Kengkamol Siwakarnsirikul (ks506@bath.ac.

uk)

UNIVERSITY OF BATH

FULL-TIME MBA 2011/12

Personal Leadership and Careers (MN50339)

Kengkamol Siwakarnsirikul

(26th March 2012)

3,300 words
(Without contents, personal story, peer cases study and reference)

Kengkamol Siwakarnsirikul (ks506@bath.ac.uk)

Contents

Personal Story

Personal Case Study

Analysis of Personal Case Study

A Peers Case Study

Analysis of Peers Case Study

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Conclusions and Implication

13

Reference

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Kengkamol Siwakarnsirikul (ks506@bath.ac.uk)

Personal Story
My challenging time started when one morning I received an email stated that I was appointed to be the project leader of Distribution Network of Building Material in Philippines: 2010. The origin of this project arose from my Philippines business trip about two weeks before the project announcement. My boss and I had a business trip to visit customers and conducted a small market survey to seek for the new opportunities. One evening during the dinner, we had an informal discussion among our team, suddenly; the idea of having our own warehouse was cropped up. After that, informally, a number of ideas and plans were surged out. However, this project did not run as smooth as I expected. I faced a number of hardship derived from both internal and external of my team. Internal problem, Acceptance was the main issue that I faced with. I got the name list of my team colleagues, which composed of six people who came from different department and they all were my senior colleagues. Though I knew most of them before, once my status had changed from being junior to be their leader, I could feel the gigantic wall between us. In the first few meetings, they were not directly against me via words or action but silence. Worse than that, during that period, it was the sales season; we were stuck with our routine workloads. Consequently, the email was the only way of communication that used to communicate and update our project status. A month passed, there was no progress for this project, and meanwhile, I was depressed by the project timeline. Finally, I decided to call for an open-mind meeting to talk with every single member to find out what was hidden in their minds and what I could do to prove myself and destroy that big wall barrier. After that meeting, everything seemed to be going well until I noticed that the work progress did not going well as plan. Some signs showed me that my team lacked of inspiration to get this project done. To boost up the gust feeling, I arranged the alternately trip for each of them to experience the real market. Surprisingly, the feedback was beyond my expectation, not only more enthusiasm but also the new creativities were adding on to the project by the team member. External problem, as to get the project done, my team was necessary to coordinate with the oversea office and consult with a number of affiliated companies, such as law firm and accountancy. However, collaboration with theses people who came from different cultures and business background was the toughest things that we had to overcome. The power issue came in and played the important role in this situation. Sometimes, when the situations were beyond our authorities, supports from the higher level were required to make our work continue. At the end, this project was handed over to another professional team to run it on.

Case Study (1,143)

This case study details the situation of a young lady, me, who was unintentionally assigned to be the leader of big project that needed to lead the team which members were all senior. With young age and less experience, I struggled with a number of difficulties that derived from both internal and external of my team. These ranged from the opposition from my team to the un-collaboration of the outsiders.

Kengkamol Siwakarnsirikul (ks506@bath.ac.uk) However, instead of being discouraged, I chose to change those negative attitudes to be my source of motivations in conquering those problems. With my strongly desire to meet the accomplishment; various kinds of leadership approaches had been adapted in dealing with different situations. Besides that, the issues of power and emotions were also involved in this case study.

Organizational context As SCGT is a young, but with high growth rate, trading company, its main characteristics are flexible and high adaptive to the changing environment. Think fast, mover fast is the core principal in its operation. However, one of the obstacles is its mixture of old and new corporate culture. As being the subsidiary of the Siam Cement Group, which has been operating almost a hundred years, the hierarchy and seniority still plays an important role in the organizational culture. Meanwhile, SCGT is absorbing the modern culture through the communication with foreign countries. Sometimes, the difference of these cultures creates the conflicts and hardship for the company itself. Easily speaking, SCGT is in the transitional period to find the appropriate organizational culture for itself. Project Context To complete this project, it acquired a very high effort and collaboration of teamwork. The reason was because this kind of business model had never implemented before. It was like a breakthrough revolution for SCGT. The figured 1 and 2 represents the different between the current and the new business model of SCGT at that time.
Retailer Manufacturers Sub-distributor

