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Assignment 1 - Leadership
All organizations see value in teams. In todays fast paced world, teams are found to be the
most productive and creative elements in an organization, and for them to be able to reach
their maximum productivity, it takes a leader with unique attributes to motivate and direct
team members to reach a common goal.
What was the endeavor? What was the mission/goal? Why is that mission /goal
worthwhile? Where does it take place? How long did it take to accomplish the
mission/goal?
Two years ago Ms. Lauren Scott was working as a graphic designer and was assigned to a
corporate brand development team, at AMC Limited, an Electronics and Networking firm in
New York. Being a rather large company it was rare that employees spent much time with the
senior management of the company and therefore as a member of the brand development
team she got the rare opportunity of working with Mr. Gerard Ryle, the Senior Vice President
of the company who decided to take it upon himself to give the companys brand a new look.
Introducing himself at the first team meeting he expressed that the company had been
through a rather difficult business year and he believed that it was time for the company to
take more interest in advertising and re-branding the products of the company, giving Sri
Lankas public a new look at the existing line of products and also those that had come in
thought the companys own innovative pipeline. He clearly expressed that he expected the
team to assist him in reaching his goal over a period of nine months which was to build firm
customer loyalty and see the companys revenue graph increasing steadily to beyond where it
had been in the previous year.
What did make you take the role if leader? What was your formal position prior and
within the context of leadership dynamics? How did you get into the leading group
because of your formal position, because you were selected, or at last you find you are
leading the group? Is it because you cant wait and see others to act when the action is
demanded by the situation? What was your initial feeling about becoming a leader in
that context? Why do others follow you? Was there any implicit or explicit competition
for the leadership position?
The first impression the Senior VP had on the team, set the tone of how they went about their
tasks. He projected a strong image of a confident businessman, unafraid to take risks, keen to
accept challenges and motivate others in the process of solving challenges. Asking around,

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Lauren found out that Mr. Ryle had begun his career at the firm as an assistant manager and
worked his way up to become the Senior Vice President of the organization seven years later.
Throughout his career at the firm, his democratic leadership style was much admired among
his employees. He was a man who as always focused on the task and he put much thought
into his decision making. Looking over the companys revenues through the last two years he
found that overall customer interest had fallen sharply, as the marketing department had been
plagued by narrow budgets which prevented them from being flamboyant with their
marketing strategy. He understood that the upper management was concerned about the risks
of sinking large amounts of money into an advertising budget and he personally felt the need
to shoulder the responsibility of a new team to take on brand management, which he affirmed
was what was necessary to re-stamp the companys brand in the local market. It had been his
idea to create a team of the firms best professionals of each department and assign them the
task of bringing the companys brand back to life. Confident of his ability to inspire
individuals and bring out the best in them, he volunteered to skipper the team that he
believed would reignite the companys corporate flame.
What were within you which help/obstruct the realization of the mission? Was it your
qualification, experience, family, professional or social background? Was it your ability
of absorbing certainty of others, bearing risk or sensing opportunities? Was it because
people naturally look for you, when they get in trouble? Was it your strategist mind,
capacity of networking? Was it your ability to speak to hart, mind or both of
others? Was it your hart driven nature or mind driven nature?
Over the course of the nine months Lauren spent much time learning about Mr. Ryles
personal background and came to realize the impact that his background had on his work
ethic. Gerard Ryle hailed from one of upstate New Yorks elite families; he had attended a
prominent School in there before being accepted into the Harvard University to purse
Business Management. It was his mother that had much influence on his thoughts and
instilled in him values of a true businessman. He had always been reminded of the value of
his education and was always pushed towards being sensible and wise in decision making,
rather than being impulsive. Being a tactful individual, he always weighed out the final
consequences of his decisions and was sharp to foresee risks and take action accordingly.
Although he was firm in his decision making, he maintained a very open personality and
always encouraged dialog. His method of thinking was often out of the box using the most
unlikeliest of ways to arrive at solutions that proved to be much more effective than
stereotype textbook solutions. His thinking was described as quite artistic among his

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employees, who respected him and enjoyed working under him. As an individual, Gerard
was not driven by rewards or recognition awards at annual events, but he found himself
motivated by the feeling of achieving success itself. He claimed that the feeling of
successfully finding a solution by taking a sizeable risk was more gratifying than monetary
compensation or public recognition awards.
To all those he worked with, he projected a humble approachable personality ever focused on
the objectives of a firm and ever concerned about his employees. He made an extra effort on
his part to always maintain personal dialog with his employees, so that he was able to
understand them on a more sincere level and therefore built a family like culture in the work
environment of his department which ultimately brought out the best in his employees.
Owing to his natural flair for leadership, his peers and juniors looked up to him as an
individual they could depend on whenever they needed assistance. His method of
communication was crystal clear. Whenever he assigned a task he discussed in detail the
steps of the task and was open to feedback from the employees. He offered as much
assistance as he could when his employees seemed in need of it but was ever ready to give
his employees full responsibility of tasks, bearing in mind their unique capabilities. He
understood the individual capacities of each member of his team and worked toward their
strengths, urging them to be fearless in pushing their boundaries and stepping outside their
comfort zone.
Mr. Ryle did however have a weakness for sometimes expecting too much of his employees.
Although he knew their exact capacities, as an optimist he believed that by bestowing
responsibility and showing the employee that as a manager he believed that the employee
was capable of doing the task, the employee would gradually increase his capacity to meet
his expectations. Noticeably employees worked harder as they felt they could not let their
manager down; however in many instances they could not meet his expectations and that left
him to do much of the incomplete work. This did affect the overall productivity but because
he was such a composed manager, he seldom showed emotional stress.
What was the context? Who are the people/institutes involved in that endeavor? What
were the threats and opportunities in the group itself? What were the threats and
opportunities within the immediate environment? Was there any impact of broader
environment? Was there anyone who helped you and whose advice was sought? Was
there enemies/competitors and what was their impact? How do they facilitate you to
gain others support?

