Navigating Uncertainty : How You Succeed When You Don 't Know About It?

Both stories, ‘Breaking Through Uncertainty—Welcoming Adversity’ and ‘neighbours’ describes the authors’ experience to take risk and overcome their self-understatement. Comparing these two articles, ‘Breaking Through Uncertainty—Welcoming Adversity’ shows the greater advantages gained by risking.

Margaret Wheatley in 2006 Leadership and the new science: Discovering order in a chaotic world discusses management development and education. This book attempts to educate people to be better leaders through a scientific mentality. In this paper I will discuss theories of her book and leadership, I will also discuss and relate these principles into real life experiences, and business realities in relation to her principle theories.

A1. Leadership Style Upon conducting research, it is clear that the definition of “leadership” is not agreed upon. It is fluid, based upon many perceptions, situations, and surroundings. According to Robinson (2010), adopting a specific style of leadership is rather futile as it is, “contingent on the personal traits of the leader, the people being led, and the nature of the activity.” Tools are available to help guide potential leaders in determining a preferred style of leadership. For example, utilizing the “Leadership Self-Assessment

It feels as if we rarely have situations with sufficient data to make decisions clear and absolute. Maybe those situations do occur frequently, but because they are obvious, we don’t even register them as decisions. Leadership hinges on effective decision making and judgement calls. That includes gathering information for analysis when available, but also recognizing how not to be caught in analysis paralysis. Effective leaders constantly evaluate the situation, recognize the benefits, risks, and constraints and move forward. Nothing impedes an organization more than inability to commit to a path forward.

Joseph Raelin (2016), a Northeastern University professor of management and organization development, recently published the article “Rethinking Leadership.” He said, “Leadership is really not about the leaders themselves. It’s about the collective practice among people who work together— accomplishing the choices we make together in our mutual work” (Raelin,

In the article “The Optimism of Uncertainty”, the author, Howard Zinn, has shown his idea that overwhelming powers are not invincible as they look like. He reinforced his opinion by showing that throughout our history those unbeatable forces still have been beaten one-by-one by human beings. A key to victory was that people did not give up, remained their optimistic attitude toward to the future. The article was first come from his book “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress”. However, his idea “hope”, which is an indispensable element of optimism, still answers the question “If our world is facing an imminent environmental catastrophe, how do I live my life right now?” Howard believed “small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.” Therefore, in

Uncertainty is horrifying—and the genre of dystopia knows this. Not only does dystopia know this, but it feeds off of it—turning the fears of the mind’s eyes into a cornucopia of terror. However, it is not uncommon for the fears of one man to be the dream of another. Indeed, to Aldous Huxley, writing in 1931, the rise of totalitarian governments across Europe was terrifying–however—perhaps more terrifying to Huxley was the fact that these governments were arising not by force, but by the will of the people themselves. As Huxley saw it, people were forfeiting their privacy to a hegemon to which they smiled, not to one from which they cowered in despair.

Great leadership overcomes the status quo by taking risks. However, it slowly moves the group through a series of small steps designed by the leader to encourage participation and build feelings of success. To continually inspire and encourage their followers, leaders must be able to break a large task into small components. This builds self confidence and a culture of active learning and hardy determination. To build this hardy resilience leaders anticipate setbacks and develop the ability to learn from them. Leaders will also teach their followers to learn from adversity and

This was highlighted by my evolution from a ‘directive’ leader to a ‘participative’ leader. Due to the changing situation, I found that I naturally adapted my leadership style. This was because of changes in the environment and followers themselves, reflective of the path-goal theory (Robbins et al. 2015, p. 347). For example, the environment shifted from a virtual to physical medium and the follower’s attitude changed from disinterested to engaged. As a result, I shifted my leadership style to match this. Now that I am aware of the impact these internal and external factors have, I will actively try and influence them in the future to achieve the optimal

The topic of leadership evokes curiosity about our leaders and their approaches in decision making, leadership styles and the effectiveness of their leadership. At time leaders are critiqued for their actions or views on different business affairs. In today’s working environment leaders set the tone, vision, and goals of any organization. Leadership has a huge impact on the culture of an organization and how people communicate within the organization (Northouse, 2009). The actions of leaders should inspire and positively impact their followers. The approach of leaders in handling adversities highlights many features of their character.

The topic of leadership evokes curiosity about our leaders and their approaches in decision making, leadership styles and the effectiveness of their leadership. At time leaders are critiqued for their actions or views on different business affairs. In today’s working environment leaders set the tone, vision, and goals of any organization. Leadership has a huge impact on the culture of an organization and how people communicate within the organization (Northouse, 2009). The actions of leaders should inspire and positively impact their followers. The approach of leaders in handling adversities highlights many features of their

The leader that I am today is confident but still inexperienced. I still have plenty to learn in order to be the leader I want to be in the future. I want to be a leader who is always striving for perfection and always keeping an open mind to the possibility of change and new leadership techniques. Nahavandi states (2006), despite our knowledge, there is also much we still do not know. Leadership as we traditionally know it—command and control—does not address the rapid social, cultural, and organizational changes that are occurring globally (Nahavandi, 2006). This is why we need to be always vigilant and open minded to the new theories that are always being introduced in this global society. According to Nahavandi (2006), future leaders must

Other common terms for the idea of organizational decentralization include: team self-management, self-management, shared control, distributed leadership (Lambe, Webb, & Ishida, 2009) and holacracy (Robertson, 2007). While these terms may have small differences they all describe the common theme of distributing power across organizations. Several concepts help to explain why decentralization and the encouragement of teamwork throughout an organization are often superior to traditional management structure.

A leader is defined as a person with responsibility to influence one or more followers and directing them to achieve a set objective (Sethuraman, 2014). In order to achieve that set of objectives effortlessly, effectively, and efficiently, the most important and valued trait of a leader is an effective leadership styles. Effective leadership styles are required in every organization at every level to be successful. The success or failure of an organization depends on the quality of leadership particularly on the part of top management. An effective leadership style can be developed on the basis of understanding of the situations (Sethuraman, 2014). Top management should know which leadership style is needed based on the situation to be most effective to gain trust and respect from their employee. There is no single method of influencing the behavior of employees for every situation. The employee’s level of knowledge on the task and can determine which leadership style that will be most effective for the situation. Preparing leaders to lead

Holocracy is a self-management structure that emphasizes on the idea of authority distribution to gain efficiency in the workplace. According to HolocracyOne (2016), Holocracy was designed to “replace the traditional management hierarchy with a new peer-to-peer ‘operating system’ that increases transparency, accountability, and organizational agility”. Using this unique management structure, employees are empowered to play significant roles within the organization. Holocracy has already been implemented in many companies, in which some are more successful than the others. It is important to understand that even though Holocracy is different from structured management, it still has some similarities.