Leadership and Management - Management Assignment Help

Assignment Task:

Activity A: Leadership and Management

Quite often the contemporary executive class uses the words Leadership and management interchangeably due to accepting a norm that the management is always carried out by the leadership of the organization. However, the two traits are different in almost all aspects barring a few general features. 

If it was to state in a single sentence, the leader and the manager differ in a single fact that the leaders have followers i.e. the people who work follow the leader to attain something of common interest wherein the leader is showing the path to travel to reach the goals whereas a manager is someone who has people to work for him or her. 

In an elaborated version, a leader sets a vision, challenges the status quo and take decisions to reach the vision he or she had painted. However, the manager sets a goal. The goal is set in a way that is based on the calculated or aspirational targets which the manager attempts to achieve through setting up the team, laying the road map and combining the team to work around the set path of action. In the practical sense, a leader in the organization such as the common workplace sets up the objective that the organization would aspire to achieve and the manager creates and builds the strategy to achieve the objectives set by the leaders. Another major difference between leadership and management as the quality is that the leadership ushers change in the present way of working or the present targets whereas a manager maintains the status quo i.e. in the workplace a manager would always seek to optimize the output by tweaking the process in its limit. 

The leaders and managers also differ in one of the most important traits of contemporary organizations in a way that defines the risk. The management would always be inclined to manage corporate risk. Managing the risk means to maximize the output at a tolerable level of risk in a way that includes risk mitigating plans and action points. However, leadership opinion differs here. The leadership through its vision creating traits foresees the potential or gauge the potential in an idea or step and are bold enough to take the risk and motivate the people following them to see that vision and take the risk. Leadership is that quality which unifies the action of individuals to come as a team and peek through the end vision the team is working for. 

The other most important aspect of leadership is that the trait is attributed to building a relationship with the team or the followers working towards the goal, with the stakeholders, and with the society, whereas a manager creates a system and processes to keep the changes sustainable. The role of management is also very crucial because as the organization grows larger and larger the driving of the company in a constantly evolving way should be system driven for a consistent manner. In addition to this, in case even a leader seeks to set the new standard, the strategy is prepared and executive by managers and hence both manager and leader are required for the contemporary corporate world. 

In the military, the basic traits of management and leadership remain the same as discussed above but the advance role of the management and leadership in the military condition becomes more specific. Incorporate situation or at the workplace, those two traits sometimes coincide and could be used interchangeably however in the military condition there exist a hard line between the two. The management in the most military situation refers to the group which is responsible to optimize the resources in the hand of soldiers and army staffs, to enhance the technology and other facilities in order to keep the forces updated. However, the operation of any mission or war is the sole responsibility of the leader of the troop and/or arms in the fields. The leader is the constraint to successfully carry out the missions given the availability of the resources and the situation that prevails at the moment. One more distinguishable difference is that the leadership in the military setting also deciphers the strategy of operations but in the business setting and the workplace, the leadership provides the vision and the direction and the management works on the scope and devises the strategy. One last but important discretion in the two roles is that both the roles leadership and the management in the military setting must have the quality of fast decision making but in the corporate setting the decision making is backed on the basis of deep data and past trend analysis which gives more time to leaders and managers to take actions and the very same fact makes the role of management and leadership in the military setting more difficult when compared to the business settings and the workplace in general. 

Therefore, in order to summarize, depending upon the situation although, there is a fine line between the two roles and the significance of both the roles are invariably lies in each and every setting or condition. Whereas one needs to give the direction to the organization and motivate the employees to follow the direction, the other builds the strategy to achieve the milestone and Complete on the mission set by the leaders. 

Activity B

For the continuous improvement of any system, it is important to keep the system or the process updated to incorporate the recent technological or managerial or procedural changes that are the best practices in the industry. 

The topic on which, my suggestion is is is the very integral topic of the maintenance management engineering which is nothing but spares management. 

