Benchmarks’ Center for Quality Integration (CQi) prioritizes continuous learning of new skills and enhancing current staff skills to keep its staff at the forefront of the human services workforce. We take this acquired knowledge and skills and integrate them into the day-to-day work we do in our own agency as well as outside of it. We have learned and applied many lessons from Brene Brown’s "Dare to Lead", including the lesson that everyone is a leader, no matter their position in an agency. But we did not stop there. We continue to seek resources that help us to build upon our current leadership foundation and that allow us to share our subject matter expertise through the development of new training, such as our “Supportive Supervision” curriculum. Currently, we are working on "Serve to Lead: True Lessons About Lean Organizational Leadership" by Samson Floyd & Dwayne Robson.
This resource starts by emphasizing the differences between management and leadership. Though these two roles have much in common, managing tends to be more about making sure that the day-to-day work tasks are being done in the organization, whereas leadership is “having the ability to get people to not just understand but to also believe in your vision and wanting to work with you in achieving your goals.” Leadership skills are essential in project management work, particularly the kind that Benchmarks’ CQi team engages in and facilitates on a regular basis.
"Serve to Lead" synthesizes various business and leadership authors’ work and writings on leadership styles and discusses how those styles have morphed in the past 90 years. Over time, there have been psychology-based definitions, business-minded professional ones, and emotional style descriptions of leadership styles. In more recent history, the focus has been on transactional, transformation, charismatic and servant leadership. Servant leadership is considered the ideal type of leadership as it encourages higher team member engagement. This can positively affect a team by encouraging higher performance due to team members feeling valued and that their leaders care about them and their wellbeing overall. A servant leader can lead with integrity while focusing on the good of team members and stakeholders while demonstrating a profound amount of self-awareness.
Avid discussions about how we operate as leaders and which leadership style best describes each one of our team members have occurred, with a focus on where each of us are on the spectrum of becoming a servant leader. Personality types and how they relate to and affect our leadership styles have been considered, as well as how leaders do not always fall fully into one leadership style over another. Leaders can demonstrate a variety of leadership styles, depending on the work situations they are leading through and on the needs of their staff. As our team has discussed each of these topics, we have focused on personality traits that affect our leadership in positive and negative ways. In the coming months, we are addressing what we want to communicate specifically with those we work with and lead, and intentionally committing to focusing on at least two leadership skills that we want to improve between our discussion times. We are excited to be following up with one another to see how we are growing in our communication and enhancing our servant leadership skills and learning from one another’s experiences!
Comments (0)