SCGT
Distributors

Retailer

Retailer Sub-distributor Retailer Figure1: The current business model

Kengkamol Siwakarnsirikul (ks506@bath.ac.uk)

Manufacturers

SCGT Bangkok

SCGT PH Distributor
Sub-distributors

Retailer

Retailer

Retailer Figure2: New business model that will be implemented in PH

Clearly seen that, with the new business model, SCGT shortened its route to market by acting itself as a main distributor and building up its own distribution channel with the purpose of higher margin gain. If the project succeeded as expect, this new model would be used as the prototype for other strategic countries. Unfortunately, because everything was very new to SCGT, information, resources, and capability were deficient during the first phase. Everything had to start from zero. Also, the timeline as six months period was another main constraint of this project.

Key Stakeholders MD and BHP Division board team

The MD and the upper management level were very enthusiastic and had a high expectation that this project would be a new hope of distribution business unit. Also, board team of BHP division, which composed of a division manager and four department managers, all agreed and saw this project as the great opportunity to enhance the BHP business performance. The project team members

There were six members, excluding me, who joined this team as shown in the figure 3. Each team member had working experiences with SCGT more than five years, so they were quite confident and arrogant with their thoughts and capability. Also, combined with culture of hierarchy and seniority, unsurprisingly, I was denied and opposed of being their project leader in the first place. Another reason of their resistance might derive from the fact that the arrival of this project increased their works as double without any benefits in return. For them, to make this project complete as the schedule seemed to be impossible and unreasonable. Moreover, I noticed that my team lack of motivation in executing this project.

Kengkamol Siwakarnsirikul (ks506@bath.ac.uk)

E (Business Development) D (IT) F (Finance )

Project Leader
(Board Product/BHP) C (HIP/BHP)
B (Roofing/BHP) A

(Insulations/BHP)

Figure3: Team Members

Outsiders

As everything was new for us, it was necessary to consult with the specialists. Therefore, collaborations with other subsidiaries, for example, the legal firm, the accountancy, and the oversea offices were significantly required. However, we did not receive the good cooperation as we expected. This might be because this project consumed their time and increase their burdens; conversely, they got nothing in return. Issue At Hand The project did not progress as plan that arose from the non-collaboration and noncompliance of the team member as well as the non-support from the related stakeholders. The need of engagement Team engagement

In the first place, I thought that the uncomfortable atmosphere would disappear if we worked together for a while. One month later, everything seemed to be worse, project had no progress and our relationship was still weird. I could sense the silent protest that radiated out from my team. Every meeting, they listened, not argued but never followed. It seemed like there was a big wall existing between my team and I. Finally, I chose to destroy that barrier by organizing the open-mind session. I listened to all of their problems and frustrations person by person. Then, I showed my apology that I might not be a kind of leader that they might expect. However, thing could not be changed, I asked them to open their minds and gave me a chance to prove that I could lead the team to conquer this project. However, the wall was destroyed only 25% at the end of the first session. I realized that more efforts were required to win their heart. I began to spend more times working with my team. I changed the way of communication from email to 6

Kengkamol Siwakarnsirikul (ks506@bath.ac.uk) be face to face. Soon after, they began to show their thoughts, opinions, or even the confronting problems to me and also to other team members. The intimate atmosphere was gradually created and, finally, that wall was outright destroyed. Higher Level Engagement

In order to smoothen the cooperation with other subsidiaries, both formal and informal relationship was built up. However, in some cases, just good relationship was not enough, we needed more power and authority to get the job done. In the case that was too serious or beyond our authority to deal with, getting the higher-level people to involve was necessary and mostly it was very effective.

