Student’s name
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Date The leadership of Rebecca Stevens Halstead
Introduction
Rebecca Stevens Halstead is one of the successful women in her career and she works very hard to makes sure that everything that she wants is done perfectly. She displays the qualities of a good leader and she forms a good relationship with the people being led. This comes first as a background of the values she learns at home whereby her mother tells her that should never quit because quitting is not her option but rather she should be courageous and know that everything is never easy and she has to keep trying every day. This is displayed at the point whereby she has entered the training for military and she feels like giving up, at this point she tells her mother and her mother takes her for a drive, and during the drive, she reassures her that everything is okay and she brings afresh the teaching she had taught her before that she should never quit. It is through this way that she gives the training another year and as the training goes on she finds herself already liking the process.
Therefore as she proceeds with her career she is seen as a very dependable person even though sometimes like the above example she feels not adequate and unable to do what she is supposed to do. It is also upon the people she depends on i.e. the parents and people at home as well as friends and the people she leads that she can live very well and show an excellent example of her life. This is because as she states at one point that she had to go through the training thinking of the love and the respect and the faith that the people at home had put into her that she could do it.
Authentic leadership theory
This theory focuses on whether leadership is genuine and if its intentions, goals, and desires of the leader are for the general good of what is being led or the people being led of they are for personal benefit and desire. It is upon the leader therefore to establish himself or herself and show the people being led the kind of leader he/she is. In this case, Becky can be considered an authentic leader. This is because she has her goals and intentions in place not for her good or benefit but for the good and benefit of the group she is leading as well as the good and the benefit of the country which she is served in her best manner possible. This leadership is based on personal beliefs and convictions which lead a person and therefore it turns out that if the personal beliefs and convictions about the good in the society as positive then there is a possibility of being a good leader. This concept applies to Becky very much as she saw the world as a place that needed change and positive minds as her parents had taught her. She also believed in never giving up and this was the same thing that she fed to her team which she led in the best manner possible.
This theory also states that authentic leadership is created or defined by both leaders and followers. This is true because authentic leadership is only visible through the people being led changing behavior and becoming better people which happens with the two groups Becky leads. That is the 63d ordinance company and her role as a brigadier. Therefore her leadership was very visible from the inside to the outside and this made life good and better every day for the people being led.
Servant leadership theory
In this theory, we see that the leader becomes the servant in a way that he/she is there for the people who are being led. The leader listens to them and helps them to make good decisions in whatever they do. Becky can be said to have been this kind of leader. This is because she was always there for the people being led. She listened to them and almost had all the qualities and characteristics of a servant leader which include; listening empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, and foresight. she displayed these through the different ways she handled her juniors and how they interacted generally.
She states that “the best way to take care of people is to get to know them” (Groysberg et.al., 11). Therefore her leadership model can be said to have been that of learning about people and making sure they got what was needed at the time it was needed so that they could perform to their maximum. Throughout the 27 years she served her country she was able to get most of it in the best way possible and she had a lot of influence as she was a servant leader who never looked back but worked closely with the juniors. This is very evident when she took charge as the head of the 63d ordinance. Her first t step was to call for everyone in the company and get their views as well as their opinions before she began her journey of transforming the company. This is servant leadership because she listened to their concerns and got a plan to make sure that it was successful (Groysberg et.al. 7).
Transformational leadership
This is a kind of leadership that transforms the people and therefore this is exactly what Becky was concerned about. She was greatly concerned about changing the behavior of the people she was leading to make them better and like a family that she had to listen to them and attend to their needs as well as push them to the wall so that they can become better versions of themselves. This is especially seen when she had to deal with the general who was not an easy person to deal with. She called back all the members of her team and began retraining so that the general could have no reason for failing to sign off the deployment for her unit to go to Iraq (Groysberg et.al. 13). Therefore through her leadership, this whole team retrained so hard and she pushed them very much. After all the retraining the general signed off and the team was deployed to Iraq. This is a very clear sign of a transformational leader because if she just waited the possibility of the general have refused to sign the deployment was high and therefore it was her efforts to transform the team that made it excellent.
This transformational leadership of hers is also seen in the ordinance company. She was able to straighten almost everything that was not okay in the 63d ordinance company and therefore when she handed it over it was a fully functioning unit after she worked on it for about 2 years.
In conclusion, we can say that Rebecca Stevens Halstead is one of the women who have shown their leadership skills very openly and who stand out to be admired and taken as mentors and role models due to their nature of doing things and making everything perfect. Therefore it can be said that she was successful in her career in the military even though this had never crossed her mind but was the influence of her mother.
Works cited
Groysberg, Boris, and Deborah Bell. “Rebecca S. Halstead: Steadfast Leadership.” Harvard Business School Organizational Behavior Unit Case 411-050 (2011).
