As the new leader of the western region of the Mountain Railways western operations, Jack Karl has come into the organization as an outsider and been startled by what he found. He has seen employees making recommendations to management and management making accommodations for employees in difficult circumstances. Everything he has seen alarms him. He fears a loss of management control that he believes will be the end of the organization. A holistic analysis of the situation reflects four leadership concepts that Karl is not aware are actually benefiting the organization: leveraging and meshing with organizational culture, treating employees with emotional intelligence, promoting employee empowerment, and replacing a hierarchical environment with a collaborative one. Recommendations for achieving these improvements will be provided.
Karl's concerns are due to his old-school views on management, which have long been demonstrated to be harmful and ineffective. One of the first leadership concepts that he needs to be aware of is meshing with organizational culture instead of bucking it. Coming in as an outsider and throwing over the organization's established and highly successful culture is needlessly disruptive and offers no benefits. Marturano and Gosling (5) point out that it is an important part of a leader's job to establish and support organizational culture, because people need to learn to trust that the leader means what he says by seeing his words fulfilled in practice. This builds trust, and trust enables employees to communicate with confidence up the chain of command, even when the news is bad news (Marturano & Gosling 5). Instead of trying to overthrow the culture, Karl needs to adopt and uphold it, because it is working.
Karl's insensitivity to employees' needs and his insensitive way of addressing employees is also disruptive. His bombastic leadership style meant to intimidate employe...