Week 5 Theories in Action

Another theory that I see playing out in leaders on my team at Guidepoint is with the project managers and Jackson, the team leaders. There is definitely an overall transformational leadership theory (Burns 1978) at play at Guidepoint and on my team because like Bass’s transformational theory the Team lead on my team and project managers drive organizational change because of the employees under them heightened emotional levels and their willingness to work toward the accomplishment of the leader’s vision which at Guidepoint would be exceeding our levels of CUs for each month ( a measurement for connecting the client with an industry expert). I see multiple components of transformational leadership at play on my team at Guidepoint. One of these would be inspirational motivation, which is essentially identifying and encouraging the pursuit of challenging goals, communicating high expectations and inspiring employees on our team to commitment and engagement in shared vision. I definitely feel as though this would describe how our team lead and especially project managers interact with employees under them at Guidepoint. For example, project managers will assign a project to me and set a challenging goal for me of finding 15 custom recruits for that specific project. They will encourage me to do it and make their high expectations clear verbally and by giving me the responsibility and autonomy to go off on my own and do this as a full time research associate would. When I do bring in awesome recruits they are excited & share their excitement and give good feedback/praise that I was able to bring these subject matter experts in, therefore solidifying our shared commitment and engagement to our team goals and that we are both working together to satisfy the clients.

Another kind of transformation leadership at Guidepoint that I see from our team lead Jackson is a little bit of Management by exception leadership. In management by exception, the leader (Jackson) interferes only when the employee does not meet their goals and withholds rewards ( like a return offer or a promotion). Jackson uses a passive form of this meaning that intervenes only after standards have not been met or problems have arisen.

I believe Jackson does this to provide his employees with autonomy and takes this hands off approach to let us have our own responsibilities. I definitely experienced this during my internship because there was little to no feedback coming from Jackson and I was informed by my buddy that “no feedback is good feedback” is the way he likes to lead. When I had my end of the year performance review and Jackson gave me excellent feedback about how well I had done, I realized that this certainly was the case. I also think that COVID and being remote could play a role in Jackson’s management by exception approach because he can’t walk past you in the office and say hey good job or something along those lines. When remote, it is harder to give brief feedback and this sometimes leads to me wondering if I was doing a good job or not.