Reference no: EM133514828

Case Study: Mr. Milton Jones is a retired school administrator in New York City - Department of Education. He worked with the department of education for over 30 years before his retirement. Prior to working with the department of education, he was a professional musician - trained in New York city at some of the best specialized schools and colleges. He later went to Queens College where he got his bachelor's degree in music and became a professional musician and travelled different countries playing mostly at Chambers music. He was so successful in his music carrier and later in 1980 he was appointed as head of the music department in Queens College.

At some point in his life, he decided not to continue with his music profession because of family needs and concerns and decided to stay around his family and help his mother and sister. This led him to change his carrier to work in the justice sector, where he worked at the District Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman in Brooklyn for about two years. He didn't like it much at the District Attorney's office, so he decided to work with the Department of education in New York where he spent over 30 years of his time.

He joined the Department of Education in 1985 and worked there till he retires in 2021. During those periods, he became involved in curriculum developments, proposal writing, testing coordinator, development of social skills, training of young teachers and developed programs to help prevent being labelled and placed in special education. He got a huge experience working with kids coming from different cultural backgrounds and nationalities. He worked with kids from Ghana, Sierra Leone, Mexico, United State, Malaysia to name but a few. Such experience placed him in an advantage position to understand people and significantly improved his communication and conflict resolution skills.

He later became a school administrator and worked with the school to develop a special program to help trained people of colored who are passionate about becoming professional teachers. It was a diversified group of people coming from different backgrounds and cultures. Managing such groups was a huge challenge in his professional carrier.

His leadership experience is outstanding as his core values are honesty, respect for diversity and integrity. He believed that for a leader to successfully lead a team, such a leader must have a shared vision of whatever they are doing. In his case as a school administrator his shared vision was to produce kids that will be outstanding in the academic field. The vision and mission of the leader must be clear and precise.

Talking about some of the challenges faced in maximizing the team performance, he mentioned the following:

Lack of trust among team members
Dependency of the philosophy, that there must be a leader and the leader must have all the answers.
Lack of engagement and poor communication.
His top five leadership skills for successfully building team was:

Modeling or mentorship
Leading by example
Challenge the status quo.
Being passionate about what you believe in.
Evaluate yourself as a leader.
Talking about his skills of developing dynamic followers, he mentioned the following:

Authenticity
Honesty
Respect
Confidentiality
Unbiases
His important decision-making strategies were:

Using empirical evidence like data
Scope and sequence of work
Intuition
Idea of theory and practice
Talking about ethical concerns, he mentioned:

Lack of trust and honesty
Lack of integrity
Lack of belief in the mission and vision of the organization you work in.
Having got a brief information about Mr. Milton Jones, schedule an interview with him and ask him the following questions:

Question 1: What can leaders do to inspire teams to perform at their best?

Question 2: What challenges do you face in maximizing team performance? What do you do to alleviate these challenges?

Question 3: What are the top 5 leadership skills for successfully building and leading teams?

Question 4: How do excellent leaders develop followership?

Question 5: What are some important decision-making strategies that leaders might use? Which of these strategies do you feel is most effective and why?

Question 6: What are some ethical concerns faced by leaders? How might you deal with these ethical concerns?