LEAD5653 Module 6 personal leadership philosophy example

What I Would Lose By: A Treatment Plant Supervisor's Leadership Philosophy, Argued From Five Episodes at One Water Utility

Student Name

American College of Education

LEAD5653: Leadership Theories, Frameworks, and Philosophies

Module 6 Assignment

Instructor Name

August 7, 2028

Where I Lead

I supervise the night shift at the conventional treatment plant of the utility whose leaders this course has followed, a role I took eight months ago after nine years as an operator on the same plant. My shift is seven people: five operators, a mechanic and a laboratory technician who rotates in from the lab. Two of the operators have more years at the plant than I do, and one of them applied for the job I hold. We run the plant alone from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., which means that most decisions on my shift are made without anyone above me awake to approve them.

The five modules before this one gave me a set of episodes I watched closely: the operations director through an ordinary week and a main break, two night shifts that needed opposite kinds of leadership, a lead line program run on a bonus and a purpose, a late boil-water notice and the lab supervisor's fight over a sampling letter. A philosophy that could have been written before those five episodes is not worth writing after them. The three principles below are the ones the evidence left me with.

First Principle: Decide in the Open, and Correct Myself in Public

The strongest thing I saw this term was the director's admission to the whole staff two days after the delayed notice analyzed in Module 4, and what followed it: voluntary near-miss reports tripled. In the manufacturing teams Edmondson (1999) studied, members who agreed that their team would not punish them for taking an interpersonal risk were more likely to seek feedback, ask colleagues for help and talk openly about errors, and those learning behaviors went with better team performance. Detert and Burris (2007) found that employees spoke up more when they saw their managers as open to input, and that the effect ran through their sense that speaking up was safe. A night shift that does not report its small errors will eventually hide a large one, so openness is not a courtesy on my shift but part of how the plant stays safe.

The principle costs me something specific. In my third month, I set the coagulant dose too low during a storm, and filter effluent turbidity rose toward the limit before an operator caught it. The operator who had applied for my job was on shift. Correcting myself in front of that operator felt like handing over the argument that the wrong person had been promoted. I said it anyway at the shift handover, and I would again, because the alternative teaches five people that the supervisor's errors are not to be discussed, and that lesson would not stay confined to mine.

Second Principle: Give Structure Early, and Hand It Back on a Schedule

Module 2 showed that the six new operators on the membrane plant needed close direction and written procedures while the veteran crew next door needed to be left alone, and that the director's most useful move was to change the situation rather than the style. I have taken from that a rule for my own shift. A new operator gets checklists, a paired partner and my attention on every decision for a defined period. At the end of that period, I remove the structure deliberately, one piece at a time, and say so, rather than letting it fade or keeping it forever.

The schedule is the important part. Structure that is never handed back tells a capable operator that I do not trust them, and research on transformational leadership in Module 3 suggested that it is individual consideration and intellectual stimulation, treating people as able to grow, that moves effort beyond what a reward system can count. The cost of this principle is risk. Handing back structure means that at 3 a.m. an operator will make a call I would have made differently, and occasionally worse. I accept that trade because a shift in which only one person can make decisions fails the night that person is sick.

Third Principle: Fix the System Before Judging the Person

The superintendent's list of radios, valve maps and valve authority in Module 4 and the laboratory supervisor's sampling letter in Module 5 taught the same lesson from two directions: most repeated errors are produced by the arrangement people work in, and the leader who changes the arrangement gets further than the leader who blames the person. Kish-Gephart et al. (2010), cited in Module 5, found that the organizational environment was a real source of poor decisions alongside individual traits, which is the research form of the same point.

This is the principle I am least sure I can keep. Last month, an operator twice skipped the hourly chlorine residual log on the clearwell. The system explanation was real: the log sat on a clipboard at the far end of the plant, and the hour it was missed was the hour the backwash cycle demanded attention. I moved the log to the control screen and changed the backwash timing. But I also told the operator, privately, that a third miss would be a written warning. My rule is that the system gets the first correction and the person gets the second. A leader who never reaches the second correction is not fixing systems but avoiding a hard conversation, and the rest of the shift can see the difference.

How I Will Keep Developing

Day et al. (2014), reviewing 25 years of research, distinguished leader development, the growth of one person's capacity, from leadership development, the growth of a group's capacity to lead itself, and concluded that both unfold over years rather than through single programs. Lord and Hall (2005) argued that leadership skill develops alongside identity, from a focus on oneself toward a focus on relationships and then on the group. My own development plan follows from both. For the next year, I will keep a short written record of every decision on my shift that I reversed or that an operator challenged, and review it monthly with the operations director. I will also give each of the two senior operators one standing area of the plant to run without my sign-off, which is leadership development in the sense Day et al. describe, since the shift should be able to lead itself on the nights I cannot.

What This Philosophy Does Not Claim

These principles come from one utility, five episodes and eight months in the role. They fit a setting where work is continuous, errors are measurable and people work unsupervised at night, and I would expect to revise them in a setting where none of that holds. They also do not settle every case. The first principle and the third will sometimes conflict, when correcting myself in public would expose an operator's mistake along with mine. When that happens, I intend to take the public part of the correction and keep the operator's share private, which is the version of both principles I could still defend the next morning.

References

Day, D. V., Fleenor, J. W., Atwater, L. E., Sturm, R. E., & McKee, R. A. (2014). Advances in leader and leadership development: A review of 25 years of research and theory. The Leadership Quarterly, 25(1), 63-82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2013.11.004

Detert, J. R., & Burris, E. R. (2007). Leadership behavior and employee voice: Is the door really open? Academy of Management Journal, 50(4), 869-884. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2007.26279183

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Kish-Gephart, J. J., Harrison, D. A., & Treviño, L. K. (2010). Bad apples, bad cases, and bad barrels: Meta-analytic evidence about sources of unethical decisions at work. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(1), 1-31. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017103

Lord, R. G., & Hall, R. J. (2005). Identity, deep structure and the development of leadership skill. The Leadership Quarterly, 16(4), 591-615. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2005.06.003