Every Organisation in order to operate smoothly have to make a trade-off between the carrying cost of carrying the inventory or the spares and the laws in the opportunity or the productivity loss due to the absence of the spares when needed in urgency. 

There are several types of equipment or spares. There is one type is of spares that are very important to the operations such that not having them would immensely affect the productivity of the organization. There are others that are not that important and can be e procured in small quantities or batches. One another factor apart from the cost of the spares is the lead time in the procurement of the spares. A spare which takes more time to procure and get available at the site it should be the priority spares and on the other hand, those spares which are procured in the close proximity of the operating plant and could be easily procured with very less lead time can be deferred for future in order to reduce the working capital. 

As per the current practice, all the spare procurement is done in the same manner on SAP. Presently, there is a minimum stock value defined for every spare depending upon the cost and lead time and when the actual stop on the ground reaches the defined value, SAP raising a flag to the procurement for the maintenance manager to procure the concerned spare. This type of system has various merits and demerits at its disposal. The criteria for defining the minimum spare requirement for the minimum stock level is person dependent and does not change with time which it should. For example, the installation of a new machine will make the spares appropriate for the old machine would be redundant. 

The change proposal aims to reduce the dependency of the person in determining the minimum stock level of any spare and discontinue the practice of managing the different types of spares in the same way. According to the proposed change, all the spares should be classified into three classes, namely, red, yellow and green. The red category belongs to the spares which are either high capital intensive or are very critical to the process or have a very high Lead time. Similarly, the yellow category would encompass the spares which have medium capital value or medium criticality to the process or have medium Lead time in procurement. Lastly, the green category would involve spares that have either low criticality to the processor are less capital intensive or have lower Lead times. The second step after the categorization of the spares is to tag the same color on the SAP. This tagging would be used to define the general rules for a typical color tagging.  This particular change in the practice of shares management would help the maintenance managers to better plan the use number of spares that are required for the operation of the plant. This will not only make the picture clear but also will help to analyze the procurement trend of a particular spare or a category of a particular spare For seeking the acceptance of the proposal from the different levels of Hierarchy, the importance of involving the senior management and showing them the value in the new proposed change is of paramount importance. The change would definitely involve a lot of additional jobs initially and may involve the expenditure on conducting that initial jobs for making the change in the accounting software. Therefore, without the value in the proposed change, it is very difficult to seek the agreement of the senior management.   

Once the senior management for the senior executive of the different stakeholders involved in the change sees the value that the change would give to the overall system, it would be relatively easy to get the approval for conducting the change. To bring the senior management for the senior executive on board, it is very important to engage them while explaining the proposed change by bringing forward the proposal in such a way that they see is their own value in the proposal. 

The various level of Executive involved the chief spares management, the chief of procurement, the chief of maintenance engineering and finally the Vice-President of the Maintenance Services are involved. For the chief spares management, the proposal helps to standardize the process of managing the spares in such a way that it is partially independent of human judgment and intervention. For the chief of procurement, this proposal would give the predictability in which the spares of different classes could be procured. For the chief of maintenance engineering, this would help in bringing the improvement in the productivity of the maintenance managers by freeing them with the cumbersome job of spares management involving them in two more important decision-making affairs. Finally for the vice president of the maintenance engineering and services this food streamline the process of management and procurement and improve the overall productivity of the maintenance engineering team.

Therefore to summarise it is important to make the system more robust and at the same time involve the executive of various hierarchy and show them the value in the engineering of the proposed changes that would ultimately, directly or indirectly help the system and the productivity of the organization improve. The acceptance of any idea, therefore, depends upon the utility of that idea to the overall aim of the organization and the value that it creates for the organization in the long run.

Activity C

People empowerment is a continuous process. In any industry or operations, the most important and the most integral part of the process is the people and hence to empower keep it up to the date and bring about continuous improvement in the process and the productivity of the industry or the organization, people empowerment plays a very significant role. 

