Application of Ethical Leadership – Task 1
Leader’s Traits
Over the past eight years I have had the pleasure of working directly for the CIO of our company. Even as our leadership team has transformed several times by growing or shrinking over the years her style and character have stayed true. Our CIO has always shown a strong respect for others regardless of their role in the organization. She also strives to be a great team builder.
In my opinion, one of the most important ethical traits for leader to demonstrate is the respect that he or she has toward others. She has shown her respect to all levels within our organization by her willingness to listen attentively, show compassion, being open minded to all ideas and valuing everyone’s contributions. In fact, I have seen her demonstrate all of these within one meeting. An employee was pitching his idea for a new product roll out and while everyone listening knew the idea was very juvenile and completely unusable, she paid close attention. She then asked very leading but gentle questions to point him in the right direction. By the end of the presentation, the employee had completely changed their thinking about the roll out but almost believed it was their idea. She then thanked him for all the hard work and thought he had put into his idea and presentation. She took what could have been a waste of time and made it a great coaching and growth moment for the staff member and a great mentoring moment for the rest of her leadership team in the room.
She also focuses on teambuilding. She works closely with our teams to foster a sense of team spirit within the organization. She encourages our teams to find ways to pull closer together and find common ground. She recently had the leadership team certified to facilitate “True Colors”, which is a personality/temperament course. As a leadership team, we took the class together first to determine each of our temperaments. Knowing where each of us fell...