Perspectives From Followers

Empowering Leadership Questionnaire

After taking a questionnaire designed to see how I fall on the spectrum of leadership styles, I found that I am high in “leading by example”. The system is based on a 1-5 score and is compiled between an overall empowering leadership score which is the sum of 5 subscores: leading by example, participative decision-making, informing, coaching, and showing concern/interacting with the team; all of which make up an empowering leader. My results showed that I had a score of 4.24 for my overall score, 4.6 for leading by example, 4.17 for participative decision-making, 4.33 for informing, 4.18 in coaching, and finally 4.1 in showing concern. All in all, I fall above the median in all traits and therefore have an above-average score (Arnold et al. 2000). 

During my time as a leader, I have noticed that many of my followers do not take me seriously as someone who holds heavy authority, mostly because I do not discipline them or correct them heavily. As a result, my peers in my opinion see me more as a friend than someone who demands respect or caution when approaching. In all actuality, I am not in the slightest perturbed by this notion and rather prefer it. I have yet to be in a position where my title demands authority nor do I want to demand it in the first place. I have never received any formal feedback, but I have been given praise by highers for saying they respect me and my leadership style and that it seems to be working well. My squad members last year thanked me for being their corporal and credited me with being the reason they had such a great year which made my heart happy. (I) I really do these things so that I can make an impact on the lives of others around me and it seems to be working the way I intended, so I suppose it can only get better from here. (J)

Shortly after taking the initial empowering leadership questionnaire (Arnold et al. 2000), I was tasked with sending a similar questionnaire to previous followers of mine to fill out in reference to their experience with me (particularly as a corporal). I received one response back from Peter Eschelman who was one of the squad bodies in my squad third-class year. The results were near identical to what I had concluded for myself.  Firstly, the overall score was similar, with my score being 4.23 and his being 4.28, so he ultimately found me more empowering than I had concluded for myself. Leading by example was exactly the same at 4.6. Participative Decision-making was somewhat similar where his score was 3.5 and mine was 4.17. Informing was also somewhat similar, with his score of me being a 5, whereas I scored a 4.33 for myself. For coaching, 4.18 was the score both of us had on me. Finally, Peter and I scored similarly again for showing concern/interacting with the team with him giving a score of 4.3 and myself having 4.1. 

Perhaps my introspective skills are decent enough to come to a similar conclusion as my peers without heavy bias, but it was interesting to note that the scores on just about everything (aside from participative decision-making) were nearly the same or exactly the same. Addressing the difference in scores for participative decision-making, the perception of a corporal does not change, however, the responsibility of corporals during my year was drastically different, causing us to dis-assume much of the decision-making power that corporals before us had enjoyed, therefore Peter might have thought I was holding things back from them where in reality we could not provide the same kind of decision-making ability.

Adaptive Leadership

I took a test to see how well I was able to adapt to new and demanding situations and assist subordinates during transition periods or other such times that require a great deal of change. The below table shows where I scored for each subset and how it compares to what my peers thought of me based on the same survey directed towards me. The closest in similarity is between giving work back to the people and identifying the adaptive challenge. (Northouse, 2018).

Adaptive Leadership	Get on the Balcony	Identify the Adaptive Challenge	Regulate Distress	Maintain Disciplined Action	Give Work Back to the People	Protect Leadership From Below
My Scores	23	17	23	21	18	22
My Follower Average	18	16	20.67	19.33	17.33	19.33
Follower 1	16	14	20	16	16	18
Follower 2	15	19	18	20	17	15
Follower 3	23	15	24	22	19	25