Personal Model of an Effective Leader

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Second, while a manager exercises power granted by his position in a hierarchy over his subordinates, a leader does not need formal authority to influence his followers. On the one hand, power exercised by a manager tend to be associated with “fear” from his subordinates. On the other hand, leaders inspire trust and admiration in their followers. This point perfectly explain how leaders “show the way” as opposed to managers.

Third, while managers’ goals are mostly short-term, a leader could forgo immediate satisfaction, envisions change and focus on long-term. Let me give a couple of real examples on this. Myopic politicians are mostly concerned about elections and ways to get votes. This behavior leads to increase public spending (or cutting taxes) whenever elections are approaching, ignoring long-term effects on debt sustainability. Similarly, when business managers focus on the short-term, they choose to turn profits to shareholders immediately instead of spending money to increase productivity, the greatest driver of economic growth. This is achieved by neglecting investments on R&D, on capital spending, and on employee training. This short-term perspective undermines long-term economic growth.

- My current positioning with respect to my model of an effective business leader

My current relative positioning with respect to the model outlined above is shown by the thumbs in the chart. I think I “know the way” of doing things, and this makes me an expert of my field. I have spent my student life and professional path so far developing capabilities, which are valuable and greatly appreciated in the financial services industry. I received my Bachelor and Master degrees with honors and then started working in portfolio management early in my career. In this role, I became even more curious about the skills and capabilities of other players in the industry and my hunger for knowledge took me back to academia to gain a deeper technical understanding of the tools and quantitative models used in financial services. Armed with this willingness to learn, I passed PhD level courses in quantitative finance and became a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) very quickly. In my last job before starting the MBA, I used my expertise to benefit different players in the industry by advising them to make better informed investment decisions. This has led me to build an excellent reputation among my colleagues and senior management, resulting in winning two corporate awards for an outstanding contribution to the company’s performance goals. Indeed, I can define myself as a very knowledgeable person in my sector.

Turning to the “go the way” part, I think I am following the right path to become a good manager. Let me explain why. My intellectual curiosity has always led me to look at the world from all possible angles. This implies that I am particularly good at assessing risks and evaluating pros and cons of actions. Each time I form an opinion on something, I challenge myself to consider alternative/opposite views equally worthy of consideration. In my professional work, I have put this decision-making process into practice. Only after such a thoughtful evaluation process, I take action. However, I think I am not mastering the ability of building my own network and most of times, I choose to take decisions on my own, rather than engaging with other people and ask their point of view. The reason of this is twofold. On one hand, this is in part motivated by my introvert personality, which makes me prefer dodging potential conflicts and working on my own. On the other hand, it is motivated by the fact that I want to be fully accountable for my actions, whether these lead to a success or a failure.

Finally, I believe I am also strengthening all of the “show the way” toolkit that a successful leader need to possess. My knowledge has always enabled me to persuade people around me. In most team assignments so far I displayed (and enjoyed!) a marked aptitude to lead the discussion, and to persuade my team members to follow my line of thought. However, it happened in the past that when I feel I do not have a complete mastery of the subject, I refrain to make comments or valuable inputs and I prefer to leave the leadership to others.

- My developmental focus areas

I definitely want to be a leader (in accordance to my model), and this is one of the fundamental reasons I decided to pursue an MBA. In order to reach success and job satisfaction in the field of social sciences, being an expert is not enough. In the global financial industry, one needs to interact and coordinate with individuals with different culture, background, and skills. Increasing a firm’s profits cannot be achieved by applying textbook knowledge into practice, but by leveraging the synergies of all the people working across the production chain. That is, being a leader in a business environment requires the coordination and help of others. Succeeding in this task can also be rewarding in terms of social and financial recognition.

Honestly, before starting this course I was skeptic about the effectiveness of teaching leadership skills just with articles, simulations, and case studies. I thought a leader was so by nature or because he learnt from real experiences. So far, I am happy I have been proved wrong. Indeed, I believe that building a behavioral repertoire, overcoming biases which undermine critical thinking, and influencing others without authority, are valuable skills for decision making that can be taught.

My learning goal for this course (and for the MBA in general) is to stretch my comfort zone by trying different behaviors, for example participating in public speaking seminars, networking with peers, raising my hand during classes. Going forward, my goals for the rest of the class mostly deal with gaining a new perspective of teamwork. As I said before, my current approach to teamwork consists of running the complete task individually and then discuss it. Probably this is not the most efficient way to work. I am curios to learn hints to develop a team decision making process, to divide the work among team members, and lead a discussion making every one motivated.

- References

Darling, M., Parry, C., & Moore, J. (2005). Learning in the thick of it. Harvard Business Review, 83(7/8), 84- 92.

Gino, F., Bazerman, M., and Schonk, K. (2016). Organizational Behavior Reading: Decision Making. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Leadership in focus. Melissa McSherry: Leading an Expert. Stanford