As the maintenance manager of my organization at my workplace, there are several measures that have been taken by me to encourage the people working with or for me to achieve more and more success in the targets set by the organization. 

The example given below could be we considered as one of the many of my small initiative which has helped in empowering the people whether it be a supervisor or a worker. During the planned shutdown of the operating plant, a lot of work is carried out for mitigative and preventive maintenance. In order to conduct this work, there are several levels of supervision and manning is done. Above all, there is a maintenance manager who plans the execution of the entire shutdown duration, resources required during the shutdown duration and the manpower required to conduct the maintenance activities. Below the maintenance manager, the first layer of supervision is conducted by the supervisors which are generally in the companies payroll.

The second layer of work is conducted by the workers who actually conduct the physical job and report to the supervisor. There is one more very important layer of people who work by and large for the entire duration and are generally the most underrated of all the classes of people working in an organization in a plant environment. This class is referred to as the outsource class for the vendor partners for the organizations which help the operations to perform specific outsource activity given to them. Since people do not belong to the operating organization directly, there is much probability that the comfort and the safety of these people are or could be overlooked and compromised.

One such instance forced me to realize this plight of these people and to work towards improving the work culture with regards to the class of people. During one of the major shutdowns that the plant was under, I appointed to conduct some activity which was planned to take around 36 hours of continuous work. I had ordered 7 people per shift of 8 hours which made a total of 21 different people who would conduct the activity in the shifts of 8 hours in such a way that they will only return to the workplace After 16 hours of rest from the previous stint of the job. While conducting the inspection of the ongoing job in the evening I saw one of the worker home I had seen in the morning shift also. Surprised I called him out of the work and asked him from how much time is he working to complete the job. The person replies to me in a tiring voice that he had taken the only a couple of breaks to have lunch and breakfast and would be taking one break to have dinner very soon because he has to work for another 6 hours in the same place for the same job to be conducted. Shocked by his response, I called the supervisor of the vendor under whom the person was working from the morning. On further investigation, I found that the vendor was using the same group of people to work for more than 12 hours to complete the jobs in order to cut down the cost of Manpower. I raised this issue immediately to my senior citing Hindi's complete situation. My senior, proactively called a meeting to discuss the issue and to generate ideas about what to prevent this kind of situation in the coming future.

There were several ideas discussed in the meeting. One idea that attracted most attention was given by me to introduce in biometric punching machine which would monitor the time the person has entered in the workplace and if that time exceeds the expected time for the maximum time for which a person can work, an alarm should go to the maintenance manager giving the identity of the person and company or the vendor partner he or she belongs to.

The implementation of this idea took around 2 to 3 months as it required the organization management approval and installation of biometric machines for these people and generating the database and feeding the same into the database of the biometric machine. This idea however small helps the vendor partner workers to realize the power that they had that they can refuse anyone if they exceed the standard time of work set by the regulatory authorities.

This example proves that the first step towards empowering the people is to educate them about the right that they are entitled to. This not only involves communicating them the right that they have but also making systems in order to keep a check on any kind of separation that any kind of person goes through. Second and one of the most important take away from the example is that the technology can be exploited to help people to realize the importance of ethical conduct and to monitor the compliance of the right that they are entitled to. 

As it was iterated at the beginning that the people empowerment is a continuous journey and not a single step, one must always think to improve the livelihood of the workers working in a workplace and adding values to the organization for their operations to be more productive. Everyone must realize that the people empowerment empowers the organization and thus, by empowering the people who are working in an organization, not only the people who work are more satisfied but also the organization is benefited at an overall level. An organization with a satisfied and strong workforce can do wonders leverage in the immense potential and energy of the workforce.

