Tag Archives: Collaboration

Adaptation

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Adaptive leadership is something that leaders use to motivate their followers. This model of leadership focuses on helping and motivating others to complete what they need to do versus doing it for them. Adaptive leadership is based off how people change and adjust their actions to new situations that arise. These types of leaders have specific behaviors that they possess and are able to apply to their everyday lives. The first behavior is they navigate a perspective and see the bigger picture of the situation (getting on the balcony). They can see that there is a greater purpose to what is happening. The second behavior is identifying adaptive challenges. This means that these leaders identify, analyze and diagnose each situation and emphasize on adaptivity. Regulating distress is the third behavior that these leaders portray. They provide methods to keep consistency by providing direction, protection, orientation, etc. Maintaining disciplined attention is the fourth behavior. This motivates people to focus on the tough work and how to positively confront change. The fifth is for the leaders to give the work back to the people. The leaders must be aware of how they impact the people they are working with and know when they should step back and let the followers to discover their own potential and how to handle situations. The final behavior is protecting leadership voices from below. These leaders must carefully listen to everyone. Overall, it is very important for these leaders to identify, analyze, motivate others to adjust, step back and listen.  

Lunch Buddies is an organization that needs leaders who are adaptive and can apply this model to it. This organization is a mentoring program that Central Michigan University uses to provide elementary students with a mentor who helps motivate them with school, nutritional choices, physical activity and as a role model.  

This program is wonderful is doing great things for the elementary students of the Central Michigan community. As far as problems go, I am not able to identify one. The way that I would apply this model to this program is by educating the mentors of this organization. This model can be used and applied to anyone, hence why it is known as adaptive. Mentors should be educated how to motivate young students and teaching them how to be adaptive. They need to be aware of this because the students they are working with at one point or another will be in a situation where they will need someone to motivate them, guide them and educate them in a way where the student can better handle the situation on their own. 

Mentors should be required to undergo a day long training session (similar to those of other leadership trainings like Spark, Rise or Purpose.) Here they will be educated on how to apply this model of leadership. They will learn the six behaviors of an adaptive leader, the strengths and weaknesses and an overview of why this is the necessary approach they are using. The reason this approach is best is because it allows the mentors to have a relationship with their followers (students), to motivate them but also provide them with guidance to handle situations on their own because the mentor will not be there to provide for them in situations that occur outside of their meeting times. This is the one and only step that I would change about the Lunch Buddies process. 

Adaptive leadership is a very valuable model to use. It allows a relation between the leader and the follower to develop, education for both the leader and follower takes place, the leader is able to provide direction but ultimately the follower is given the opportunity to decide what to do.  

Collaborative Leadership

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There are many ways to view the relationship between leadership and followership. The two share many of the same characteristics that indicate that they are closely related, and one desires the presence of the other. Leadership and followership are like one another but are not the same thing, although they do work in collaboration with one another.

There is an immense amount of power in both leadership and followership and they work together in a coercive manner but, again, they are not the same. Leaders and followers collaborate to get different tasks accomplished but it is not always as simple as the leader leading and the follower following. It is a relationship in which the two people learn from each other, teach each other different things, guide one another, and build each other up. It is not a one-way relationship in which the leader does all these things and the follower listens and does them. They merge in this way but ultimately the leader is the person who is deemed to carry more wisdom, passion, and power, but must also remain open-minded to what their followers have to offer them. To assist in proving that these two ideas utilize one another and are very similar. The following will be used to do so: the article “The Leader-Follower Partnership: It’s a New Day,” and the two leadership models/theories, Blake and Moutons’ Managerial Grid/Leadership Grid, which doesn’t effectively describe followers and Situational Leadership Model which limits followers and leaders to be one of four ways.

As stated before, this bond between leader and follower is very close-knit and reciprocated. One does not work without the other. They have very similar characteristics. According to the article, “The Leader-Follower Partnership: It’s a New Day,” there are five dimensions of courageous followership. These elements apply not only to followers but are very important to leaders as well. The five dimensions are as followed: (1) “the courage to assume responsibility-” both leaders and followers assume and pick up responsibility for others who do not, the difference is that followers do not receive as much credit for doing these things. (2) “The courage to serve-” the leader and follower coincide to serve one another just for different reasons: the leader to motivate and the follower to make sure the leader will accomplish their goals. (3) “The courage to challenge-” the leader challenges their followers to make them grow as individuals, while the follower uses their voice to challenge the direction of leader and to voice opinions. (4) “The courage to participate in transformation-” leader change in order to encourage their followers and teach/learn from them the best way possible and the follower transforms to assist the leader and build them up and teach/learn as well. (5) “The courage to take morale action-” both the leader and the follower take stand when something is not morally correct that the other is doing. Although the reasons might be different behind why they do what they do, but leaders and followers do very similar things. After analyzing these characteristics, it is evident that followers and leaders are not the same because they have different purposes for doing what they do but they do a lot of the same things.

There have been methods that have been developed to declare good leaders and the relationship between leader and follower. However, these assume that a leader is only used to direct and tell their followers what to do. For example, Blake and Moutons’ Managerial/Leadership grid doesn’t even take followers into account. It only discusses the benefits of different leadership styles, tasks, and behaviors. Since leaders and followers possess similar characteristics, it is safe to assume that followers do a lot of these things as well. This is not a great use to measure leadership because it uses terms that are exclusive, doesn’t say anything about followers or situations, and grades and suggest that certain types of leadership are not acceptable, but again never takes situations into account. On the other hand, the Situational Theory is also very inaccurate by implying that leaders are only used to teach followers and followers are only there to do what they’re told to and by way of saying that there’s only one possible method to handle a situation. Neither of these charts suggest the greater meaning behind the leadership and followership relationship and what they both have to offer one another and how they are very similar.

Through cooperation leadership and followership work together and are very similar but not the same. These people generally do a lot of the same actions but have different reasons on why they do them. Leaders and followers must understand that they are here to serve one another in very similar ways and no person is better or higher up than the other.