Leadership is a role that focuses on accomplishing a goal by directing. To successfully accomplish a goal through direction requires leaders to adopt a lot of strategies based on their situation. Depending on the situation or the pattern of the mission leaders adopt different methods to direct followers day after day. Year after year through different circumstances.

Communication plays a very important role in leadership and to maintain successful organizational transformations. In this essay, I will try to explore the significance of effective communication in change leadership by drawing insights from two books: “Leading Change by John P. Kotter and “Management 3.0 by Jurgen Appelo”. Both of these books on Management and Leadership give an idea of challenges during organizational transformation and give a solid idea of how the impact of effective communication is crucial to successful organizational transformation. There are different types of Leadership practices that convey communication very differently than each other. Leadership style can be different from organization to organization.

In today’s competitive business landscape, effective communication is very important to handle bottlenecks to increase the power of adaptability and flexibility. That means proper use of technical knowledge, methodology, and paying attention to the human factor combinedly to be the most efficient leader in this changed business era. Communication reflects a lot of tools that not only ease the process but also create a synergy within teams to achieve the best outcome.

Communication Challenges During Organizational Transformations:

John P. Kotter the Author of the book “Leading Change” reflected in his book on the communication challenges leaders encounter during organizational transformation. In his book he highlighted the complexities of communicating the change vision, managing resistance and overcoming barriers to effective communication(Kotter, 2012). Which I found very relevant to our company Crevio Osk, during the early day’s of Crevio we had a lot of difficulties with conveying the right vision with our company and fast forward to now it is now more relevant considering the difficulties that we face every day to move forward with our goals of the company. Kotter emphasized the importance of maintaining a consistent and transparent flow of information throughout the transformation process and also creating a sense of urgency, communicating the reasons for change. To tackle such situations Kotter discussed some strategies such as storytelling, creating a guideline, and addressing everyone’s concerns to foster communication and support between every member of the team.

Agile Leadership in Management 3.0

In Management 3.0 Appelo focused on Agile leadership and emphasises the importance of effective communication for leaders in business.  Agile Leaders are more humane, democratic, and inclusive leaders. They give their teams the “why” and trust them to discover and deliver the “how.” They provide their teams with the autonomy to self-organize, create and do the work.(Appelo, 2011). The agile leadership management style has a bunch of benefits because of the uniqueness of the strategy. It improves the responsiveness in communication at all levels of the organization by improving communication between and within the team. Thus the team increases a lot of confidence individually also improving the team’s overall motivation and involvement. The organization forms in a way to empower leaders and thus empowers the whole organization. Agile leaders focus on continuously improving the culture in order to maintain an inspiring environment for their teams. Healthy culture within an organization is very important to the success of teams, under agile leadership management healthy work culture improvement happens a lot because instead of micromanaging and controlling their team, leaders trust their team to discover and actually give room to discover and deliver the best possible outcome form the team.

Transactional leadership in an organization

The transactional Leadership style focuses on rewards and punishment to get optimum performance from the team. This leadership model is based on the exchange or transaction of reward and punishment for performance on the job. Transactional leaders set clear expectation and put targets on their team or individual subordinates by establishing rules and procedures. The key components of this management style are to Monitoring and micromanaging the organization. They closely monitor and actively monitor the performance and intervene regularly if they identify any issues arising that might deviate from expectations.

Authentic Leadership

Authentic leadership depends on building a trusting relationship and encourages openness and authenticity among their subordinate. Authentic leaders emphasize on being true to themselves, maintaining a high ethical standard, and promoting transparency. Authentic leadership is beneficial in organizations as it helps to develop and encourage employee engagement, job satisfaction and a higher standard of work. Under Authentic Leadership they create a certain environment where employees are more inspired and empowered to reach their full potential by receiving guidance, support, and room to grow.

(Authentic Leadership: What It Is, Why It Matters, n.d.)

Characteristics of Authentic Leaders:

• They’re committed to improving themselves
• They cultivate self-awareness
• They are disciplined
• They are Mission-driven
• They Inspire faith

Becoming an Authentic Leader is not so very complicated process. To improve your leadership in yourself, try to follow these 5 tips that will build an authentic leadership style in yourself.

References

Appelo, J. (2011). Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders. Addison-Wesley.

Authentic Leadership: What It Is, Why It Matters. (n.d.). Center for Creative Leadership. Retrieved May 21, 2023, from https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/authenticity-1-idea-3-facts-5-tips/

Kotter, J. P. (2012). Leading Change. Harvard Business Review Press.