Task-oriented or People-oriented ?

 After I took the Least Preferred Coworker Scale by Fiedler, I found myself as a task-oriented leader. Then, I was on my journal to understand what it means, why I am a task-oriented leader, and the pros cons that come with it.

Task-oriented leadership often means doing their best to get the job done. This approach tends to emphasize completing tasks required to meet organizational goals. However, I think the task-oriented style is much more like a manager that focus on tasks needed to achieve goals. One of the significant defects is that task-oriented leadership is more likely to lack attention to the well-being of team members and tend to be deficiency in many situations that require proper leadership to keep employees satisfied with their work.

I believe the manager’s job is to plan, organize and coordinate. The leader’s job is to inspire and motivate, even though leaders sometimes tend to be both. In the past, I always came out with structure, plans, and schedules for getting things done. I wrote down a to-do list, prioritizing achievement, and sticking to rigid schedules. However, I think it is considered as autocratic and oftentimes, lead to motivation problems. I reckon that most talented people do not want to be lead by authoritarian, especially when a company highly rely on talented employees such as Google, Apple, Tesla, 3M, or Honeywell. For example, Google.org, the philanthropic arm of search giant Google that offers funding, innovation and technical expertise to underserved communities, announced on Monday that it will invest $14 million in the nonprofit Goodwill Digital Career Accelerator. Together, their goal is to help people of color, under-represented groups, people from rural areas and those without high school and college degrees attain credentials that will offer entry into the workforce with good, well-paying jobs. 

After all, a company is formed by a group of people. The past success is not a ganretee to future success. The ultimate throttle on growth for any great company is not markets, or technology, or competition, or products. The ability to get and keep enough of the right people is considered to be the most important part of an organization to survive in the long term. Therefore, I have to learn more about how to replace my task-oriented leadership by an more more effective one.

References

Kelly, J. (2022, May 12). Google's $14 million investment into goodwill empowers underserved people to gain access to well-paying jobs. Forbes. Retrieved June 21, 2022, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/05/11/googles-14-million-investment-into-goodwill-empowers-underserved-people-to-gain-access-to-well-paying-jobs/?sh=76f26f0460bf 

What is task-oriented leadership? - st. thomas online. STU. (2022, June 16). Retrieved June 21, 2022, from https://online.stu.edu/degrees/education/what-is-task-oriented-leadership/