Finding the Balance between a Great and an Effective Leader: An example

Finding the Balance between a Great and an Effective Leader: An example

There are so many skills, qualities and characteristics that guarantee effectiveness and great leadership. Not all may be present within an individual leader, it is however important that a leader possesses some critical ones in my opinion. The qualities most important to me include the drive for results; commitment and ‘knowledgeability’ of an individual leader. For a leader to be considered of character, such a leader must be decisive, very balanced in thoughts and decision; and feeds back or communicates effectively.  With such qualities and characteristics, such a leader would most certainly possess skills sets that include: - interpersonal skills, ability to empower and delegate functions, positive encouraging spirit and many others that may not come to mind now.

I worked with some really great and inspiring personalities who were often times not so effective in leading teams and I have also worked with effective leaders who were not often considered that inspirational or great by the teams they lead. Finding the balance between being a great and an effective leader is not always easy. My current boss - Ms. Jean (not real name) is one such rare person who tries to balance out on the qualities, character and skills that propels her forward as an effective and great leader within the country office.

Ms. Jean is passionate about service delivery and working for and with children. She is currently engaged in building community structures and strengthening 56 local governments in central and western Uganda to ensure that they deliver results for the children and women in this part of the Uganda so that the children remain safe, alive and learning. She has worked in this organisation for over 20 years. Currently, she supervises 11 staff; out of which 7 are senior program specialists with diverse backgrounds - water engineers, child protection specialists, medical doctors, evaluation specialists...

Working with such a number of professionals necessitates the Ms. Jean possesses those qualities, character and skills highlighted above. Because of her drive for results she has not only instituted a check list of indicators that contributes directly to the office annual reports and the millennium development goals (MDGs) reports for Uganda, but has ensured each team member reports on this on a monthly basis. To do this, Jean organised all the 11 staffs into ‘task teams’, with a group responsible for a certain number of local governments and another group responsible for the compilation of monthly data. This sounds tedious and monotonous and mind you, it is only one of the several roles that the team have to play as an office. What she did then was to introduce a form of recognition to best written and analysed reports.

A monthly  office meeting is conducted once every month where such recognition is announced. A tin of exotic cookies and a big silver star awaits the best report and the second best report gets to have a smaller blue star; these are usually pinned on the wall next to the performing officers for all to see the ‘star of the month’ and the individual officer gets to have it until the next reporting period. I am sure someone might be saying “this method works in a kindergarten”. Hold it; the boss has not only achieved her results, but kept the warmth and the team together. The fact that this process is on every month, regardless of her presence in office or not, is an indication of how far Ms. Jean can stretch her commitment for what she believes in. I must tell you, no other section of office within the country office has ever been able to meet this target consistently as her team did since 2011.

She is very knowledgeable, and one can assess this by the fact that she is able to effectively supervise the team in spite of different areas of specialisation and work (child protection, maternal and child health, paediatric HIV/AIDS, water engineers, administrators etc.). She critiques all of the different team members satisfactorily and the team remains motivated.

She has developed trust and delegated most of her functions at the district local government levels to respective specialists. She delegates with full authority (empowers) because she is able to quickly expand and learn new roles herself, and not worried that someone is taking over her space.

As a person she is very objective and understanding of personal limitations of staff and provides regular feed back to their work. For instance, she has never failed to meet the target of conducting 2 performance evaluation discussions per year per staff for all the 11 staffs.
As I therefore conclude, one can clearly see that this boss certainly possesses all the skills mentioned above such as interpersonal skills, ability to empower and delegate functions, positive encouraging spirit. To be a great and effective leader, one needs the qualities, the character and the skills to deliver.