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When Gerard first proposed the idea to the senior management and board of directors
requesting the endorsement of 35% of the companys annual budget for re-branding the
business, many individuals on the Board had strongly opposed it, as they refused to risk such
a large amount on an advertising campaign. However amidst the opposition, there were open
minded opinions among the top managers and backed by them, Mr. Ryle convinced the
Board that re-branding and advertising was the solution to keep up with the pace of the
economic and market changes that had caused the companys revenues to collapse over the
last two years. Once the budget was approved and he was mandated authority to oversee the
re-branding process, he set to work, stringing together what he believed was the dream
team.
Undoubtedly, all eight individuals drafted into the team were highly skilled in their various
fields each of who had a unique ability which he expected when put together as a team would
work like clockwork. True to his expectations, the team worked wonders, but faced many
shortcomings in the process. When called together first, several members were quite
reluctant to take on the project fearing failure while working directly under a senior member
of the management whos thinking process and work ethic was not known to them. The first
meeting had many uneasy feelings about working under the Vice President of the company,
however, his natural ability to connect with people was felt immediately and gradually the
team became accustomed to working under his guidance. He maintained his position within
the team as a leader than as a manager, establishing a close professional relationship with
each team member. Working as a single unit, each individual looked forward to showing up
at the office each day, ever ready to take on new challenges and learn as much as they could
from their boss.
When Gerard took up the task there were many highly opinionated individuals discouraging
his efforts, and once the team had been called together and began working, it was noticed
that such opinions had spread into the team itself, and began to pick on the optimistic
confidence that he himself had spurred within the team. Another impending issue that
threatened to devour the effectiveness of the team was the personal agendas of each team
member. As the team brainstormed ideas and came up with innovative strategies, they began
to realize that if the project was a success, each of them stood a chance to obtain a promotion
or another form of employee recognition or rewarding and therefore began to work towards
personal goals, hoarding creative thoughts and attempting to personally develop them so as
to gain as much as they could for this opportunity. This was all unhealthy for the team and in
light of such events, his natural talent for personnel management came into play.

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What were the strategies you adopted? How did you make others follow you? Did you
engage in any project/attempt of constructing a favorable image to you as a leader? Did
you make any alliances with traditional helpers or traditional enemies and how?
Did you attempt to develop a brotherhood, fatherhood etc, with other people who
got involved in the endeavor? Was you task, people or autocratic?
As a manager, Gerard maintained a firm process in addressing tasks and he used this process
to simplify much of the teams work and make it easier for them to complete their assigned
tasks. He always began by understanding the problem and setting small goals to achieve
based on the ultimate goal they needed to achieve. He firmly believed a series of small wins
that occurred along the course in pursuit of the ultimate goal, produced visible results and
motivated the employees to continue accomplishing their tasks. Once he had set the outline
of how he expected the team members to progress, he would communicate their task to them,
explaining the objective of the task and the outline he had created and delegate to each one
their set of tasks. At this point he expected input from the team members. He always felt that
they may have valuable ideas that could be incorporated into the process and was very open
and straightforward when discussing tasks with the team.
Being the head of the team, Mr. Ryle took it upon himself to be a mentor to the team
members. Having worked in the industry for over fifteen years, he had vast amounts of
experience which he enjoyed sharing with his employees. He was an excellent teacher and
took much time to engage in small conversations sharing his own little strategies that he had
learnt along the way and those he had developed himself. He encouraged each member to ask
questions and inspired them to always put forward an extra effort to expand their knowledge
in whatever field they were in. Although he enjoyed the occasional office humor, as a leader,
he took his work very seriously. He always sought out a perfect balance between amusement
and work that gave the work place an ideal environment for individuals to be serious enough
with their work but not overly engaged such that they found it boring. As a leader he
displayed his natural class and elegance in all his methods of carrying out day to day
activities at the firm and resolving crisis. Time management was another aspect that he
taught his team to follow, efficiently appropriating the available work time to ensure all tasks
were carried out within the given deadlines, and any sudden workplace fires that were
sparked had sufficient time to be looked into.
When it came to dealing with situations, he was very firm. On realizing that his team
members confidence was gradually reducing due to pessimistic attitudesleaking into the
team, he called up for a team meeting, and urged those he believed responsible to express