The need of motivation Though, the team relationship was getting better, I noticed that the performance of my team was not that efficient and effective as it should be. I realized that they might lack of the project involvement. This was because none of them had a chance to explore the market or even met the overseas staffs that they were dealing with. Then, the alternate trips were immediately arranged for every member. Surprisingly, in the second phase, the project was aggressively progressed. Lesson Identified From this case study, there were a number of leadership lessons to be learned. Good leader should be observant and recognize the change of surroundings all the time. When identify the cause and problem, the internal and external contexts are necessarily took into account. Adapting leadership approaches are required in dealing with different situations. Power and emotions are major issues that play an important role and affect to the leadership

Analysis of Case Study (836)

According to the problem classification that introduced by Rittel and Webber (1973), Tames and Wicked are the two main types of problems. The major characteristics of tames problem are relatively well defined, has a clear solution that could be evaluated whether it is correct or incorrect, and finally similar problem can be solved by similar approach. On the other hand, wicked problems are not that well defined and mostly are associated to the social issues, such as moral, political, and etc. There is no fixed manner to solve wicked problems, even if it is the same kind of problems. Besides that, wicked problems highly depend on the stakeholders and the dynamic of social context. From my case, it obviously demonstrates as a wicked problem because it strongly involved with human and social issues. As French and Ravens five forms of Power (1959) illustrates 7

Kengkamol Siwakarnsirikul (ks506@bath.ac.uk) that the power and influence of leader can be derived from two majors sources, these are position and personal attributes. Initially, I chose to lead my team based on the legitimate power that descended from my position as the project leader. I managed and allocated the tasks based on my discretion with the thoughts that they were all professional, so the jobs had to be done easily. In reality, the outcome was in the opposite way. I was sure that I chose the wrong way and new approach in accessing my team was urgently required. Then, the transformational approach (Bass, 1990) was adapted to deal with my confronting situation. As being the transformational leaders, it is necessary to inspire and excite their staff with the idea that everyone can achieve, just only put their great effort to their works. Further that, the leaders have to know the differences among their staffs and try to meet all those kinds of individual needs. That is why the open-mind session was organized to listen and understand the emotional needs of every single of my staff. After that, I spent more time to work with my team in order to learn more about each other. When trouble occurred, I was always there and solved the problem together with my team. In doing so, I hoped that my team would be more open-up and counted me as a part of their team. However, to make them trust and accept in me was very difficult. It took me sometimes to prove myself as a competent and good leader. In this situation, my leadership style could be categorized as an achiever in accordance with the theory mentioned by Rook and Torbert (2005), which states that the achievers try to create the positive work environment and have an ability to enhance the staffs engagement. In order to make the great transformation or solve the severe conflicts, positive relationships and ability to influent others are required. Finally, to gain the completely acceptance from my team, I decided to build up my own power via the expert and referent source, instead of the positional power, not surprisingly, it worked very well as I expected. However, from my observation, the performance of my team was not as good as it should, in spite of no conflicts or difficulties. Searching for a while, I found out that they all lacked of motivation and inspiration. Finally, the true cause was discovered, they had no intrinsic motivation. Malone and Lepper (1987) defined the intrinsic motivation as what people will do without external inducement. The seven factors that help to promote the intrinsic motivation are challenge, control, curiosity, fantasy, cooperation, competition, and recognition. I selected to arouse my teams intrinsic motivation with curiosity factor by arranging trips to visit Philippines to give them an opportunity to explore the market, meet the customers, and get familiar with the oversea staffs. As the result, overwhelming eagerness and creativity were surging out through their performance. At that time, I also faced with the hardship in dealing with the outsiders who mostly were our subsidiaries. Fortunately, I had a good relationship with some seniors and bosses who gave me very best supports. With these connections, I could also access to the upper-level management who helped facilitate our liaison with external parties more efficient. This execution of mine can be matched to the topic of Mete out resource as mentioned by Pfeffer (2010). He suggested that we could generate our own power if we have the ability to control over the important resources to others as well as to access to the influential people to garner their supports.

Kengkamol Siwakarnsirikul (ks506@bath.ac.uk) Looking back, one thing that I missed was to organize the reflection session for my team. Gosling and Mintzberg (2004) said that reflection is a time-out for the manger and team to stop and think of the meaning of their experiences. Reflecting is about to think why thing happened and how could it be different from other happenings. I believed that if my team would have had the collective reflections, not only the group performance would be enhanced but also self-development would be incurred individually.

