Servant Leadership, Entrepreneurial Leadership Essay

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Leading Complex Organizations

The case "You have to lead from everywhere" is told from the perspective of Thad Allen, who is the national incident commander for the Deepwater Horizon response. The Deepwater Horizon event was considered to be a total government response, where different agencies were responsible for different components of the response. The challenge, as Allen describes, was "creating unity of effort," or getting everybody to perform their disparate roles in line with a common objective, in a time of crisis. Some of the more significant challenges that Allen identified were with respect to things that were not strictly a part of the response doctrine for oil spills under law -- things like seafood safety and behavioral health problems. The effort was further complicated by dealing with BP, and with the varying interests of both the public and of the different layers of government (Berinato, 2010).

Allen identified that it was necessary to create, quickly, a set of shared values that would guide the response, and that the leadership had to be able to identify a vision of what success looked like, and then execute on that vision. The phrase 'you have to lead from everywhere' refers to Allen's management of multiple stakeholders. He had to split his time between Washington DC and the Gulf, in order to ensure that all major stakeholders were given due attention.

The author, and Allen, does not identify something that "went wrong," but rather that there were specific challenges that were associated with the complexity of the event, and the multiple stakeholders that were involved in the disaster response. Allen noted in particular that leadership needed a high degree of flexibility. There are different ways to lead, and different ways to run a disaster response, but in dealing with citizens, military, government and corporations there are a number of different approaches. The people in each of those types of organizations will have their own worldviews, their own protocols and methods for dealing with things, so in that sense the leadership needed to be highly flexible in order to manage that challenge.

While this is perhaps a surprising admission, I have never run point on a disaster response. I have never seen anything even close to that level of complexity before. I have never had to fly to DC to talk to Congress about my project, appear on any news networks, nor faced angry questions from people whose lives are being ruined by the disaster I am trying to solve. I work in smaller organizations, or small components of large ones, and have never run a team much bigger than a couple of dozen. There is no reasonable corollary that I can draw from Allen's experience to my own.

But I have at the very least been able to provide guidance to people from a leadership position. Granted, the different stakeholders are all fairly similar in terms of their demographics, and are driven by a common objective that I merely need to frame. But as Allen had to be available to his different stakeholders, so too do I. I need to ensure that the messages I want to be conveyed are repeated, multiple times, so that there is a steady stream of reinforcement for the people who need to work together. The common objective needs to be defined and communicated so that everybody understands it.

One of the areas that Allen does touch upon is that leadership can be different when there is one clear leader (i.e. The military) and a chain of command, versus situations where one has to lead in more of a partnership with others. Allen notes that communication is important in both, but in the latter collaboration is also very important. You are communicating not just your ideas to subordinates, but you have to communicate with your partners as well. Everybody needs to be on the same page. This is the complexity that Allen had to deal with in the disaster scenarios -- and I have never faced that. Allen clearly needed to work with key partner stakeholders to determine what the agenda needed to be, and get everybody's support for that agenda. In his case, he needed to do this very quickly. He kept it simple, which I think was the right call, because it allowed for each stakeholder partner to then go back to their constituents and communicate the mission effectively. I though the idea that Allen had to write out a mission statement for Deepwater was a great one, and that is something that I would personally adopt as well, should I ever find myself working in a more complex organization.

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The questions about the workplace situation seem to hint that a conflict situation should be examined, even though Allen was not in a conflict situation, and Allen furthermore did not indicate regrets about how he handled anything. I have little experience with conflict in a workplace situation. First, I encourage constructive dialogue. Second, I have clearly-established chains of command, so there are people in charge of making each decision. Third, decisions are made on evidence and facts. This is not to say that conflict can never happen under my watch, but ultimately conflict other than constructive debate is simply not a part of our organizational culture.

So how do I handle "incidents"? Well, first I don't consider some things to be incidents and other things not. Everything that transpires within our organizational context is part of doing business. There is no magic line where something is "an incident," as this simply creates a false dichotomy of what is ultimately a continuum of interpersonal interactions and interactions between different organizational stakeholders. People do not always agree, but it is toxic to consider a disagreement as an incident. Maybe this is why I can't think of some crisis that I have had to solve -- I run a better organization than that. We don't lurch from one crisis to another. This is actually how Allen seems to run his organizations either. He sets the tone from the outset, like with the speech he gave in Baton Rouge, and works hard to reinforce his messages. The result is an organization that can manage a highly complex situation without needless conflict. I like Allen's approach to his organization. Of course, the interview only presents his views -- he may overstate the harmony of his operation considerably for all I know.

Richardson (2008) opens up the discussion about the role that complexity plays in managing an organization. The more complex an organization, there more difficult it is to conceptualize how the different components of the organization work together. My organization is sufficiently simple that I can handle this fairly easily -- I'm not sure I'm on Allen's level but I do not have to be. Complex systems, especially when multiple complex systems interact, are usually broken down into smaller pieces, but ultimately somebody at the top of the organization has to understand how everything comes together to meet the organizational objectives.

Another key concept from the readings was authentic leadership. Authentic leadership reflects a leader that is "true to oneself," in other words that the leader knows who he or she is (has high self-awareness) and is true to this. People are more likely to follow that type of leader than they are someone who they view as being in authentic (Walumba, et al., 2008). Allen seems an authentic leader -- though we only have his own words to go by. But when he gathered the people after Katrina and gave his brief mission, that seemed to resonate well with people who were facing a very challenging situation before. He simply empowered them to do what should be done -- something that demonstrated his own humanity, or authenticity. I try to lead this way. I can be a bit prickly, but the big thing I try to convey is that I am always going to do the right thing for the organization and its mission, even where that means a sacrifice on my part. My approach to conflict -- why I don't have a great conflict story to tell you -- is rooted on that. I run the organization as I think it should be run, in a manner that seeks to do things so well from the outset that I do not spend my time on conflict resolution, fire-fighting or whatever else I am supposed to be writing about here.

Part II.

Kotter (2008) explains the difference between management and leadership as follows. Leadership is an old concept, rooted when humans first began to organize themselves into groups. The roles typically associated with leadership include motivating, inspiring, providing direction and providing support. Leadership, therefore, is inherently a human endeavor, the result of an interaction between two or more people (Kotter, 2008, p.3). Management, Kotter argues (p.3) is "largely the product of the last 100 years," and is concerned with organizing the resources and activities of complex organizations. Without management, such….....

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