Leadership for Management & Business

Case Study 1 – Metro Bank

Question: 1.

Describe how Marsha utilized the four leadership roles (Visionary/Strategist, Organization Builder, Communicator/Motivator, and Decision Maker) after identifying the issues at Metro Bank.

Answer:

When Marsha joined as a manager of a suburban branch office of Metro bank, she found many issues which were the main reasons of their lower morale and productivity. Even though she had an impression in the beginning that it is impossible to change some of the programs she felt inappropriate, she took few months to know the employees well and then applied her leadership skills to improve the whole operations. In this process she utilized different leadership roles such as Visionary/Strategist, Organization Builder, Communicator/Motivator, and Decision Maker.

a. Visionary/Strategist: When Marsha joined in the branch, the productivity and morale was much lesser than expected in the branch which was supposed to be essential for executive development. Before setting the vision and strategy, she took enough time to learn each employee by talking with them. After knowing the issues, Marsha wanted a unique vision that fulfills the needs of her employee with the objective of executive development program and to make the branch better for customer support. Here we can see how well she had utilized her leadership role as visionary.

To fulfill her vision, she formulated the strategic objective that to make the branch best for managerial talent development along with quality customer service. She put a strategy to empower the employees with the help different development programs and trainings to improve their competency and morale. We can say that she was very successful as strategist as the result they got in the Metro bank branch.

b. Organization Builder: Marsha made the development and growth opportunities open to all employees. She provided them different training after negotiating with headquarters and also, she provided them the job opportunities which they might be interested. She implemented cross-training in the branch so that she could utilize the employees to reduce workloads if needed but this helped more for the employees to know the company’s policies and procedures. Also she set the example by giving managerial assignments to her subordinate managers time to time.

c. Communicator/ Motivator: At first, she took few months to meet all the employees. She talked with them individually to know about their career aspirations. She understood that the employees are capable of doing much more than what they do. She gave them motivation by empowering them using different development programs, trainings and adding rewards into the appraisal system. Her communication was well effective, she used to stress her strategic objectives to