Leadership and Decision MakingAssignment Two.docx

Leadership and Decision Making
Assignment Two
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Assessment Task TwoAssessment Task Two: Leadership
DevelopmentDue Date: Week 09Type: Individual Weighting:
Total 50%Length: 2,500 words (+/- 10%)
RMIT University©
School of Management
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Assessment Task Two - SummaryThree stages and objectives:
Stage one - Observation: Learning outcome of this stage is that
you are challenged to apply and link the theories in this course
with your observation.
Stage Two – Leadership Development Plan: Expected to learn
not only from your role model but also how to develop and
improve your own leadership skills and qualities
Stage Three - Feedback: To seek feedback on your plan from an
industry leader and incorporate his/her feedback into your plan
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In Week 06, you are required to submit background information
of your leader who will provide feedback on your plan via the
course Canvas. You do not need to identify the person (e.g.
name). However, you must provide background information of
your role model (e.g. position, leadership experience,
organisation information etc.). A penalty of 2 marks may apply
if you fail to submit the background information.
Important Note:
Stage One – Research/Observation
Identify a person who you consider to be a successful or
effective leader. This could be someone you work with or for
(for example: business, professional, sport, volunteer work,
religious organisations etc.) or anyone you judge to be a good
leader. This leader could be someone you can observe in person
or from your past experience or a public figure or someone you
have read about same qualifier as above.From your research
and/or observation, critically analyse:
What makes this person a good leader?
What you perceive this person’s leadership traits, behaviours
and qualities;
How the person uses power and influence to make him/her an
effective leader.
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Second Stage – Leadership Development Plan
First, you are required to diagnose and assess your current
strengths and weaknesses as a leader (or potential leader). To
identify your leadership strengths and weaknesses, you will
complete the ‘leadership attributes’ diagnostic tools provided
(see Canvas for suggested diagnostic tools).Second, you are
then required to create a leadership development plan. The plan
must at least maintain or further develop your leadership
strengths and improve weaknesses. The plan should consist of
key components such as timeframe, activities, goals and
measurement indicators etc. (see Canvas for Suggested
Development Plan template).
RMIT University©
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Stage Three – FeedbackIn the final stage, you must seek
feedback on your plan from a leader. This leader can be anyone
you know who holds a leadership position in an organisation.
This leader could be the same person as Stage One or a different
leader. To assist with the feedback stage, you should provide
the leader with the ‘Feedback Checklist’ (see Canvas).Note:
You are required to include the feedback checklist that is
completed by your leader in your assignment as an appendix.At
this stage, you must:

Describe what and how you have incorporated this leader’s
feedback into your plan;
Describe how you will evaluate whether or not you have
reached the level of development set out in your plan (e.g. how
will you know that you’ve achieved the goals set out in your
leadership development plan? what kind(s) of data and
information will inform this?)
RMIT University©
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Format & ReferenceFormat:
This assignment should have the following format:
1) Introduction
2) Body with headings and sub-headings (i.e.
Observation/Research, Leadership Development Plan;
Feedback)
3) Conclusion
4) References
5) Appendix
Note: 4) and 5) are not included in the word count.It is expected
that you will use at least 10 academic references, preferably
refereed journal/research articles. Websites, such as Wikipedia,
will not be accepted, other than for providing general details of
the leaders and these will not be counted in the minimum

references required.
RMIT University©
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Suggested Leadership Diagnostic ToolsComplete Three of the
following diagnostic tools to assess your leadership strengths
and weaknesses:
1. Self-Confident Test
2. Team Leadership Skills
3. Emotional Intelligence Test
4. Locus of Control: Self-assessment
5. Diversity Management Capability: Self-assessment
6. Cultural Intelligence: Self-assessment
7. Ability to Work under Ambiguity/Uncertainty/Change: Self-
assessment
RMIT University©
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Suggested Plan Template
RMIT University©
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Rubric

