HRM4424 Importance Of Effective Leadership And Management Development Homework Answer

Answer :

i. Introduce the proposal explaining the role and importance of leadership and management development in organisations:

The leadership and management program include the following modules:

Module 1:

• Self-awareness and personal development
• Emotional intelligence
• Communication and culture
• Understanding user community and the value of the social care sector
• Resolving external environment issues

Module 2:

• Behaviour, theory and culture of the organisation
• Working in teams
• Policy contexts
• Collaboration, consultation and partnership
• Personal development planning

Role and importance:

Leaders are important for all lines of business in an organisation because they are involved in the smooth functioning of organisational operation. Therefore, leadership and management development create a beneficial impact on the organisation. It not only equips the leader with skills that can help them in enhancing team productivity but also improves employee engagement. Good leaders always acknowledge their mistakes and encourage other people in learning from them (Simkins, 2012). Leaders make it their duty in keeping everyone productive. They pass this accountability in creating a strong culture throughout the workplace. Leadership development generates a higher degree of accountability among leaders. Through the development, leaders gain a clear understanding of why the culture of accountability is necessary for their success. Leadership and management development involves the leader in offering better support to the employees that increase their engagement level. This higher level of engagement is effective in improving retention among employees. As stated by Carmeli et al. (2013), effective problem solving is one of the key traits of a good leader. Strategic problem solving includes a better analysis of the problems and identifies a better solution to the problem. Leadership development is highly effective in understanding the adversity in the unpredictable business environment. Therefore, leadership and management development create a team of leaders with strong as well as effective problem-solving skills. As stated by Aga (2016), role clarity can be defined as the individuals who know their role in the organisation. Leaders should know the role of every team member so that they can create a productive team. With the help of leadership development and management, leaders learn to identify the role of team members to align it on the right track.

ii. Present the background of the organisation to build up a clear rationale for the proposal. Here, further assumptions on internal and external challenges can be made to build the case for the proposed programme: 

This assignment is intended to develop a leadership and management development program for ABC pharmaceuticals. This organisation is engaged in developing, manufacturing and distributing pharmaceutical products in the commercial markets of Asia, the USA and Europe. Currently, the organisation is expanding their business in emerging markets. Therefore, for expanding the business and sustaining organisational growth, strong leadership and management are necessary.

It has been observed that some leaders have some interpersonal problems with the organisation as they are not satisfied with the approach of the organisation. Along with that different governmental policy, economic issues or social factors of the emerging markets creates influence on the organisation (Carmeli et al. 2013). To some extent, a measure of leaders is how effectively they can deal with the external crisis. If they can resolve external issues then the external issues are hardly noticeable by other stakeholders. However, if leaders become ineffective in resolving external challenges then the entire organisation can face the issue. For resolving the inefficiencies among leaders to resolve external issues and developing business more effectively, ABC pharmaceutical needs to develop this leadership and management development program.

Currently, the leaders of ABC pharmaceutical have become inefficient in understanding the need of employees that make them insufficient in offering necessary support the employees. Along with that, the leaders of ABC pharmaceutical have become inefficient in identifying the appropriate leadership style with the help of which they can engage the employees. The inappropriate leadership approach and management style has created an ineffective employee relationship. This fact has de-motivated the employees which ultimately increases the employee turnover. Every employee has some limitation and it is the role of leaders in identifying the weaknesses and overcoming them so that the followers can follow the vision of leaders effectively and create a better organisational result (Babalola, 2016). Lack of confidence, fear, impatience, insecurity or intolerance of the leaders can create difficulties in identifying the strengths and weaknesses of employees (Men, 2014). This is because these factors create an ineffective relationship between the employee and leaders. In the present time, some of the leaders of ABC pharmaceutical have become incompetent in identifying employee’s capability. Due to this reason, they are facing issues in developing strategies to make the employees more competent. As most of the leaders of the organisation are not supportive to the employees so the employees feel de-motivated and dissatisfied in their workplace which is increasing employee turnover. High employee turnover is increasing the operating costs of the organisation and hampering the productivity of the organisation. The leadership program therefore would ought to give leaders with the enhancement of leadership qualities and traits to manage the above issues. 