Peers Case Study (The case of Keiichi Nakamura)

In 2010, Keiichi was in charge of an auditing team as a senior staff in an accounting firm, one of so-called Big Four. A client he audited produced TV programs. This auditing was conducted to verify the clients financial statement with planned to finish approximately in three weeks. In auditing, it was common that a manager supervised an auditing team where a member of senior staff controlled the team as a field leader. The auditing team consisted of four junior staff and him (Three of them will be described below). Although the auditing was not as important as others because it was not a mandatory auditing, not required by laws, it was challenging for him for the following reasons: he did not have sufficient experience of team management; all the junior staff had just one year experience; the team manager was famous for a low reputation of managing auditing teams; the client was just transferred from another accounting firm. These concerns had worried him before we began the auditing. In advance of this auditing, he was considering what a good team leader was, looking back to his period of junior staff. The type of leader he identified the best was a person who makes an atmosphere where it is easy for subordinates to ask questions to the team leader, listens to subordinates carefully and then gives a clear guidance against accounting issues. Therefore, he decided to try to realize them. Firstly, in order to make the atmosphere, he thought that the most effective way to achieve that was having many communications in informal situations. This attributes to the period when he was a junior. He appreciated his seniors who encouraged conversations and behaved friendly to their subordinates in informal situations. Such teams had a good atmosphere in an auditing room as well, which prompted an efficient and effective auditing where issues were often found with the trigger of juniors questions. Moreover, since this team was just organized for this client, all members had not had conversations so much before. Therefore, it was important to have as many communications as possible especially at the beginning of the auditing. Then, he kept in mind that he should listen to them carefully. In addition, in order to give clear advices as the leader, he prepared the auditing by reviewing the auditing procedure and information about the client in advance. Once they began the auditing for the client, he tried to realize the plan. In order to make the atmosphere, he tried to have as many conversations as possible during lunchtime as well as in the auditing room. Especially, talks in lunchtime appeared to be effective because informal conversations broke the ice in the team. As a result, his team had a good

Kengkamol Siwakarnsirikul (ks506@bath.ac.uk) atmosphere where it was easy for the staff to ask questions. However, he could not be confident in whether gave them clear instructions or advices because there were some issues generated during the auditing, seen from junior A and B, while one good observation, seen from junior C. One junior, named A, was a person with a high motivation for his task. He struggled to examine a specific account in the clients financial statement because he had not taken charge of the account before. In addition, this account generated a disruption of accounting treatment because it did not correctly reflect its economic reality of the transaction. The staff asked Keiichi how to deal with this problem, and Keiichi gave him some advices. Since this was the most significant issue during this auditing, it took time for the staff to investigate the account. Considering the time that the staff took for the issue, he might have needed more supports. Keiichi was not sure whether he could give effective advices. Another junior, named B, was a person who tended not to pay much attention for his working. He was responsible for sending confirmation letters to banks to verify the validity of companys cash balance. He was supposed to send them to all the banks, but he missed dispatching one of the confirmations. Keiichi should have asked him about this procedure at the beginning of the auditing. It was true that the staff caused the mistake, but Keiichi might have needed to take care of him more carefully as a leader. On the other hand, one of the staff pointed out Keiichis good aspect as a leader. Another junior, named C, told him that he was a nice listener and it was easy for her to ask him questions. According to her, Keiichi was distinct in this point compared to other peers. It made sense that Keiichi tried to make the atmosphere where they could ask questions easily and be a good listener. As for the relationship with client, there was a problem. The accounting manager of the client could not smoothly prepare documents required for the auditing because he had just become a manager instead of the previous manager who left the company. This was a typical situation where a delay of auditing happened. In this case, auditors should demand the submission of the documents against clients, though; Keiichi could not strongly insist it because he was afraid of creating a conflict between the client and his team. Actually, the accounting manager was had a polite attitude to Keiichis team and appeared to try to live up to their demands. Keiichi did not want to break a favorable relationship. However, it was true that his attitude exaggerated a delay of the auditing. Despite of the teams efforts, auditing procedure were delayed mainly due to the lack of Keiichis leadership. As a result, the manager supervising the team assigned another member of senior, who was a senior of him and had sufficient experiences. Though they could finish the auditing thanks to the senior, they needed to postpone the auditing reporting date by a week. Since this auditing was not a mandatory, this event did not become a major issue. However, this result had to be avoided as much as possible because an auditing report was a final and the most important derivable for audit corporations.

