Maddie Orgen

Reaction Essay 9

I am presenting on theses readings this week and I feel that this assignment has allowed

me to learn from the material on a deeper level. I aligned the most with the adaptive leadership

article and chose to focus on this a lot more than the other ones. Through this degree path, we

have been presented with varying leadership styles to reflect on, and this weeks coincides the

best with what I am I learning in my undergraduate program currently.

Change scares people (Beerel, 2021). This is an inevitable fact that no one can dispute or

argue, it is a fact of life, and we have leaders, managers, and people who work with other people,

have to find a way to be productive in the face of change. Finally, we see a statement of a

tangible idea of what leadership is. In this context in comparison to authority. Supposedly, “real

leadership gets people to face reality and engage with the real problems as opposed to the

symptoms, decoys, false concerns, and distractions, (Beerel, 2021, p. 226) and I think there is

weight to this explanation. In class a few weeks ago, in defining leadership all our definitions

aligned with something that looked like mentorship, but we agreed that it was more than that.

The concept of being an adaptive leader helps nail down some characteristics and necessitates of

leadership and how they differ from authority.

Leadership is also critiqued so much so by being focused on individual strategies instead

of emphasizing long term suitability of the systems of the group (Williams, 2005, p.ix). We see

this a lot in leadership, when the power of the position goes to one’s head there is a greater

reliance of authoritarian approaches that align with only that of one person’s perspective. A

refreshing point to ponder was one of that, “Leaders should thus not do the work alone but must

recruit others who can help hold up the value tensions, (Beerel, 2021, p. 225) and essentially
become a united front with other leaders, stakeholders, managers, and other important personnel

in the organization. Through my view of authoritarian leadership, it is a sharp contrast, where

authority is used at the great equalizer needing other people buy in to enforce the rules and

expectations.

These styles of leadership are so different, that it is inevitable to assume that the types of

leaders holding these positions would be in sharp contrast as well. A leader strictly depending on

authority and cooperation with rules, is one that I imagine to be very ego tactical and having a

‘separate from the ret mindset. Extreme authority creates distance in my mind, one party makes

the rules, and the other follows them without much vocal disdain. Where an adaptive leader is

one to welcome other ideas and beliefs and use their skills to guide these ideas into best practice.

A limitation of this type of leader could be that not every person is emotionally developed

enough to be as insightful as an adaptive leader has to be. There is an intricate balance that needs

to be struck between keeping some sort of dependable structure and process, but also welcoming

change and building each other’s ideas up.

 References

Beerel, A. C. (2021). Rethinking leadership a critique of contemporary theories. Routledge.

Williams, Dean. Real Leadership. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2005.