Exodus 18:13- 26 There is an adage that suggests we manage systems and lead peop

Question

Exodus 18:13-

26

There is an adage that suggests we manage systems and lead people.

Management and leadership are distinct operations. Often, organizations confuse managing with

leading and vise-versa. Exodus 18 provides a strategy to help leaders share responsibilities of

managing systems so that proper leadership can take place. Discuss how you see shared leadership benefitting Moses’ leadership. What specific results took place when leadership was shared? Discuss an example you experienced where leadership was shared, the organizational system positively benefitted, and God was glorified through the process.

Explanation / Answer

Shared leadership is the type of leadership in which the leadership attribute and responsibilities are distributed among the members in team so that team members and the company have the capability of leading each other. In Exodus 18, Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro is found talking about the ideology and benefits of shared leadership. Jethro advises Moses to share his responsibilities among people who are capable and knowledgeable of handling the same. A leader cannot work alone. He needs to be a good task allocator to get the work done efficiently and timely.

In my views, Jethro was quite correct. A leader has such wide scope of responsibilities and has a plethora of roles to play, so it becomes cumbersome for him to handle all responsibilities alone. Hence a leader must be well equipped with the strengths and weaknesses of his team. He must capitalize on the strengths of his team members and allot them work accordingly. The leader must also take interventions to work on the weaknesses of his team members and transform it to strength.

An instance where I implemented shared leadership in my work:

We were only a week away from the submission date when I believed it was time I stirred some life into the group when it was needed the most. That is when I quoted to them a quote from one of my most favourite novella “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” - “Remember that hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” And a smile swept across every face in our group.

There was renewed energy in our group and we together planned to revamp our efforts and look upon the problems. We pondered over what was ailing our progress and narrowed it down to working in an unorganized manner and not having distributed the proper roles to everyone. I directed everyone and distributed the roles keeping in mind everyone’s strengths and group synergy. Everyone started to work with renewed energy and everything started falling into place as we prudently proceeded on our respective jobs. Everyone was leading his or her allotted domain, so we were implementing the concept of shared leadership. We were able to successfully complete the project in time and were satisfied with our results. Our project was well received by the faculty-in-charge and we got 10 out of 10 pointer in our Minor-Project.

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