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Kengkamol Siwakarnsirikul (ks506@bath.ac.uk)

Analysis of Peers Case (834)

According to the case of Keiichi, the analysis will be separated into two main parts. First part will discuss about Keiichi himself and another will analyze the ways of his leadership. From the case, it clearly showed that Keiichi himself had an innate characteristic of good leader. As shown, in order to get familiar with his team members in the first place, he tried to create the informal atmosphere in order to form a good relationship with every single of his member as well as encourage them to show their feeling and problems to him, both personal and impersonal issues. The characteristic of Keiichi could be explained by the five-factor model of personality, (Digma, 1990), which illustrates the five broad different variables that define human personality and account for personal differences. The five factors are composed of the openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. These five variables are considered to be the fundamental traits that create the individual overall personality. If consider characteristic of Keiichi, it might be the combination of the agreeableness and conscientiousness traits. This is because his personality mostly matches the commonality characteristic of people who are agreeable and conscientious, as shown in the figure1, for instance friendly, dependable, compassionate, and so forth.

Agreeableness Friendly Cooperative Compassionate Gentle and warm Affectionate Sympathetic

Conscientiousness Dependable Responsible Honest Reliable Conscientious Organized Methodic Thorough

Figure4: The common characteristics of Agreeable and Conscientiousness (Digma, 1990)

Also, from the case, it can be noticed that he was far more focusing on forming teamwork, by organizing, supporting, and developing his team, rather than pushing up the tasks to be done. This could be demonstrated that he was kind of people-oriented rather than task-oriented leadership. However, in reality, the successful leadership should balance between these two extreme to fit the job they are assigned. Consequently, the theory of situational leadership mentioned by Hersey and Blanchard (1977) is suggested for this project. The theory states that the successful leaders should adapt their leadership style based on the maturity of their people and type of task they are responsible for. The table below shows the appropriate pairing between maturity level and leadership style introduced by this theory.

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Kengkamol Siwakarnsirikul (ks506@bath.ac.uk) Regarding to his team, each member had different level of maturity, so he should approach each of them with different leadership style, for instance, staff A seemed to be ranked in the medium range of maturity because he had limited skills in term of account. Therefore, the selling approach is the most proper way to lead him. This approach emphasize on communication between leader and follower. Keiichi has to provide information and explain the directions of his tasks in a supportive and persuasive way in order to get him on board.

Maturity Level Low maturity

Most Appropriate Leadership Style Telling/directing

Medium maturity, limited skills

Selling/coaching

Medium maturity, higher skills but lacking confidence High maturity

Participating/supporting

Delegating

Figure5: The matching of the maturity level and appropriate leadership style

In order to deal with Staff B who did not pay much attention to his work, after considering, the cause might arise from the motivation issue. As mentioned by Herzberg (1923-200) that, apart from adopting democratic approach, leader should improve the content of the employees job through some methods such as Job enlargement, Job enrichment, or empowerment. In this situation, Staff B might think that his job was not challenging enough, so Keiichi has to enlarge his job by assigning more challenging responsibilities and delegate more power to him to make his own decision for his responsible area. By this way, he might be more enthusiastic and energetic to work with this team. In another aspect, Keiichis leadership style can be categorized as a mixture between the diplomat and expert type of transformational leadership, which mentioned by Rook and Torbert (2005). Interestingly, he obtained the advantages from both sides. Easily speaking, as he was an accountant whose common personality is a great contributor that derived from the strong pursuit of continuing improvement. The consensus will be reached only logic and hard data are presented. On the other hand, because of his nature trait as a friendly and compromise person, he was counted as a diplomat. However, if he would like to be a successful leader, he needs to improve into the higher level as an achiever and individualist respectively. One major thing that differentiates achiever and

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Kengkamol Siwakarnsirikul (ks506@bath.ac.uk) individualist is their awareness of a possible conflict between their principles and their actions, or between the organization's values and its implementation of those values, mentioned by Rook and Robert. With this ability, he will be able to deal with any conflicts far more effectively and efficiently. The negotiation is another skill of leadership that Keiichi is needed to improve. According to the research of Shell (2006), he illustrates that the style deployed by individual during the negotiation depends on the context and the other partys interest. The negotiation style can be divided into five options; these are accommodating, avoiding, collaborating, competing, and compromising. Keiichi chose the accommodating style in dealing with his customers because he wanted to maintain his good relationship with them. However, in this confronting situation which time was his constraint, he should apply the collaborating approach with strong assertiveness instead. By this mean, Keiichi will cooperate with the accounting manager of his client to solve the problem in the creative way, instead of leaving him solve the problem by himself.

