American

American Dental Care, is a dental care provider located in Philadelphia, PA, responsible for providing high quality dental care to patients; performing all aspects of general or specialty dentistry, including but not limited to restorative, prosthetic, oral surgery and other services. Since the inception of ADC, their employment goals have been straightforward: employ the best, develop the best and keep the best. Believing a productive, educated and energized professional staff leads to a successful dental group. ADC strives to be the country's leader network of dental professionals delivering the highest measurable quantity of service and patient satisfaction. Traditional leadership roles need to be re-examined The current managers at ADC are insufficient in empowering their employees to produce results. ADC is questioning the notion that traditional command-and-control styles of management and leadership are the only way to succeed. This use of authoritative, power and control style of management is often referred to as Transactional Leadership. In this form of management, managers interact with subordinates and provide incentives for good performance and consequences for poor performance. The current culture of management has been organized to give instructions, delegate, manipulate, convince or tell how to do something. The basic premise of management is an "us or them" mentality. In fact, included in almost every definition of the word manage is a reference to making and keeping one submissive. Even the word used to describe the one being managed, subordinate, is defined as "being placed in or occupying a lower class or rank; submissive to or controlled by authority." (cite) The traditional view of management, which is seen as planning, organizing, coordinating and controlling, was first introduced by the French industrialist Henri Fayol in 1916 (Mintzberg 163). The industrial era hints to the reason why management was based on authority, power and control. The focus for most companies during the Industrial Revolution was on product, raw materials and machinery. People worked on assembly lines. They needed to be told what to do, and then heavily supervised. Human interaction was at a bare minimum, therefore, there was little or no need for developing interpersonal skills. If someone was not producing or performing up to standards, management simply got rid of him and brought in someone new. Unfortunately, this manner of management has persisted through the decades. People have remained on the bottom of the list by managers when asked what resources they manage. Machines, money, raw materials, facilities, and the finished product usually takes precedence over the employees (Fournies 20). As industry evolved into what is now referred to as the information and technological era, more and more companies are realizing that their most valuable assets are their people. The transactional style of management and leadership is now insufficient and inappropriate to accomplish organizational objectives. A new way of managing and leading is beginning to emerge called Transformational Leadership. It is based on having people transform their own interests into aligning with the goals and missions of the team and overall organization. Authority, power and control from this perspective of management have been replaced with cooperation, participation and empowerment. The personalities of managers in this role have characteristics such as charisma, interpersonal skills, and relationship building. In the traditional view, managers are centered on doing things, a human doer. However, this new approach is based on how a manager relates, a human being. New Leadership Pardigm One of the most important sets of skills required in a changing world are the skills of leadership. Effective leadership is one of the keys to our future success and survival. Our current approach to leadership has created large bureaucracies incapable of operating efficiently or responding to the demands of customers. “Leaders” have lost sight of what leadership is all about. What we need now is not more fads, it's not more people talking about leaders with vision, but rather a change in our leadership paradigm. To be effective, the leader must have adequate resources to accomplish the job, an appropriate organizational structure, a set of followers to perform the tasks and certain leadership skills and abilities. Leadership is a function of the leader's motivation, skills, style and level of conceptual ability. High Performance Leadership is founded on matching the right leader to the appropriate organizational level. Motivational level is a function of the match between the organizational structure, the level of the organization at which the leader works and organizational climate. The structure must be such that the leader is able to operate within his/her time frame of discretion. The organizational level and climate must match the leader's skill and conceptual level. The skills component of leadership is composed of three factors: technical skills, interpersonal skills and leader skills. Technical skills are peculiar to the type of industry, e.g., chemical, engineering, forest products, etc., in which the organization operates. Interpersonal skills involve those skills required to successfully interact with other people. Leader skills will be presented with each leader level below. Leader style is based on the premise that leaders exhibit behaviors along two axes, relationship and task. The result is four basic leader styles: Limiting, Encouraging, Assisting and Developing. Conceptual ability (CA) refers to how a leader processes, organizes, stores and retrieves information, makes sense of it and acts on it. Stratified systems theory indicates that CA is one of the primary factors influencing the leader's ability to make appropriate decisions and lead successfully at varying organizational levels. ADC staff will be a highly motivated, empowered and experienced team working in an environment of trust, communication and accountability. Conclusion The leadership literature has unduly glamorized leaders and simultaneously defamed managers. While it is true that some leaders’ roles and responsibilities are relatively glamorous (e.g., setting the vision for the organization) leaders also engage in mundane activities, just as managers may engage in relatively glamorous activities. In their study of leadership in a large, knowledge-intensive multinational corporation, Alvesson & Sveningsson (2003) found that leaders often engaged in passive, mundane activities such as listening to employees and that these activities were critical to the leaders’ effectiveness. Just as leaders’ roles have been overly glamorized, managers’ roles have been rendered unduly dull and mundane as indicated by the leadership literature’s efforts to de-glamorize managers’ roles through measures such as removing “motivating and inspiring” from managers’ roster of duties. While many leadership theorists continue to argue that leaders are superior to, or at least more important than, managers for organizational success (Ackoff, 2003; Bennis, 2004; Bennis & Townsend, 1995; Heifetz & Laurie, 2001; Kouzes & Posner, 2001, 2003a; Lowy & Hood, 2004; Tichy & Cohen, 2003), they are incorrect in their prediction of impending managerial obsolescence, Leadership is not something wholly different from management. Indeed, it is one component of management and has always been a responsibility of management, especially for top managers. The portrayal of managers as concerned with controlling and bean-counting and leaders as concerned with visioning and motivating is a false dichotomy and a disservice to effective managers. Good managers need to be good leaders, and the most effective leaders are good managers. Much of what is touted as “effective leadership” is really nothing more than good management repackaged. Businesses are in a continual state of change and human beings typically prefer to maintain the status quo. One of the many responsibilities of business leaders is to drive change, to keep their companies competitive. This often requires forcing employees outside of their comfort zones to participate in the process. http://www.americandentalconcepts.com/vision.shtml http://www.combinedcyclejournal.com/4Q2009/CCJ_70-73.pdf http://www.distinctionsinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/DevelopingYourOwnInnerCoach_Effectiveness.pdf [pic]