Week 6: Leader/Follower Relationship

I wrote a previous post, after week three, about the leader-follower relationship at Reaching Milestones between the Director and her independent contractors. In that post, I mentioned the need for a transformational leadership style given the unique structure of the organization. However, after completing six weeks of the internships, I have realized that the organizational is even more complex than I originally observed. This additional complexity is present in the organization’s structure because the Director has dual responsibilities of providing health care in the form of speech therapy in addition to running the business side of Reaching Milestones. One of my duties as an internship has been to evaluate the therapy services, which have included the Director’s speech services. While evaluating her services, I realized that another leader-follower relationship exists between the therapist and the child they are working worth as well as the therapist and the family members of the child. A factor I evaluate in the therapy sessions is how well the therapist is engaging the member of the family in the activities they are leading with the child. One mother remarked in a post-service questionnaire, “she’s teaching us as much as she is helping Daniel. It becomes more than a once a week session because we are implementing the techniques she shares with us every day.”

In Dr. Von Ruedon’s Leadership Theories class last fall, we defined leadership at its core as a “process of influence.” In the context of the Reaching Milestones organization, the therapists are tasked with the objective of influencing children aged 0 to 3 in addition to the guardian present during therapy sessions. The art of influencing children, who are not even potty-trained yet is very challenging and can be frustrating, which requires the therapists to be very patient, forward, and clear with both the guardian and the child. From my observations, the therapists and especially the Director often were able to control the child better than the guardian as a result of their skill and expertise. For example, when evaluating the Director in a day care with a group of three-year-olds, I noticed that she used just the right tone and cadence of speech when speaking to the children in order to get them to participate in the activities. What was more astonishing to me was the way she was able to control them and how cooperative they were to her instructions. I had expected a group of three-year-olds to be uncooperative, messy, and noisy, but they listened to the Director better than the day care workers.

Connecting this observation to leadership studies, I think the director’s leadership effectiveness in this situation was ground in a system of rewards and punishments through her appraisal and disappointment that came in the form of the Director’s speech including her tone, cadence, and diction. For example, if a child did something he/she was not suppose to do, the Director’s tone would drop, the cadence would slow, and she would repeat a word directly and clearly such as, “Nathaniel, no…no…put back.” In contrast, if the child did something favorable, her cadence would pick up slightly and become more like a “sing-song,” her tone would increase, and she was give the child a big smile such as, “Very good, Vivian! Everyone look at Vivian!” The children really wanted to make her happy and proud of them so this form of appraisals was effective in influencing them. When the children received a remark of praise from the Director, they would get really excited and start to squeal and jump up and down. I am still shocked and impressed at the Director’s ability to influence this age group while remaining very patient.

This leader-follower relationship is a very interesting and unique dynamic because the therapists are in the age range of 40 to 55 and the children’s age range is 0 to 3. It is a dynamic that I have not encountered in any leadership class, however, I was able to apply the concepts I have traversed to this unique dynamic in order to better understand its effectiveness.