Week #4

Leadership Essay

By: San Isidro Navarro

South Texas College

Capstone I

ORGL 4352
 What is leadership? A political leader, chasing an emotional, personal cause? A

team captain, setting an example for the rest of his group to follow? Or a project

manager, advancing his/her companys master plan to beat the competition.

Leading means different things to different people around the world, and different

things in different situations. For example, it could relate to community leadership,

religious leadership, political leadership, and leadership of campaigning groups.

Leaders help themselves and others to do the right things. They set a course, assemble

a motivational vision, and generate something new or improve where improvement is

needed. Leadership is about coordinating where everyone has to be to succeed as a

team or an organization; and its vigorous, exhilarating, and motivating. As leaders set a

course, they must additionally use management skills to mentor their employees to the

desired target, in a steady and effective way.

According to the idea of transformational leadership, an effective leader is a

person who does the following; generates an influential vision of the goals, drives and

influence employees to connect with that vision, oversee delivery of the vision, coaches

and builds a team, so that it is more successful at accomplishing the goal.

Vision provides direction, establishes priorities, and provides a target, so that you

can tell that youve achieved what you wanted to achieve. A captivating vision provides

the base for leadership. But its leaders ability to drive and influence employees that

helps them remit that vision. For example, when commencing a new project, you will

probably possess plenty of passion for it, so its frequently effortless to gain support for

it at the beginning. Nonetheless, it can be burdensome to discover ways to retain your

vision inspiring after the initial passion vanishes, primarily if the group or organization
needs to create notable changes in the way that it does things. Leaders identify this,

and they work hard throughout the project to link their vision with peoples personal

demands, goals and ambitions.

Leaders should establish that the work needed to convey the vision is properly

managed either by themselves, or by a committed manager or group of managers to

whom the leader entrusts with this responsibility and they need to establish that their

vision is conveyed successfully. To do this, group members need performance targets

that are associated to the groups overall vision. As a project manager, I use key

performance indicators to accomplish short term and long term firm goals. Knowing

your overhead for example is probably the most important KPI for an engineering firm.

In order to know the correct rate to charge for your services, you need to understand

how much those services are costing you to produce. Overhead takes into account

costs like paying your rent, paying for software, telephones, and stationery. Every

project manager has their own break-even rate (their hourly salary + the overhead rate)

- the actual amount it costs you to employ them. If you know this rate, then you know

what each employee needs to be bringing in in order to cover the cost of hiring them. If

you multiply your break-even rate by your desired profit margin, youll arrive at the

hourly-rate you need to charge out in order to meet your goals.

It is very important to realize that we should use this tool of Key Performance

Indicators in our firms to achieve a greater outcome in more business, sales, services,

etc. You can apply this information not only for profit but to grow and remain

competitive. While profit, revenue, and costs are frequently used to measure the

business, these alone will not be the most useful indicators to drive business decisions.
Lets say youve just reviewed the previous months financials. It turns out that invoices

were issued as soon as the information was received, and the foremen were managing

labor costs within their control. Two entirely separate issues were the culprit:

Superintendents were not completing their reports on time, and labor estimates were

not correct in the first place because of faulty labor formulas. Unfortunately, these cant

be resolved based on your reactions. It will take some time before the underlying

causes are identified and corrected. Forward-looking KPIs tailored to individual

business operations can provide much more information on trends, issues, and margin-

eroding roadblocks.

The one thing that surprised me was that based on our experience, once KPIs

are determined, successful implementation requires diligent measurement, tracking,

and incenting the proper behaviors. With little margin for error, the construction industry

cant afford to ignore the power of KPIs to help achieve and exceed business goals.

With a more complete and strategic collection of indicators, we believe youll find

yourself behind the wheel, confidently looking at the horizon not just focused on the

rearview mirror.

I am really glad I took on Organizational Leadership Degree, it has helped me in

gaining a wide range of knowledge of how to become a good leader. With the new

knowledge I have gained, I will implement it onto my career to improve and inspire

those around me. Ethics is one of the subjects that most impacted me in a profound

way. To me ethics is the basic concepts and fundamental principles of decent human

conduct. It includes study of universal values such as the essential equality of all men

and women, human or natural rights, obedience to the law of land, concern for health
and safety and, increasingly, also for the natural environment. When I speak of

organizational ethics to me it means; the principals and standards by which businesses

operate. They are best demonstrated through acts of fairness, compassion, integrity,

honor and responsibility.

 References

Marr, B. (2012) Key Performance Indicators (KIP): The 75 Measures Every Manager

Needs to Know: Pearson

McKee, A. (2014) Management A Focus on Leaders 2nd Edition. Pearson

Nahavandi, A. (2015) The Art and Science of Leadership (7th Edition). Pearson

Education, Inc.