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themselves and their opinions and then presented a viable solution to bring about a change in
attitude both within the team and among those outside the team, monitoring their progress.
When he noticed that there was a growing rift between each of the members as they tried to
outdo each other within the team he again called them together, and expressed his concern
that their personal agendas were causing the team to be increasingly less effective; and then
he expressed his policy of personal integrity, by which he specified that all members of the
team would be rewarded and recognized equally as a team and not as individual efforts as he
strongly disapproved of any nepotism in organizations.
What were the outcomes/effects of realization of the mission or failure to realize the
mission? Who are the people and institutes who benefited/suffered? Were the effects of
your leadership exercise short lived or long lasted? What factors influenced the
continuity or discontinuity effects?
As the nine months progressed, the team gradually learnt to work on each others strengths,
coming up with unique ideas for a new logo, marketing slogans and several other strategies
to re-launch the business brand. The team had, to their advantage, employees from the
marketing department who were requested to assist the members of the team in any way as
required by the team. To make the most of all the employees, Mr. Ryle proposed a
competition among those in the marketing department to come up with creative slogans. This
too paid off considerably as it sparked within the company and energy that had been missing
for a rather long time. After months of brainstorming and strategic planning, the new image
was launched, presenting several new products, targeting a wide consumer market. The
pricing had been done tactically to make their products much more competitive than they had
ever been. The newly designed advertising campaign proved to be one of the most effective
campaigns in the history of the firm using electronic and social media to their maximum
potential. An idea from the team to launch an online business portal to retail their products of
the companys website was also taken up and further added to the growing success of the
team. The second and third quarters of the organizations business year saw drastic
improvements in their revenues with the third quarter seeing the highest figures in a single
business quarter for the company.
As the business flourished and leaped towards an increasing market share over the nine
months, the loudly voiced pessimism had died down to a silent murmur. Understanding the
need for sustainable revenue increases, the dream team, lead by the companys vice
president was given the mandate to continue on as a brand management team that was
assigned to lead the marketing department. The targets were then furthered to establish a

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sustainable competitive advantage by strategically feeding their products into the market
bearing in mind the importance of a strategic advantage. All members of the team had agreed
that working under the direct leadership of their Senior Vice President had been a valuable
learning experience for each of them. Gerard Ryle had shown them the importance of
embracing failure as a means of learning from it rather than being disappointed by it.
What were others responses to you? Did people love or hate you, keep a distance from
you or close to you? Did they work with/for you willingly or unwillingly? What were the
feelings of participants at the beginning, middle and end of the endeavor about you? Do
people feel free to talk openly to you or not?
This aspect of openness to innovative ideas was found to be very favorable among the team
members as they felt satisfied being heard and were further motivated when he made use of
their input in his goal setting process. By the end of the nine months, the team members
came to trust one and other and they all appreciated that within their forum of nine
individuals they could be frank and openly express themselves. Once the options were all
discussed, he mandated the necessary authority, set the basic boundaries for their work and
then handed over the task to the team members in full faith that the task would be completed
on time. During the course of the task, he made it a point to continue monitoring on the
progress of the task to ensure that the employee was on track and also show interest and
motivate the employee.
Understandably so, being a man of firm perspective, he had many disagreements with several
of his peers within the upper management of the organization. While many of his colleagues
admired his efforts and successes, many others had disapproved of his unorthodox decisions
due to differences in opinions and had questioned the strategies the team employed on
multiple occasions. As a responsible leader, he always backed his team in their endeavors
and defended their strategies and innovative ideas when questions were raised.
Why do you consider that particular leadership exercise as your ever best leadership
experience? Was it because you have to get the things done from people who challenge
or compete with you? Ws it because the solution not appealing to many people? Was it
because friends turnout to be enemies or vice-versa?
Lauren considered this experience to be the best experience of leadership she ever
encountered in her career. When they started out, she too, like most others found it hard to
imagine the company making the progress they achieved over the next nine months. Reading

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into the market research that had been conducted to position their business in the market
among their competitors she found that their organization was far behind in terms of market
share and given the vicious pace of the market, it seemed only a dream to arrive at their
current position. It was his compelling attitude that fueled the team to take up the challenge
fearlessly. When communicating to them their goals, he reassured them with his continuous
support and leadership toward reaching their objectives, and he worked toward building
confidence within the members of the team.
Following the resounding success of the team that spanned over the next year, as promised
by him, all members were equally promoted and were each assigned their own teams to
assist them in their tasks as part of the brand management team. His traits of being a
determined leader had rubbed off on to them and were quite evident in how they lead their
individual teams. They too structured their work methodically, delegated tasks efficiently and
always looked to bring out the best in their employees. Even today, Lauren, working for
AMC Limited as the companys creative digital design manager agrees that learning from
one of New Yorks finest top managers has made her the leader she is.