Revamping Leadership Essay

Submitted By iheartpbnj
Words: 1691
Pages: 7

Revamping leadership
Colorado State University

Being employed by a local government I am accustomed to the constant stream of politics brought on by not only policy but citizens of my city; however, after twelve years with this organization I still have not been able to accept the internal politics that have led to unproductive work habits and declining performance within my division.
Recently the city underwent a political change that took us from being a council-manager form of government to a strong-mayor type of government; with this change has come a significant amount of unknowns, stress, and changes within the organization. The roles of leadership have changed; the newly elected mayor was/is looking for leaders that define the organization and can lead it forward and is more concerned than those of the past with the selection and development of people who can provide these services to set us apart from the private sector. This has played a role in the way that management is choosing to lead their staff. Unfortunately, my division has found that there are behaviors that our manager is engaging in that are impacting the effectiveness of the entire division.
Our manager whom most employees respected has begun to run this division through fear and intimidation while getting heavily involved in internal politic thus resulting in a dysfunctional division. Our manager whom I’ll refer to as DK has went from being a fairly hands off manager who let you do your job in the way that you felt was most effective (after all you are the one who does it every day and knows what steps need to be taken to successfully complete it) to a manager who micromanages each job terribly and who doesn’t support a majority of his staff; except for those who are included in his personal agenda, the employees that he has hired (friends), promoted, and showed other forms of favoritism to at the expense of those who are likely more qualified and certainly higher performers. A recent example of this was when my co-worker and I were having an issue with our direct supervisor. As part of DK’s recent organizational change my co-worker and I were put under a gentleman whose main concern is empire building in an attempt to not be put on the layoff list after the mayor has conducted his review of the organization. This particular manager has taken a number of steps to not only sabotage employees directly but also the programs in which they work through creating battles around budget, strategies and operations. As the supervisor for the traffic count program I personally have been one of the individuals who have been sabotaged by this person, not only through him placing blame on me for tasks not being completed but to the program itself. After being approached by one of my employees about this particular supervisor sending her inappropriate text messages during and off of work time I felt as though it was my responsibility to speak to DK about the growing number of issues we were experiencing with this gentleman. During my meeting with DK I expressed my concerns with him regarding the supervisor and his behavior regarding work behavior as well as the sexual harassment that he was participating in both in and outside of work with my employee. DK appeared receptive to what he was being told and assured me that the situation was going to be taken care of immediately, that he would be talking to the supervisor after we had finished our conversation and immediate action would be taken to rectify the issues. Approximately 30 minutes later I was asked to join DK in his office, only to find my supervisor and co-worker sitting in there already. DK started his lecture with “Some of you in here won’t be happy when you leave” and at this point I knew that it was not going to be good for my co-worker and I as DK and our supervisor are very close friends. DK proceeded to tell my co-worker and I that if he heard any more about this