PS391 Unit 4 Developing Others Paper Example

My Old Friends Got the Good Assignments: A PS391 Unit 4 Developing Others Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS391: Psychology of Leadership

Unit 4 Developing Others Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the warehouse, the crew and every figure are composite and illustrative; the sources cited are real.

The Spreadsheet

Nine months after I took over the night crew, a picker named Jalen asked why he had never been offered forklift certification, which pays a dollar more an hour. I said I would look into it. That night I made a spreadsheet of every development opportunity I had controlled since my promotion: forklift and reach-truck certifications, lead picker shifts, training new hires and the overtime that comes with peak weeks.

The pattern was hard to look at. Of eleven opportunities, eight had gone to five people I had worked beside and been friends with before my promotion. Jalen, who had joined six months before I was promoted and rarely talked with me, had received none, though his accuracy was among the best on the floor.

Leader-Member Exchange

Leader-member exchange theory starts from a plain observation: a supervisor holds a separate bond with every person on a crew rather than a single bond with the crew, and some of those are much closer than others. High-quality relationships involve trust, mutual support and more opportunities; lower-quality ones stay closer to the formal job.

Dulebohn et al. (2012) pooled the studies on what builds these relationships and what follows from them. How the leader behaves mattered, and so did how capable the follower was, but so did how alike the two people felt. Followers in the closer relationships turned in stronger work, enjoyed it more, felt bound to the company and seldom talked about quitting.

I had not chosen favorites; I had chosen the people I already knew, which looked the same from Jalen's side of the floor.

My spreadsheet matched the research uncomfortably well. Familiarity and similarity had shaped who I trusted with opportunities, and those opportunities would in turn build their skills and loyalty while others' stalled. If Dulebohn and colleagues' findings held, people like Jalen were more likely to leave.

Developing Everyone

Bass and Riggio (2006) picture the leader who practices individualized consideration as a coach to every follower, someone who learns what each person wants from the job. The key word is each. I decided to make development deliberate rather than relational.

First, I posted every development opportunity on the break room board, with clear criteria, such as six months of accuracy above ninety-eight percent for forklift certification, and a sign-up sheet.

Second, I started fifteen-minute monthly development conversations with every crew member, asking what skill or role they wanted to work toward. Several people, including Jalen, had goals I had never heard, from moving to the day-shift inventory team to studying for a commercial driver's license.

Third, I began coaching in small doses on the floor, following a simple pattern: ask what the person is trying to do, watch, ask what they noticed, and suggest one adjustment.

A Coaching Moment on the Floor

One example shows what small-dose coaching looked like. Keisha, a picker in her second month, was accurate but slow, and she worried about it. One night I asked what she was trying to do when she reached a new aisle. She said she read the whole pick list first so she would not miss anything. I watched her work two aisles. Then I asked what she noticed about her path. She said she was walking past the same bays twice. I suggested she read only the next three picks and plan a single pass through the aisle, which is how faster pickers work. Over the next two weeks she picked roughly a fifth more cases per hour, and her mispicks did not go up. The conversation took four minutes, and most of it was her talking. Before, I would have told her to "pick up the pace," which would have made her more anxious and probably less accurate.

What I Learned About Myself

The spreadsheet taught me something uncomfortable about how trust forms. I trusted my old friends because I knew their work, and I knew their work because we had spent years side by side. Newer crew members never had that chance with me, so they started behind through no fault of their own. Leader-member exchange research describes relationships as developing through repeated exchanges, and I had simply had far more exchanges with some people than with others. The monthly conversations are partly a way to give everyone a fair number of exchanges with me, so that trust can form on evidence rather than history.

Does Coaching Work?

Theeboom et al. (2014) pooled studies of coaching inside organizations. People who were coached did better than those who were not on skills and job results, and also on how they felt, how they coped with strain, how they saw their work and how steadily they pursued their own goals. Most of the studies examined formal coaching by professional or trained coaches, so a supervisor's on-the-floor coaching is not the same thing, but the findings suggested that structured attention to a person's goals can help.

Jalen

Jalen's goal was to become a lead picker within a year. He earned forklift certification in his first month on the list and started training new hires in peak season. In his three-month check-in, he said the difference was not the certification but being asked what he wanted. His accuracy stayed high, and he picked up two shifts as acting lead.

What Changed for the Old Friends

Some of my friends were unhappy when opportunities they had come to expect went on a sign-up sheet. One said I had "gotten corporate." I explained the change directly and kept the criteria the same for everyone. Two of them earned the next opportunities on merit, which helped show the system was fair. A third, who had trained most of our new hires for a year, agreed to mentor Jalen in the trainer role, which turned a possible rivalry into a partnership and kept her experience in use.

Checking Myself

I now update the spreadsheet monthly and keep it where my manager can see it. If any group of people, my old friends, newer hires, day-shift transfers or anyone else, is getting a share of opportunities far out of line with their numbers on the crew, I look at why before the next assignment.

Conclusion

Opportunities on my crew had flowed to my old friends, a pattern Dulebohn and colleagues' meta-analysis of leader-member exchange helps explain and warns about. Bass and Riggio's individualized consideration and Theeboom and colleagues' coaching findings pointed toward deliberate development for every crew member, through posted opportunities, monthly conversations and small coaching moments.

References

Bass, B. M., & Riggio, R. E. (2006). Transformational leadership (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Dulebohn, J. H., Bommer, W. H., Liden, R. C., Brouer, R. L., & Ferris, G. R. (2012). A meta-analysis of antecedents and consequences of leader-member exchange: Integrating the past with an eye toward the future. Journal of Management, 38(6), 1715-1759. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206311415280

Theeboom, T., Beersma, B., & van Vianen, A. E. M. (2014). Does coaching work? A meta-analysis on the effects of coaching on individual level outcomes in an organizational context. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 9(1), 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2013.837499