Optimal Leadership Styles

Optimal Leadership Styles
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(April 14, 2013)
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Optimal Leadership Styles
Introduction
People works together as teams in serving the target customers, an indication that a contact center environment must employ diverse leadership styles in managing the customer service effectively. Leadership and management has different meanings, it has been noted that management entails doing things in the right way while leadership is about doing only the right things (Leadership and Oraganisational Success, 2012). A manager is a facilitator to the performance of teams while leaders are found in the teams, people with special talents will always crop up, meaning that titles does not refer to leadership, but strengths in a person always prevails. In a customer service perspective, it is important to apply diverse leadership styles in dealing with multicultural customers who have different approaches and different needs (Benincasa, 2012).
Main Body
Shared leadership
Shared leadership in customer service is experienced by maximizing and engaging all the customer service representatives in the contact center. Today’s work environment is ever changing and dynamic in nature, the changing nature of the economic landscape calls for multiple perspectives of dealing with the changes in meeting the changing needs of the customer base. Shared leadership pulls the resources, people and the ideas together in meeting the target vision and mission of the organization (House et al, 2002).
Human resources are enhanced through empowering workers and allowing the employees to take up leadership positions at the exact areas of work or expertise. The markets in the customer service are becoming complex and demanding for new approaches to leadership styles in meeting the needs of the customers. Shared leadership ensures that people plays diverse roles as a unit (Zaccaro & Klimoski, 2001).
Surveys indicated that maximizing talents is one of the best models of enhancing shared leadership. This is made possible through giving more powers to the customer service representatives with the highest levels of prowess in improving their capabilities and strengths. Shared leadership also calls for defining limits on the powers employed in the decision making processes, this is critical in ensuring that the business processes are in control. Shared leadership can also be enhanced by creating a work environment in the contact center where all the employees feels part of the processes and can voluntary take up assignments of their own (Leadership and Oraganisational Success, 2012).
Shared leadership can also be enhanced through allowing the qualified people autonomy and discretion over resources and tasks in encouraging them be more creative in dealing with issues of customer service; and finally, shared leadership can be enhanced by avoiding second guessing the decisions made earlier by people empowered in the ...