Some of the external challenges includes the Rising customer expectations which without good leadership qualities and supervision is not possible to achieve. Secondly, the pharmaceutical industry also faces the challenges of dropping scientific productivity. Having good leaders and their management style can be helpful in improving the scientific productivity. Pharmaceuticals industry also faces the negative effects of digitalisation including cyber security issues, data loses issues whereas the industry sometimes faces the lack of quality in its operations and increased cost of operations. Good leadership quality can manage this challenge. Under this program, the program intends to connect leadership enhancement with leadership development through the development of different intervention programs. 

iii. Identify the learning outcomes and key features of the leadership and management development programme: 

 Learning outcome:

This program helps the leaders in enhancing their management and leadership skills. It can help the leaders in fulfilling the personal development need with the help of guided action, learning as well as reflection. It improves the ability among leaders in developing high-performance team, relationship as well as partnerships. This programme also helps the leaders in building a learning community with colleagues across the sectors. It can help ABC pharmaceuticals in developing best practice solutions to improve the organisational effectiveness. It can help the leaders in engaging the employees to improve service quality. It can also support the influence and development of leaders across the sectors. The external environmental challenges including operations, marketing, managing customer experience can also be improved. 

Key features:

Leadership and management development must be based on the individualistic and traditional conceptualisation of leadership. The underlying assumption, in this case, is that more effective leadership occurs through developing individual leaders. This development also assumes that leadership is something that can improve operational as well as social effectiveness in the organisation. The development of leadership and management has their origins in the contemporary and relational leadership model (Day, 2000). This model assumes that leadership is the social resource’s functions that are mainly embedded in a relationship. From this perspective, it can be said that leadership can be considered as one of the emergent properties of the social system. The program must link the leader development with the leadership development so that leadership development transcends but not replace individual leader’s development. The key to effective implementation is having organisational discipline in introducing leadership development throughout organisations (Day, 2000). This program must rely on the mutual commitments, respect and trust of leaders in creating a better and productive organisation. This program must provide focus on the realities of the workplaces. The program needs to be developed in a way so that it can increase interactions and engagement among the employees and the leaders. 

iv. discuss the overall learning strategy and range of interventions to implement the programme using relevant academic literature:

According to Chaimongkonrojna and Steane (2015), organisations have several options regarding the leadership and management development strategies from formal to informal and from organisation directed to self-directed. One of the interesting facts is that in workplaces, it is accepted that most of the learning is formal and organisation driven. However, Becker and Bish (2017) argued this by stating that the informal learning strategy is the best when it is learning about leadership and management development. In this context, formal, job-based, relationship-based and informal and non-formal approaches will be used as a part of the overall learning strategy with both organisations directed and self-directed interventions. 

Formal approaches: 

As a part of the formal approach, the main organisation driven interventions would be multisource feedback, action learning, executive programs, MBA programs and feedback intensive programs. Thorpe (2016) remarked that programs like action learning in the organisational context help leaders to learn through experience whereas the executive programs and MBA programs provide the required theoretical underpinning on leadership attributes and practices. Multisource and feedback intensive programs however include practical organisational learning. However, leaders who want to build up their leadership characteristics also need to conduct self-directed learning including developing personal and career development planning and conducting activities according to it. The leadership and management program for the ABC pharmaceuticals therefore would follow similar pathways to use formal learning strategy with organisational and self-directed intervention as mentioned. Lucas et al., (2018) however, argued that formal learning strategies are not effective in actual leadership and management development due to their inability to provide the leaders with the practical understanding and situational contexts in which they would need to apply their leadership skills. Subramony et al., (2018) remarked that formal approaches can create confusion among the would-be leaders regarding their leadership traits as their confidence and leadership skills contradicts sometimes with the theoretical underpinning and the absence of any practical scenario to apply the obtained knowledge. However, this approach would still be included as a standard leadership and management development procedure. 

Job-based approaches: 

Bryman et al., (2011) identified job-based learning strategies as similar to learning like on the job training. As a part of this learning strategy, organisational intervention can be hardship exercises, international assignments and stretch assignments. At the same time, self-directed interventions like voluntary participation in different activities would be encouraged to help to improve the leadership traits and characteristics. The job-based approaches are effective in providing the required basic principles of leadership and management. Therefore, using this strategy would help set up the scene for leadership and management development using relationship and informal approaches. 

