Sheet 35
LEADERSHIP
1 Leadership and Management
Leadership may be defined as the skill in which a leader guides the members of their team into cooperating to achieve a common objective. To provide good leadership, a manager, as a leader of the office, must pay attention to two factors; accomplishing the overall organizational target and ensuring that staff gain a sense of job satisfaction in the process.
Managers who demand that their staff accomplish established norms or who are overstrict about the way in which work is carried out place too much emphasis on the attainment of the organizational target and neglect to provide opportunities for staff to achieve a level of job satisfaction. In circumstances such as these, staff are merely used without being provided any room for self development. There may be a short-term improvement in the level of achievements of an office where staff are worked to the bone under the eye of a tyrant supervisor. Superficially, staff may appear to obey their supervisor. In the long term, however, their frustration builds up as it becomes more and more difficult to accomplish work of any quality within such strict deadlines.
On the other side of the coin, however, in offices where supervisors do not push their staff to accomplish tasks or are much too lenient regarding work in general, staff relations are emphasized more than work performance. Staff who spend their office hours chatting with each other or pursuing their own personal affairs, put their personal interests before the interests of the organization. In the private sector, levels of achievement are directly linked to the rate of salary of individual members of staff. Quite the opposite is true of the public sector, where the achievements of the overall organization have little influence on individual pay. This might explain why government offices tend to have such a lukewarm atmosphere.
An office is not a private club where friends gather at leisure. It is a place to perform work. It is quite ridiculous to put a friendly work environment ahead of the accomplishment of work itself. The purpose of a friendly atmosphere is to lift morale and ensure that work is performed efficiently and effectively. A sociable atmosphere itself is not the objective of the office.
It is important to not place too much weight on either the achievement of the target or creating a friendly atmosphere among staff. Managers are expected to motivate staff to work towards accomplishing the organizational objectives. They are also required to create an atmosphere where individual members of staff are encouraged to take the initiative in the performance of their work, and are provided an opportunity to develop themselves to a level where they may do better work.
