The theme of this week’s lecture is about How We Impact Others. Leadership is not only about making decisions or setting direction but also about how our words, actions, and behaviors shape the people around us. This perspective helped me reflect more deeply on the ripple effects of leadership. If you are new, this is a continuation of the IT2900 Weekly Reflection series, where I share my responses to the weekly assignments for this course.

The previous week’s blog post was titled “Successful Leaders Guide the Team with Strategy and Compassion.” You can take a look if you later find this article interesting.

What was most insightful / thought provoking / inspiring for you from today’s lecture? Explain

I believe there are so many things I took away from these lessons. I never think about most of them, and it was really perspective-changing. However, if I can only choose one, I will go with the SCARF (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness) model, its implication, and how I can exploit it for personal and team advantages.

To begin with, I will use the scenario where I am taking exams in general. Personally, I wondered why I always performed better when doing practice questions, and I found the SCARF model to explain it really well. Since I don’t know exactly what is going to come up, the situation is more uncertain, and I feel threatened. The competitive environment also reduces the sense of autonomy because there is not much that we can control, e.g., the time constraint.

Furthermore, the SCARF model applies to leaders because they are people who influence others. How the team perceives the environment significantly relies on how we apply each abbreviation in the SCARF to action. Interestingly, the framework breaks down the factors that contribute to how individuals perceive threatening or replenishing. Therefore, as a team leader, it is important to know how to exploit these factors to ensure a psychologically safe working environment, which would boost the cognitive ability of the team and produce higher-quality work.

Respond to the following based on pre-readings and lecture

Describe a bad leadership behaviour you’ve observed in a leader/someone you know. Explain the possible insecurity that was driving it

A few years ago, I once worked in a team where my direct leader was quite fearful of judgement and rejection, as well as constantly seeking approval. For context, there is a higher-rank leader who oversaw the project. You can imagine this person as the team lead in CVWO who still works under Prof. Ben (higher-rank leader). When we are presenting any new ideas that we want to implement in the project, the guy takes an interestingly horrible action. He always prevents the team from dropping his name, because he worries that the higher-up might not like his idea (and might not like him as well). Obviously, the guy focuses too much on his performance rather than learning, and he shows the sign of “resistance to feedback”, which also suggests insecurity.

Describe how the bad leadership behaviour / insecurity impacted you. i.e How did it make you feel about yourself and the situation? How did it influence your subsequent thoughts, actions or behaviors?

Definitely, everyone in the team does not like him, even though none of us have heard about the SCARF model before. The situation makes us perceive that we have lower status and we are just one of his chessmen. Subsequently, we also lack autonomy; we mostly need to follow his idea and need to take responsibility for it. It made me feel undervalued and powerless, as if my contribution does not matter. As time went on, I found myself disengaging and just blindly following the instructions without being proactive, since my ideas are likely to be dismissed anyways.

Share an alternative way in which you wished the leader could have behaved / responded positively

In this specific situation, I think the fact that my ideas were rejected is not the main concern, since they are relatively impractical anyways after looking back. However, the important thing is about how he behaves as a leader, takes wins instead of the team, and lets the team take negativity when it happens. The correct approaches for the leader include taking responsibility for what he did, seeking feedback, and growing together as a team. Doing it this way would create a positive working environment that drives a better outcome and happiness.