Servant, Democratic, Autocratic, Laissez-Faire, Transactional, Transformational, and Charismatic (Miller 2022). Servant and Democratic leadership styles seem very similar in that they use emotional intelligence, empathy, mutual respect, and equality despite ranks, only different by a higher degree of self-sacrifice-for-the-cause practiced (and likely also expected) by the servant leader. In stark contrast to servant and democratic leaders, who involve others in decision-making, Autocratic leaders act like dictators. They are the Figurehead who makes all the decisions, hardly allowing for input, expecting mostly obedience from employees. The spectral opposite of authoritarian autocratic leadership style is Laissez-Faire leadership, in which there is minimal to no supervision of employees and rather total trust in their interest in seeing the business thrive for everybody’s mutual benefit. Employees are only expected to engage in work as timely and for as long as it takes to get the work done well. I admired my father running his 20-people company using laissez-faire style with good results. Transactional leadership busies itself with measuring and evaluating the input and output of their organization. This includes the relationship with their employees, who are expected to follow certain workflows and regulations and are punished or rewarded according to their adherence to the provided framework. Goals, performance, efficiency, achievements, progress, and accountability are key concepts in this leadership style. More inspirational, Transformational leaders lead by offering their followers a life-changing, life-enhancing vision, and they communicate this vision with both words and actions on a larger level than the daily nitty-gritty. To fulfill these visions they need skilled and dedicated teams, as transformational leaders themselves are not necessarily good at running a business. Charismatic leaders take the transformational effect a step further. They are iconic figures, such as Martin Luther King; larger than life, leading monumental movements that tend to influence world history. The magnitude of the issues they raise blur out the details necessary to achieve the goals, and it may take whole nations to fulfill the requirements and more than these leaders’ lifetime to see the results in action. (Miller 2022.)
C) Evaluate also your own leadership behavior. Look again the tests that you did in topic 1: “What kind of leader I am?”. Now take your analyses into deeper level. Use theory that you have read (+watched videos) about leadership styles. Write about your own leadership behavior – based on your own observation and the tests + literature & videos. Integrate theory and practice. For example which behavior is related to transactional style -which transformative style, do you have any elements of coaching style etc. Mention also how you can improve your leadership behavior. Be practical and give arguments why that is important.
I haven’t yet had much opportunity to test my leadership style, but have witnessed my quiet transformation over time and with experience into a person that younger and less experienced teammates look toward for guidance. This confirms Braden’s (2018) thoughts on how one develops their authentic leadership style, namely through self-awareness, consistency of values and intrinsic motivation, appreciation of one’s support system, and a holistic work-life balance (Braden 2018). It also echoes Ancona & Gregersen’s (2018) findings that leaders who were identified as such, did not see themselves as that and were downright uncomfortable being labeled a leader (Ancona & Gregersen 2018).
I believe that creating several WhatsApp chats that profoundly improved the work culture at one of my recent jobs made me a transformational leader in the eyes of those who witnessed the process. My actions changed the job setting to one of the loneliest possible jobs to one of the most interconnected workplaces my peers and I have ever been part of. An ever-growing number of grateful newcomers proves that the few basic rules the chats are built upon support everyone’s needs and integrity. Eventually, our union leader, who is not a nurse, asked permission to join the chats in order to reach more nurses with informational posts. It feels like a huge achievement. I feel like a servant, democratic, and transformational leader and that I lead by permission, a concept identified in Maxwell’s teachings (Miller 2023).
After reading the materials brought to me by this course, I am actively pursuing more self-knowledge and -awareness by taking coaching sessions to help me illuminate my personal blind spots. I want to know how to communicate better, especially in times of stress and under pressure. Bill George’s book about discovering one’s authentic leadership style and John Maxwell’s description of morphing through levels of leadership expertise – not only in one’s own perception, but simultaneously in that of others – are steeping me in valuable concepts that will gradually enhance my understanding of my personal, authentic leadership skills and behaviors (George 2015; Maxwell s.a.).
References
Ancona, Deborah & Gregersen, Hal 2018. What Kind of Leadership Works Best at Your Company? Harvard Business Review. March 19, 2018. Online publication. https://hbr.org/2018/03/what-kind-of-leadership-works-best-at-your-company. Accessed 12.3.2024.
Braden, Michelle 2018. Seven Ways To Develop Your Authentic Leadership Style. Forbes. 13.3.2018. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2018/03/13/seven-ways-to-develop-your-authentic-leadership-style/#163fb9e69e64. Accessed 15.3.2024.
By The Bay Health s.a. Leadership. https://bythebayhealth.org/leadership. Accessed 11.3.2024.
George, Bill 2015. Discover Your True North: Expanded and Updated Edition. John Wiley & Sons. 24. July 2015. Print ISBN:9781119082941 |Online ISBN:9781119169116 |DOI:10.1002/9781119169116. Accessed 19.2.2024.
Harvard Business Review 2017. Adapt your Leadership Style to the Situation. 7.3.2017. https://hbr.org/tip/2017/03/adapt-your-leadership-style-to-the-situation. Accessed 15.3.2024.
Kruse, Kevin 2016. Why Successful Leaders Don’t Have An Open Door Policy. Forbes 24.4. 2016. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2016/04/24/why-successful-leaders-dont-have-an-open-door-policy/?sh=10b57bff31ef. Accessed 12.3.2024.
Kumar, Pardeep 2015. An Analytical study on Mintzberg’s Framework: Managerial Roles. International Journal of Research in Management & Business Studies (IJRMBS 2015), Vol. 2 Issue 3. https://studylib.net/doc/8085279/an-analytical-study-on-mintzberg-s-framework–managerial-roles. Accessed 13.2.2024.
Maxwell, John s.a. The 5 Levels of Leadership shortened version. YouTube video service. Published on channel diana4you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-14rFuVBhcU. Accessed 12.3.2024.
Miller, Hannah L. 2022. Learn the 7 Distinct Leadership Styles. Leaders. 16. December 2022. https://leaders.com/articles/leadership/leadership-styles. Accessed 17.3.2024.
Miller, Hannah L. 2023. 5 Levels of Leadership: Which Stage Have You Reached? Leaders. 25. August 2023. https://leaders.com/articles/leadership/5-levels-of-leadership. Accessed 17.3.2024.