{"id":341,"date":"2020-02-08T13:34:01","date_gmt":"2020-02-08T21:34:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0130\/?p=341"},"modified":"2020-02-08T13:34:01","modified_gmt":"2020-02-08T21:34:01","slug":"reflection-on-leadership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0130\/reflection-on-leadership\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflection on Leadership"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Leadership is a vital component in the culture of the hotel industry. I have been working in the hotel industry for 10 years, all the international companies I worked with valued leadership. In the learning and development department, the set of programs that are required for all supervisory, mid-career and senior-level employees is called Accelerated Leadership Development Programs (ADPs). This set includes 10-15 programs that talk about leadership topics such as Fundamental leadership, situational leadership, delegation, change management and many others.<\/span><\/p>\n

In my job as Director of Learning and Development, I was leading the learning and development team in addition to departmental trainers, who are selected employees from every department in the hotel, responsible for delivering the on-job training for their colleagues. I worked closely with the hotel leadership team in order to analyze the organization’s training needs, and develop strategies that address the needs of our employees, presenting them in a form of a training business plan. My job was all about coaching, counselling, and disciplining employees, and providing constructive feedback to enhance employees\u2019 overall performance. Therefore, leadership was a core aspect of my role.<\/span><\/p>\n

As I reflect on my leadership throughout the 10 years, I believe two leadership theories helped me the most in my role; adaptive leadership and reflective leadership. From my experience, I consider the hotel environment very complex. A defining aspect of the hospitality industry is that it focuses on ideas of luxury, pleasure, enjoyment and experiences, as opposed to catering for necessities and essentials. Therefore, change always occurs in hotels in order to fulfill the demanding nature of the job. \u00a0In my opinion, being an adaptive leader in the hotel industry means you are a forward-thinker who always seeks solutions in a fast-paced environment to achieve transformative goals. Khan (2017) argues that \u201cAn adaptive leadership approach allows institutions to consider situations uniquely and select actions based on what is needed currently rather than on past traditions\u201d (p.182). From my experience, leaders in the hotel industry are always required to find solutions, whether for employees or customers, instantly to solve continuously evolving problems. Leaders need to be innovative when it comes to providing solutions in the hotel complex environment. Yesterday\u2019s solution may not be applicable to today\u2019s problem.<\/span><\/p>\n

Reflective leadership can help leaders to be innovative. Castelli (2016) states that reflective leadership is based on \u201cInternal characteristics such as critical thinking, long-term planning and finding innovative ways to solve problems with an equal focus on people and profit\u201d (p.8). Leaders who practice reflective leadership are therefore able to understand themselves, their team, and their organization and come up with innovative solutions to constant problems. Castelli (2016) provides examples of Reflective practices such as \u201cself-awareness, mindfulness and personal wisdom\u201d (p.2019), these practices allow leaders to connect with people since leaders are purposefully questioning and altering their behaviours to influence employees and organizational outcomes.<\/span><\/p>\n

On another note, a combination of adaptive and reflective leadership helped me with introducing a digital learning environment in the hotels I worked in. In 2016, I participated in the pioneering phase for launching a new Learning Management System (LMS) where we shifted from the traditional way of delivering training to a blended learning environment. We had to manage change in the learning methodology of our hotel. Adaptive leadership which focuses on the leader (hotel leadership) \u2013follower (hotel employees) relationship helped us overcome the initial resistance the employees had, in addition to managing the environmental issues that affected the launch of the LMS such as the technical and financial challenges. The reflective leadership approach helped us question our behaviours as leaders in terms of enforcing the new change of learning methodology. In each stage of the launching project, we asked ourselves questions like: Are we pressuring and overwhelming our employees at this stage? Is there a need for refresher training at this point? Are we too fast or too slow? Is the instructional design clear? Do we need to change the content? Reflecting on our behaviours and the ability to understand the emotional state of our employees helped us introduce a digital learning environment more smoothly.<\/span><\/p>\n

References<\/span><\/p>\n

Castelli, P. A. (2016). Reflective leadership review: A framework for improving organisational performance.\u00a0The Journal of Management Development,\u00a035<\/em>(2), 217-236. doi:10.1108\/JMD-08-2015-0112<\/span><\/p>\n

Khan, N. (2017). Adaptive or Transactional Leadership in Current Higher Education: A Brief Comparison.\u00a0The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning<\/em>,\u00a018<\/em>(3). Retrieved from\u00a0https:\/\/doi.org\/10.19173\/irrodl.v18i3.3294<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Attribution<\/span><\/p>\n

Matteo Vistocco<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leadership is a vital component in the culture of the hotel industry. I have been working in the hotel industry for 10 years, all the international companies I worked with valued leadership. In the learning and development department, the set… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":159,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lrnt525"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0130\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0130\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0130\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0130\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/159"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0130\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0130\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":343,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0130\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341\/revisions\/343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0130\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0130\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0130\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}