Full Range Leadership Development at Sunoco

Full Range Leadership Development at SunocoIntroductionLeaders encounter uncertainties and overwhelming complexities in their daily lives. The problems they have to solve are rarely simple and clear-cut. If they were, they would likely already have been solved by someone else. If not well thought-outand sometimes even when they are the solutions made become tomorrow’s problems. Therefore, success in the contemporary operating environment requires different ways of thinking about problems and organizations. This brings about the inevitable need for leaders to have incredible innovation and creativity for continued growth and success in their organizations and also to have competitive advantage to survive in the market.the purpose of this paper is to explain how Transformational Leadership behaviors and attributes can influence building and maintaining higher levels of innovation and creativity. It also explains how FRLD can get customers involved in these innovations.Sunoco is a leading Gasoline Distribution Company in the United States. It has tremendously developed over the period of time it has been active.  However, innovations will be critical in order for the organization to building a foundation for future growth, address unmet needs in the market, and improve process efficiencies and effectiveness and in order to develop new businesses. Sunoco needs to implement the following aspects and attribute of FRLD in its operations

Intellectual Stimulation (IS)This is an element of transformational leadership in which the leader challenges assumptions, takes risks and looks for ideas from his followers. Leaders here by stimulate and encourage creativity in their followers. They nurture people who think independently. The followers ask questions, think deeply about things and figure out better ways to execute their tasks. Most transformational leaders encourage followers to succeed, by training and development by building relationships, discouraging laissez-faire attitudes and using instrumental compliance, because they will feel it contributes to their success. In (IS) leaders solve problems using non-traditional thinking, rethink ideas, and strengthen seeking differing perspectives by looking at different angles. (Bona & Judge, 2004: Sosik & Jung, 2010).

Individualized Consideration (IC)This is yet another aspect of transformational leadership which is about helping others to develop their strengths. Sunoco leaders need to attend to each follower’s needs, acts as mentors to the follower and listens to their concerns and needs. In (IC) the leader gives empathy and support, keeps communication open and places challenges before the followers. This also incorporates the need for respect and appreciating the individual contribution that each follower can make to the team. In this way Sunoco employees will have a will and aspirations for self-development and have intrinsic motivation for their tasks.  Individualized Consideration (IC)  will increase behavior self-efficacy and instill confidence, encouragement, motivation, good communication, feedback, challenges, and improves their job commitment, which leads to Transformational Leadership (Rafferty & Griffin, 2006: Sosik & Jung, 2010). Inspirational Motivationthis is a leader behavior that involves developing and articulating a vision. Such visions paint an optimistic and enthusiastic picture of the future that encourages the followers. This kind of approach will elevate performance expectations inspiring the followers to put extra effort in their work. Sunoco employees will therefore be motivated to come up with innovative ideas to meet these expectations.By using inspiration, leaders express confidence in their followers and their shared vision. Inspirational leaders energize followers to put extra effort in challenging situations. Moreover, they encourage collective action and teamwork. This are an essential ingredients needed to achieve the visions of the organization. (Sosik & Jung, 2010).

Idealized Influencein addition, Idealized Influence leaders have respect and admiration from their followers.  Idealized Behaviors is focused on the human side of transformational leadership.  It has five attributes associate with idealized leaders and they are: Instill pride, no self-interest, build respect, confidence and overcome obstacles.  It attributes to ethical leadership, norms, fairness, trust and encouragement and they are role models. It gives inspirational motivation (Sosik & Jung, 2010: Bona & Judge, 2004).  According to DuBrin (2010), charismatic leaders can use their abilities to accomplish great things by getting people to agree with them and because of empowerment, which leads to Transformational Leadership

Strategic LeadershipTop corporate leaders like Steve Jobs are responsible for creating a lot of wealth. They did this by increasing profits and stock price and by creating a sustainable growth plan for the future. Strategic leadership involves using a useful framework called the balanced scorecard. Professors Richard Kaplan and David Norton developed the balanced scorecard as a performance management tool to plan, execute, and monitor organizational strategy. It works by encouraging organizations to measure their success from customer, employee, operational, and financial perspectives. The balanced scorecard assumes that organizations should focus on planning for and measuring things that influence financial outcomes over time such as customer engagement, employee engagement, cycle time, waste, production and management efficiency.One aspects of FRLD that Sunoco should apply in order to involve their clients in their innovation is customer perspective. Sunoco can attain this through one or some combination of three strategic approaches, namely operational excellence, customer intimacy, or product leadership.Operational excellence can be promoted by displaying inspirational motivation behavior that raises the bar on performance levels and contingent reward behavior that compensates associates for meeting elevated performance standards.Customer intimacy can be created by encouraging sales staff to display individually considerate behaviors that ask customers what they value in a product or service and use this feedback in improving products or services.Product leadership can be promoted by displaying intellectually stimulating behaviors that promote creativity and innovation in research and development and deliver new products and services that are cutting edge and cost-effective.

ReferencesSosik, J. J. & Jung, D. I., (2010). Full range leadership development: Pathways for people,profit and planet. Psychology Press. New York, NY.

Ackoff Center Weblog: Leadership and Systems Thinking. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://ackoffcenter.blogs.com/ackoff_center_weblog/2007/11/leadership-and-.html

Citizenship behavior at the team level of analysis: the … (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15168430

Transformational Leadership at Mind Garden, Inc. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.mindgarden.com/translead.htm