Determining Leaders and Their Importance to Your Organization
By: Kristi Uecker, Area Program Consultant, Genex
Leadership is defined as the ability to influence, motivate and enable others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organization1. Leaders can influence through subtle persuasion or being assertive. The key is they are providing the right motivation and environment in which the employees are better able to achieve the organization's objectives.
When a farm sets up an Ovsynch program, they use their best employees to ensure the job is done correctly because good reproduction is a vital necessity on all dairies. In order for those employees to be successful, they need the right tools. It is the manager's responsibility to supply those tools and create the best environment for the employees. To ensure a successful Ovsynch program several objectives need to be met such as: healthy cows, accurate records, correct materials and people. If any one of those is missing, the program fails.
The focus here is on people. How do managers determine the best people for the job? Simple - find the leaders. Leaders are not just the top people in the organization, they exist on all levels. Managers must find those leaders and put them in a work environment that meets their needs - that is motivation.
The seven competencies to look for in a manager are emotional intelligence, integrity, drive, leadership motivation, self-confidence, intelligence and knowledge of the business.
1) Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and regulate emotion in oneself and others. In other words, a manager needs to determine if the employee has the ability to control him or herself under pressure. If the person gets angry quickly and takes it out on the staff or cows, this person is not ideal for leading others.
2) Integrity is the ability to not only be truthful and honest, but to demonstrate words into action. An employee who takes the responsibility to let the manager know he couldn't find all the cows on the Ovsynch shot list possesses integrity.
3) Drive is an internal motivation to do well or succeed. To find those with drive, managers look for employees who take pride in their work and try to do their best without being pushed. People with drive want to learn. As a manager you need to supply these individuals with training and materials to meet their internal forces.
4) Leadership motivation is a need for socialized power. These people want to lead others as a team to meet objectives. They feel a need to encourage others to work towards the same goal. To simplify, managers are searching for the person that tries to motivate his co-workers to do well.
5) Self-confidence is the belief you have the skills and ability to lead others to achieve goals.
6) Intelligence is the above-average cognitive ability to process large amounts of information. This doesn't mean leaders are geniuses; it simply means they are able to identify several solutions or areas of opportunity. For example, headlock time is becoming more and more important to dairies to improve cow efficiency and comfort. The leaders are those that find different ways to minimize time in headlocks during heavy breeding days, whether it be breeding earlier or using chalk marks on cows to locate synched animals.
7) Knowledge of the business is the leader's understanding of the organization's environment to make more intuitive decisions. Employees that understand the parlor flow system, the shot schedules, the transition program and cow movement on the dairy are better able to make smart decisions on the operation that improve effectiveness in obtaining goals.
People are the biggest asset to any organization. Robert Waterman, co-author of "In Search of Excellence," argues that the best performing companies provide their employees with the following:
- Something to believe in
- A feeling of control
- Job challenge
- The opportunity to engage in lifelong learning
- Recognition for achievements
He continues with, "...[the best firms] are better organized to meet the needs of their people, so that they attract better people than their competitors do and their people are more greatly motivated to do a superior job, whatever it is they do."1
In conclusion, the key to running a successful program on a dairy is people because they are the largest contributors. Attracting, hiring and sustaining the leaders that possess the seven competencies will set the farm or any organization up for success.
1 References available upon request.
posted January 2010
