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The Leadership Pipeline

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The Leadership PipelineThe Leadership Pipeline, Intro and Chapter 1

Reflect on the Six Leadership Passages you will go through during your career. What stage are you at now? What are your current challenges? What challenges should you be preparing for?
I am at passage two of the six leadership passages; managing managers. However, currently I am transitioning to a regional role, where functional managers will not report directly to me but will work on specific company strategies lead by me. My current challenges are that I have not completely divested myself from individual tasks. Also, I need to put expand my view from a tactical to a more strategic vision that support the overall company. The challenge that I should be preparing for is skip-level communication; now the individual contributors and first level managers require an extra layer of communication, I need to be able to understand what those contributors are working on without disrupting the management chain. At the same time, functional managers tend to be older and more experienced than me, I need to prepare myself to understand and challenge their contributions without sounding too inexperienced.

Discuss/compare McGregor & Wolford’s leadership styles. How effectively are they going through their leadership passages?
I believe that McGregor and Wolford are at passage four of the leadership ladder, however none of them is performing at that level, McGregor could easily be at passage 5, while Wolford is struggling to get out of passage 2.
Their management styles are totally opposite, while McGregor allows an incredible amount of autonomy, Wolford is into the day-to-day operations, and problem solving. McGregor mobilizes towards a vision and set high standards, his people is highly motivated in an environment where they help each other, their drive is to become someday “the Thursday man”. In

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