In my classmate’s Katie’s blog, there is a blog post titled “The Future is Friendly” very interesting to me. Katie summarizes the general ideas from the article “The TELUS Leadership Philosophy: a collaborative, engaging and open leadership framework for 35,000+ team members”, and talks about what challenges TELUS company is facing, and how TELUS initiates the TLP (known as TELUS Leadership Philosophy). In the end, Katie points out the importance of consistency of common values and leadership in large companies and even in the course group projects.
After reading this Katie’s post, I can’t help opening up the linked article and reading further about the leadership ideas of TELUS. Particularly, the ideas of increasing employee engagement and tight-loose culture are very insightful for me to see the organizational culture and enterprise values of TELUS.
Although Katie mentions that the article relates chapter 7: communication, chapter 11: leadership, and chapter 3: values and diversity in the workplace respectively, I would like to see how she applies concepts from each of the 3 chapters to explain the context in the article in detail.
Since I’m the most interested in ideas of increasing employee engagement and tight-loose culture in the organization. I would like to talk about how I connect ideas to chapter 8: power.
In the TLP, it says “The TELUS leadership philosophy is about creating an environment where team members, regardless of title, level or experience, feel that they have a responsibility to take a leadership role, and understand that they can add value and make a difference in our organization.”, and this reminds of the empowerment concept in chapter 8. Empowerment means describes the freedom and capacity of employees to make decisions and commitments. Therefore, the empowered employees have a better sense of meaning and impact in the organization since they feel the importance of the jobs they choose and get respect on their ideas by others, which exactly matches the idea of increasing employee engagement in TLP.
In general, in my opinion, TELUS is making a correct move to introduce employee engagement in the leadership philosophy since Canada is a county with low power distance. However, since Canada still has a significant amount of Asian population from their home countries with high power distance. While dealing with Asian employees in the company, TELUS should be very careful with empowerment, or lack of clear instructions in command of chain would be considered as weak sign of the manager.
Word Count: 456
Reference:
Pontefract, Dan. “Story:The TELUS Leadership Philosophy: A Collaborative, Engaging and Open Leadership Framework for 35,000+ Team Members.” The TELUS Leadership Philosophy: A Collaborative, Engaging and Open Leadership Framework for 35,000+ Team Members | Management Innovation EXchange. Management Innovation EXchange, n.d. Web. 26 Mar. 2017. <http://www.managementexchange.com/story/telus-leadership-philosophy>.
Langton, Robbins, Judge, Organizational Behaviour, 7th edition, p. 299.