Dec'18
The Effective Executive
Focus
On Keeping Team Members Motivated
Employees are the major and most important resource of any company. It is through this human resource that most companies get important work done. When you combine the members� energy, knowledge, and skills with high motivation, you and your team can accomplish great results. Therefore, each leader should have a motivation strategy to create and maintain the spirit of enthusiasm among his team members. A leader may have put together an excellent working team, but keeping them motivated during hard times can be a challenge even for the best-governed companies. Between strict deadlines, ever-increasing workload and high performance factors, it is easy for employees to often feel discouraged and demotivated, which subsequently leads to fall in their productivity. When it comes to job satisfaction, monetary rewards may be valued low on the list. Being satisfied with the job seems to depend more on the intangibles such as belongingness and being valued and appreciated consistently. These intangibles often outshine even the financial rewards.
The present issue revolves around the factors which may motivate the employees and enhance their morale. The issue will be helpful for practitioners in identifying the relevant ways to motivate their team members. Simultaneously, academicians can also benefit from the discussions on the motivating factors and their implications.
Dan Coughlin�s perspective, �The Tremendous Value of Personal Reflection and Discernment�, is an interesting description of personal improvement, which should start with taking time for personal reflection and discernment. The author has presented the personal improvement ways through asking four questions to self.
In their paper, �Advice in Action: How to Retain and Engage Employees�, Stephanie Jones, Dixon Block and Abigail Daley have raised concerns regarding employer branding. The authors have correctly mentioned that motivating team members should be the key element for being a good manager or leader. In this paper, real experiences and best practices are taken from different leaders of different backgrounds and sectors to provide insights into employee engagement, regardless of the situation at hand.
Kai-Alexander Schlevogt�s paper, �Lessons in Intelligent Leadership from Cyrus the Great: First Insights from the New Discipline Called �Archaeology of Leadership Thought and Knowledge� (ALTK)�, proposes a new discipline �Archaeology of Leadership Thought and Knowledge�. This discipline deals with knowledge creation, codification and transmission. The author claims that this discipline will be helpful to the leaders in terms of designing innovative solutions to their problems.
Not only the employees, the board of directors also need motivation to remain effective. Colin Coulson-Thomas�s paper, �Teamwork, Motivation, Complexity and the Board�, focuses on factors leading to board effectiveness. The author has suggested ways through which today�s leaders can counter the uncertainty and other challenges.
Finally, Ronald J Burke�s paper, �Agency and Communion�, reviews two concepts that have only recently been applied to effective leadership, viz., agency and communion.
Consulting Editor
|
|
|||
| Article | Price (₹) | ||
| The Tremendous Value of Personal Reflection and Discernment |
100
|
||
| Advice in Action: How to Retain and Engage Employees |
100
|
||
| Lessons in Intelligent Leadership from Cyrus the Great: First Insights from the New Discipline Called �Archaeology of Leadership Thought and Knowledge� (ALTK) |
100
|
||
| Teamwork, Motivation, Complexity and the Board |
100
|
||
| Agency and Communion |
100
|
||
The Tremendous Value of Personal Reflection and Discernment
A week is a looooong time. Over the course of a week, we say and do a lot of things. Most of those things turn out to be trivial and are quickly forgotten. However, that still leaves an incredible amount of things we said and did that are not trivial.
Advice in Action: How to Retain and Engage Employees
Through social media, news, online reviews, and technology that makes word-of- mouth so much easier and more impactful, employer branding has become a topic of utmost importance. Furthermore, as traditional �one-employer� careers fade away to be replaced by a more positive outlook on �job-hopping� by the current generation, employee retention becomes less about long-term benefits like pension plans and dental care, and more about the immediate advantages of a positive atmosphere and opportunities for development. Motivating team members (or enabling employees to motivate themselves) is a key element to being a good manager or leader. In this paper, the real experiences and best practices are taken from different leaders of different backgrounds and sectors to provide insights into employee engagement, regardless of the situation at hand.
Lessons in Intelligent Leadership from Cyrus the Great: First Insights from the New Discipline Called �Archaeology of Leadership Thought and Knowledge� (ALTK)
This programmatic study makes three key contributions in terms of (1) discipline creation, (2) innovative cross-disciplinary method application and (3) novel and actionable leadership content. First, the pioneering discipline of �Archaeology of Leadership Thought and Knowledge� (ALTK) is invented, consisting of the two subdisciplines of �Archaeology of Leadership Thought (ALT)� and �Archaeology of Leadership Knowledge� (ALK). These new branches of knowledge aim at uncovering long-hidden treasures that can help postmodern leaders to solve truly challenging problems. Second, the author proposes a distinctive methodological approach for these new disciplines, including the application of Qualitative Content Analysis to the field of classical philology. Third, a multifaceted holistic leadership model is created from Xenophon�s Cyropaedia, which fictionally portrays the life of Cyrus the Great. The model includes new transformational concepts for movers and shakers, such as �proleptic leadership�, �cordial leadership�, �nano-leadership� and �radiant self-discipline�, thus demonstrating the game-changing potential inherent in the �Archaeology of Leadership�.
Teamwork, Motivation, Complexity and the Board
The collective effectiveness of boardroom teams cannot be assumed and has to be worked at. Boards operate in a business environment of change, uncertainty and insecurity. They are simultaneously confronted with multiple and interrelated challenges and new and unprecedented opportunities. The issues faced by many boards have also become more complex and may have a variety of short, medium and long-term impacts for many corporate activities and, in some cases, most stakeholder groups. They may require collective responses and have implications for how boards operate, governance arrangements and the motivation of directors who feel �out of their depth� and worry whether they are still relevant.
Agency and Communion
This paper reviews two concepts that have only recently been applied to effective leadership: Agency and Communion. Agency refers to behaviors and attitudes that are authoritative, demanding and self-advocating; Communion refers to behaviors and attitudes that are caring, other-serving, and participative. Men get rewarded for being agentic, women get punished for being both agentic and communal. In this paper, examples of both agentic and communal behaviors and attitudes are described. Since effective leadership includes both agency and communion, ways of integrating and combining them are also offered.