Leadership: Leaders, Followers, Environments

Delegation, empowerment, and development

The concepts of delegation, empowerment, and development of followers are additional motivational tools used by leaders and managers, just as they employ compensation, rewards, and punishments to motivate. They demonstrate the unavoidable interconnectedness in the leadership processes. Delegation is self-explanatory: it is the ability to assign and entrust a set of responsibilities to another. Micromanagers intent on controlling and centralizing everything under them are poor delegators. They don’t trust anyone else to do a task. Perhaps they are perfectionists in the extreme who want to do everything themselves because they fear no one else can do it as well. A leader’s inability to delegate might also be indicative of a failure to prioritize and manage time effectively. Poor delegation skills are associated with unhappy associates and inefficient operations and often lead to weak organizational performance and leader derailment.

LEADERSHIP SPOTLIGHT

Le cost killer: A foreigner at Nissan

The dramatic Nissan Motor Company turnaround of the late 1990s illustrates important aspects of the leader-follower dynamic. When Carlos Ghosn arrived at Nissan in 1999, the Yokohama, Japan, automaker was close to bankruptcy. Nissan had a debt of over $20 ...