Conclusions and Implications (487)

Although, in these two cases, we confronted with the different situations and chose the different approach to tackle our hardships, there were some similarities that were we had the limited experience and skill of being a good leader at that time. Moreover, we both were categorized as the transformational leadership but in the different type. This might arose from our differences in personality and vocation. However, as a leader, no matter what incidents that we are going to face with, the important things that we have to keep in mind as the key successes are as follows. Initially, the individual needs are necessary to be accessed and served as mentioned by the theory of Maslow (1943). If all their needs could be responded, certainly, their intrinsic motivation will be created and leads to the better in work performance. Apart from needs, understanding the personality of each staff is also important because it would be a valuable clues for leaders to adopt the suitable practices as well as motives to elevate the staffs performance. Another lesson learnt from the cases is the informal atmosphere extremely works in forming the great teamwork. The intimacy in the workplace, not only make staff relax, but also encourage them to be more open-up and share their thoughts and feeling to the others. Besides that, good leaders should have a high ability to gain power and exercise their power in the appropriate way. Sometimes, only their own power might not be enough, so external power might be required to make the job done smoothly, the situation in the first case is a good example. Power and influence is very useful tool if it is properly used, but if not, the outcome might be in the opposite way. The balancing between task oriented and people oriented is also a requisite. In the case of Keiichi, he cared so much about his people that the task was ignored. Hence, the jobs could not meet the timeline and, finally, was taken over by another person. Thing to be

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Kengkamol Siwakarnsirikul (ks506@bath.ac.uk) learnt here is the context of task, people, and surrounding elements are significant to be considered in order to make the right balance. Last but not least, team reflection is another tool that leader should apply. It is just a small period that team members spend to think about the effectiveness of their work as a team. With the reflection, team will not only attain the optimum productivity, but also the cooperative learning atmosphere.

All in all, obviously seen, the leadership is the process of unending learning and accumulating the experiences from the real situations. Every time that you have a chance to lead, always the new lesson is waiting for you to learn. Ultimately, I found out that no single leadership style is perfect. To obtain the achievement, leader must wisely adapt and adopt the right tools to deal with the right people and the right situations.

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Kengkamol Siwakarnsirikul (ks506@bath.ac.uk)

References
Bass, B. M., 1999. Two Decades of Research and Development in Transformational Leadership. European Journal of Work & Organizational Psychology, 8, pp. 9-32. Digman, J. M., 1990. Personality structure: Emergence of the five-factor model. Annual Review of Psychology, 41, 417-440. French, J., and Raven, B. H., 1959. The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in social power, pp. 150-167. Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research. Gosling, J and H Mintzberg., 2004. The education of practicing managers. MIT Sloan Management Review 45(4), pp. 19-22. Herzberg, F., 1923-2000. Herzbergs Motivators and Hygiene Factors [online] Available at: < http://www.lacpa.org.lb/Includes/Images/Docs/TC/TC308.pdf > [Accessed 22 February 2012 ]. Hersey, P. and Blanchard, K. H. (1977) The Management of Organizational Behaviour 3e, Upper Saddle River N. J.: Prentice Hall. Malone, T. W., and Lepper, M. R., 1987. Making learning fun: A taxonomic model of intrinsic motivations for learning. In R. E. Snow & M. J. Farr (Eds.), Aptitude, learning, and instruction: III. Conative and affective process analysis, pp. 223-253. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Maslow, A., 1943. A theory of human motivation, Psychological Review, vol. 50, 1943, 370-96. Pfeffer, J., 2010. Power Play. Harvard Business Review 88(7/8): pp. 84-92. Rittel, H. and Webber,M., 1973. Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. Policy Sciences 4(1973), pp. 155-169 Rooke, D. and W. R. Torbert ., 2005. 7 Transformations of Leadership. Harvard Business Review 83(4): pp. 66-66. Shell, R.G., 2006. Bargaining for advantage. New York, NY: Penguin Books.

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