Relationship-based approaches: 

The organisation directed intervention strategies of the relationship-based approach will be generally peer coaching, peer monitoring, external and internal monitoring and peer support group mentoring and coaching. Coaching and mentoring is not only about directing someone towards a goal, but also acting as a coordinator, supporter in emotional terms and helping in every difficult scenario. Bush (2008) identified coaching and mentoring activities to be one of the best interventions to develop leadership and management skills among the leaders. However, in such a scenario, it would be important for the leaders to also seek feedback and observation of whether those whom they have coached or mentored are following the same guidelines or not. If they are not following, feedback should be taken whereas the leaders should question themselves about their coaching and mentoring strategy as a part of the self-driven intervention. 

Informal approaches: 

 Informal approaches are remarked as the most effective learning strategy for leadership and management development. The main reason is that the only organisational driven intervention is learning from mistakes. There cannot be anything better than learning from the mistakes as it helps individuals to understand their mistakes and helps in using different leadership approaches if a similar situation arises. Self-directed intervention becomes important in the case of information learning strategy as leadership should reflect periodically on their leadership and management attributes and approaches taken in the job and thereby should continually interact with the peers even outside the sphere of the organisation for their personal and professional leadership development (Carmichael et al., 2011). 

Therefore, from the above analysis, it can be said that the developed learning strategies and associated intervention strategies can help develop the leadership and management skills of the leaders at ABC pharmaceutical. However, it is very important to note that even though the program has outlined the need for self-directed intervention on all the four approaches identified, it is up to the learners to apply those alongside organisation driven interventions. Those applying both the interventions would be able to develop a comprehensive practical and theoretical understanding of leadership and management skills. 

v. Presents a clear evaluation strategy for the programme:

The programme will be evaluated based on a 4-step process namely Learner reaction and satisfaction, Learning, Application and implication and Results. 

Learner reaction and satisfaction: In the first step of the evaluation, the success of the program will be judged based on whether the learners liked the learning process and whether they have been able to obtain new knowledge from the program. 

Learning: In the second step, the main learning that the learners obtained from the program, skills they developed and whether they understood how and where to apply the learning will be evaluated.

Application and implication: The third step will evaluate the effectiveness of the application of the learning which in this case is the leadership and management skills. 

Results: In this step, the results that the learners are bringing to the business both intangible and intangible manners will be evaluated. 

The four-step process is developed keeping in mind the challenges faced by general leadership and management development frameworks in evaluating the success of such programs. According to Carmichael et al.,(2011), LMD programs lacks precise learning objectives. They are generally learning aims and therefore when evaluation models tend to evaluate based on the learning objectives, they are unable to provide fruitful statistical findings. Moreover, as per Bryman et al., (2011), the nature of organisations evaluating programs based on the tangible benefits like the improvement in sales performance and organisational performance makes it difficult to judge the success of an LMD program. LMD programs rather than directly impacting on the sales performance or organisational benefits helps in improving organisational culture through improved employee morale, increased flexibility and adaptability of the management style employed by the leaders. The proposed evaluation framework indeed focuses on the intangible benefits which makes this framework suitable to use while evaluating the above sketched LMD program. 

vi. produce an effective conclusion with a focus on sustainability/ongoing professional development of leaders and managers:

Thus, from the above analysis, it can be said that the proposed leadership program focuses on developing the core leadership and management skills of the leaders so that they develop their management strategies, planning and execution of activities and at the same time, their ability to manage, lead and motivate people. As ABC pharmaceutical is facing issues related to people management, developing the program in the light of improving the leadership and management skills of the leaders including the personal and professional development of the employees can be remarked appropriate. The LMD program would ensure that after the completion of the program, the leaders can develop skills like emotional intelligence, good communication, situational adaptation, empathy, self-awareness, trust, giving respect, motivation and creating a leader-follower relationship based on ethical grounds. To ensure the continuous personal and professional development of the leaders, different learning strategies including job-based, relationship-based, formal and informal will be taken into consideration with both self-directed and organisational-directed interventions. The success of the program will be evaluated based on the satisfaction of the leaders of the program, their learning, the way they are applying the knowledge gained and the results in terms of both tangible and intangible benefits to the organisation.