The Role of Leadership in Building Successful Organizations Assignment

The Role of Leadership in Building Successful Organizations - Assignment Example With this ambitious agenda for expansion, Aramex has been facing challenges concerning employee loyalty and engagement with an increasingly diverse and international workforce. This paper will seek to analyze Aramex’s specific strengths and weaknesses in leadership, in light of their current expansion strategy, as well as areas that need improvement, through interviews with Hussein Hachem and Laith Tahboub. The paper will also outline specific actions to address these issues as identified. Interviews with Executives Hussein Hachem After working for 20 years, Mr. Hussein Hachem serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Aramex in the Middle East and Africa (MEN) region. With his extensive knowledge about the logistics and transportation industry, Mr. Hachem is a representative on several decision boards of the industry. Laith Tahboub Mr. Laith Tahboub has worked at Aramex for nine years as an operations supervisor and a Business Improvement and Efficiency manager, prior to his cu rrent position as Operations Manager. With experience in team management and process management, Mr. Tahboub has been managing and leading teams in successful service standards and procedure developments for business success and excellence. Leadership Challenges and Strengths at Aramex At Aramex, the current style of leadership is a hybrid between task-oriented and distributed leadership. In task-oriented leadership, the leader focuses on tasks that require to be performed to meet a specific goal, in which the leading and following acts interlock across three levels; organizational, relational, and task (Derue, 2011: p38). A task-oriented leader is more concerned with producing solutions at every step for a goal or specific problem, ensuring the team meets deadlines and achieves outcomes. This is important for Aramex as a logistic company since the services have to be offered on time to maintain their competitive advantage and success. However, task-oriented leadership neglects the welfare and engagement of the team-members, harming their productivity. Distributed leadership works hand-in-hand with task-oriented leadership at Aramex. This form of leadership removes hierarchy from the leadership structure with requisite functions distributed among various teams by dividing labor across time and space (Derue, 2011: p135). One actor serves as the basic originator of action and other team-members respond with subsequent following acts. These acts of leading and following move from group to group over time and space. According to Mr. Hachem, engaging new employees in new geographical operations has proved challenging for the organization, especially since they have to communicate outside of their comfort zone (Personal communication, 2013). The biggest challenge is enabling them to understand the culture and values that drive Aramex. Expanding into new markets has seen Aramex leave operations to local talent, which has necessitated the organization to bring them up to speed with regards to their cultures and values. With these challenges, Mr. Hachem contended that the senior leadership team has decided to assess employee engagement with the results being used to align their goals with what was important for the organization (Personal communi