Activity D : Continual improvement proposal

Improvement is a journey and not a onetime affair. Based on the research conducted on the current system for the protocol being followed in my workplace, following are the ideas that I would support the introduction of:

1. Uses of critical chain project management for managing major shutdowns: As per the current practice in the workplace, Gantt chart is being used to manage and plan major shutdowns in the plant. Although Gantt charts prove to be a very useful tool in managing the shutdown it has some basic default that makes this method not the best of the methods available in the industry. A better approach in this regard is the uses of the methodology known as the critical chain project management that is CCPM. In this method, not only the important and Critical not only the important and Critical works or jobs are highlighted but also the staus of other jobs are regularly updated.  When the execution does not move as per the initial planning, the CCPM technique updates the current status and emphasize on the jobs which were earlier not coming into the critical Chain but now are added due to the change in the actual execution. This helps in keeping track of the original timeline of the execution of a project even after the plan and the actual does not exactly coincide. Last but not least, the critical chain technique also tells the loss or gain in the buffer that was originally inbuilt into the planning. This gives the executioner the idea of the actual lag or lead from the original plan of the shutdown.

2.  The aging workforce: In a setting where the experience for the executives is one of the most important assets, it is difficult to conclude that whether an aging workforce can find a replacement without jeopardizing the efficiency of the operation. Or, to say in other words, the replacement of the young generation with the aging workforce is not the solution to improve the average age of the employees and to fill the rigor back in the workplace. To be able to do so, the organization must come up with the system to prevent the tacit knowledge of the elder generation which they have earned from their hard work and experience. The company for this to happen should open up the knowledge management portals wherein the aging portion of the workforce is motivated to feed in their knowledge and experience which proves handy to the young generations to come.

3. Change initiation and management: Managing change can be considered as one of the most difficult jobs for an organization where there is a culture that is as old as the organization is. The most interesting thing about change is that it is constant and even though it has bought unprecedented results in the past, it is considered to be a Bad Omen for the company for the existing employees. To initiate and manage the changes around the process and the people and Technology in an organization there should be an exhausting procedure that involves all the agencies the change is going to impact. The organization should build in the change agents and the attitude of the change for the betterment in the young generation so that they can drive the changes with the zeal that motivates even the ones who is reluctant to change. The Change management system of the organization must be such that everyone who is impacted by the change feeling that he or she has a considerable significant say in the changes that are been suggested for the betterment of the company. The Change management system must also include the possible risk and rewards of the change so that the change does not what affects the company in an undesired way. This would also ensure that the change has done is irrevocable and there is system intact to maintain the changes that have been done in the past otherwise we company would move only to and fro of the development that is anticipated by the change that is occurring in the organization.

4. Inventory control: The change proposal aims to reduce the dependency of the person in determining the minimum stock level of any spare and discontinue the practice of managing the different types of spares in the same way. According to the proposed change, all the spares should be classified into three classes, namely, red, yellow and green. The red category belongs to the spares which are either high capital intensive or are very critical to the process or have a very high Lead time. Similarly, the yellow category would encompass the spares which have medium capital value or medium criticality to the process or have medium Lead time in procurement. Lastly, the green category would involve spares that have either low criticality to the processor are less capital intensive or have lower Lead times. The second step after the categorization of the spares is to tag the same color on the SAP. This tagging would be used to define the general rules for a typical color tagging.  This particular change in the practice of shares management would help the maintenance managers to better plan the use number of spares that are required for the operation of the plant. This will not only make the picture clear but also will help to analyze the procurement trend of a particular spare or a category of a particular spare. 

5. Analytical techniques: In the present era, the data is considered to be the next oil in the economy of the world and in such a circumstances, it is of paramount importance that the executive of an organization must be aligned and inform about the modern Data Analytics and its enormous potential towards bringing an unprecedented improvement in the existing system and the profitability and the productivity of the company. To usher this environment, the company should begin some program dedicated to bringing in the talent of Data Analytics in the executive of the organization. The program should reward those who have an analytical bank and wants to use data for decision making.  The workplace should employee third party e experts who can add in conducting this program and bring in their expertise to improve the analytical skills of the employees or the executive of the organization. This Data Analytics skill would go a long way to improve the productivity and the decision making of every level of the executive of the organization. 

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