Audio Transcript Auto-generated
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sorry
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biologists who developed what is now called Fiedler's contingency theory.
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He was from Austria and moved to the United States just a few years before World War II
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in 1938.
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I can imagine it was the conflict in Germany
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that probably brought his family over to America.
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Also one bit of interesting information I found was that
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he knew in grade school that he wanted to be a psychologist and also study business.
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Before I get into the specifics of the Fiedler model, I wanted to touch on
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leadership overall.
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Prior to Fiedler doing his research,
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people focused on more of a one size fits all for good leadership.
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In other words, you need to have these qualities to be a good leader.
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But when Fiedler came along, he sort of turned that all on its head.
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He posited that the effectiveness of a leader really
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depends on the interception or interaction of certain variables.
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What Fiedler said was that a leader's
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effectiveness depends on the conditions and situations.
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These situations are based on two things,
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leadership style and situational favorability.
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Fiedler developed the least preferred coworker scale or
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LPC to determine the type of leadership style.
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A person has,
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The leader answers a series of questions and then rates them one through 8.
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So here you can see some of the questions
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for example, I am inefficient or efficient or somewhere in the middle
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and each of those gets a score.
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The leader numbers, all of the characteristics that apply to them.
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The numbers are all added up and if they have a high score there A people person.
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If they have a low score, they are more of a go to work, do your job,
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go home kind of leader?
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In other words, more task oriented
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and not wanting the workplace
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to necessarily be a place where you would build relationships.
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So the other component of this is situational favorability.
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Fiedler describes this as three dimensions.
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So how favorable is the situation
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in the workplace?
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Mhm.
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It depends on leader member relations, so how well they get along task structure.
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So do they have tasks defined or is it kind of loosey goosey?
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And they don't really have anything, any procedures.
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And then lastly on how much power the leader has.
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So what do these scores mean?
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Once the leader answers all of the questions um and then they're tallied up
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A score below 60 63 means that the leader is task oriented.
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In other words, let's get the job done, no time for relationship building. We have,
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you know, we have things, we need to get done.
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A score between 64 and 72 is sort of in the middle,
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so it's an intermediate score and it means
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the leader is task oriented or relationship,
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oriented kind of depends
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A score over 73 is a high LPC
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and therefore that indicates the manager is relationship oriented
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and I think it's very important to note here that one is not better than the other,
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they are just different.
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So once the the leader has gone through all of these steps and they
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have put this in the feed Fiedler model um depending on the um relationships,
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structure, task structure and how strong the authority is,
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depends on where the leader
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falls within the organization. Um and so whether or not it's a good fit or not.
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So in other words you can't take
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Um one person and say we want to put you in this, you know,
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square peg round hole thing. In other words,
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um
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you can't list these characteristics and say this makes the perfect
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leader for this role because it
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according to Fiedler, it depends on all of these different things.
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So I wanted to put this in here so that you could see it's not
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like a cut and dry thing.
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It they kind of all worked together and
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it's dependent upon one another each characteristic.
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So basically here they put it all together and with
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the data they can determine the most effective leadership style.
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I know this is sort of an, you know,
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an in depth chart,
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but the overall idea here is that they gather all the information and determine the
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most effective leader in each situation depending on
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leader member task structure and position power.
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So how could I use this information as a professional school counselor?
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Well, I thought of many ways, but I tried to narrow it down to three
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um as a professional school counselor,
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I could use this information and also the LPC um with students
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in maybe are college and career planning um Just as a tool,
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not as the tool but um
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and it helped these students learn about leadership,
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the importance of it and that it's not a cut and dry,
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either you're a leader or you're not by any means.
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And so I think I can definitely use it that way. Um as a school counselor
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um I also think it will help me personally in my role as a school counselor,
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I probably will be at more than one school or if if I am
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at one school I may have several different principles come in and out through
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the school and I think it's very important to understand leadership styles and to
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know that if I'm a touchy feely person and I'm a relationship builder,
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what kind of person if someone isn't and they just want to come in and do
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their job and go home and um you know not get to know each other,
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there's nothing, it's not personal, it's just their style.
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So I think it's always a good reminder to you know, keep that in mind.
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And then also as a professional school counselor,
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I could use this information in guidance lessons
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um and small groups in discussing leadership roles and the importance of them.
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So um I think that we can all use this information.
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So thank you very much for listening