Leadership Case

Leadership

The Executive Director, Michelle Perez, is responsible for overseeing the club operations as well as the Director of Operations, the numerous department heads and volunteers. To execute this role effectively Michelle maintains strong competency in leadership. Having strong emotional intelligence, integrity, drive, motivation, self-confidence, and intelligence are a few areas of which require her to excel in.

The organization has a highly decentralized and organic structure, all of the department heads report to one person, the Executive Director (See Exhibit 1). In addition, Michelle's job requires her to oversee a myriad of areas at the club, there is a sense of shared leadership that evolves within the environment to make Michelle's job a little easier during hectic weeks. Therefore, leadership roles were "broadly distributed (to all the directors) rather than assigned to one person, such that people within the team and organization lead each other" (Mc Shane & Glinow, 2007).

Shared leadership style is a major factor that formed the culture of the organization. The club is working as a family so that they could support and challenge each other to perform the best by communication not instruction. Gill supported it in his book Theory and Practice of leadership, "shared leadership reflects shared ownership of problems, an emphasis on learning and development to enable sharing, understanding and contribution and a culture of openness, mutual respect and trust" (P30). The executive director holds weekly meetings across all departments, they address problems and concerns on the basis of open communication; a manager will take the job of another if one is unavailable. Like Gill mentioned, shared leadership prevents the chaos from happening when one strong leader suddenly leaves. Hence, this leadership style is relatively flexible.

Although the department heads have leadership roles, they also have manager's role, which has adjusted and developed over years. As discussed in Managerial Behavior written by Leonard Sayles, management has shifted from a paternal, moral problem to a training, conditioning, learning problem; and then as applied psychology in modern organization (P6, see exhibit 2). The managers our team interviewed at Boys and Girls Club have uniformed answers for their managerial roles: he/she oversees the department, runs certain programs and supervises their subordinates. The managers' job is becoming more difficult since they not only need to balance the power between them and employees, but also build the psychological environment which would affect employees and the organization in the long run.