RMIT University©
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CriteriaFail (NN)Pass (PA)Credit (CR)Distinction (DI)High
Distinction (HD)MarkAbility to critically analyse the leader’s
leadership behaviours, traits, qualities and use of powerLack of
understanding and ability to critically analyse the leader’s
leadership behaviours, traits and qualities and power.Some
leadership behaviours, traits and qualities and power.Competent
leadership behaviours, traits and qualities and power.Strong
grasp of understanding and ability to critically analyse the
leader’s leadership behaviours, traits and qualities and
power.Exceptionally clear understanding and ability to critically
analyse the leader’s leadership behaviours, traits and qualities
and power.8Demonstrate a good understanding of relevant
leadership theories/issues referred to in the
observation/researchLack of understanding of relevant
observation/research.Some appreciation of understanding of
relevant leadership theories/issues referred to in the
observation/research.Competent understanding of relevant
observation/research.Strong grasp of understanding of relevant
observation/research.Exceptionally clear understanding of
relevant leadership theories/issues referred to in the
observation/research.8Ability to diagnose leadership strengths
and weaknesses as a result of self-assessmentLack of
understanding and ability to diagnose leadership strengths and
weaknesses as a result of self-assessment.Some appreciation of
weaknesses as a result of self-assessment.Competent
weaknesses as a result of self-assessment.Strong grasp of

weaknesses as a result of self-assessment.Exceptionally clear
weaknesses as a result of self-assessment.8Ability to create a
leadership development plan based on self-assessmentLack of
understanding and ability to create a leadership development
plan.Some appreciation of understanding and ability to create a
leadership development plan.Competent understanding and
ability to create a leadership development plan.Strong grasp of
understanding and ability to create a leadership development
plan.Exceptionally clear understanding and ability to create a
leadership development plan.8Ability to describe how to
incorporate the feedback into the plan
Lack of understanding and ability to describe how to
incorporate the feedback into the plan.Some appreciation of
understanding and ability to describe how to incorporate the
feedback into the plan.Competent understanding and ability to
describe how to incorporate the feedback into the plan.Strong
grasp of understanding and ability to describe how to
incorporate the feedback into the plan.Exceptionally clear
understanding and ability to describe how to incorporate the
feedback into the plan.8Ability to identify plan evaluation
approach/es
Lack of understanding and ability to identify plan evaluation
approach/es.Some appreciation of understanding and ability to
identify plan evaluation approach/es.Competent understanding
and ability to identify plan evaluation approach/es.Strong grasp
of understanding and ability to identify plan evaluation
approach/es.Exceptionally clear understanding and ability to
identify plan evaluation approach/es.8Quality and quantity of
referencesLack of quality and quantity of references.Some
quality and quantity of referencesAdequate quality and quantity
of referencesStrong quality and quantity of
referencesExceptional quality and quantity of references2

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Suggested plan template
GOAL Strengths/Weaknesses ACTIVITY
TIMEFRAME MEASUREMENT
Goal # 1 Strength/weakness # 1
(e.g. improve self-
confident)
Activty#1
Activity#2

Activity#3
Period 1
Period 2
Period 3
Indicator#1
Indicator#2
Indicator#3
(e.g. improve team
leadershipskills)
Activty#1
Activity#2
Activity#3
Period 1
Period 2
Period 3
Indicator#1
Indicator#2

Indicator#3
Goal # 3 Activty#1
Activity#2
Activity#3
Period 1
Period 2
Period 3
Indicator#1
Indicator#2
Indicator#3
Goal # 4 Activty#1
Activity#2
Activity#3
Period 1
Period 2
Period 3
Indicator#1

Indicator#2
Indicator#3
GOAL Strengths/Weaknesses ACTIVITY
TIMEFRAME MEASUREMENT
(e.g. improve self-
confident)
Activty#1
Activity#2
Activity#3
Period 1
Period 2
Period 3
Indicator#1
Indicator#2
Indicator#3
(e.g. improve team
leadershipskills)
Activty#1
Activity#2

Activity#3
Period 1
Period 2
Period 3
Indicator#1
Indicator#2
Indicator#3
Goal # 3 Activty#1
Activity#2
Activity#3
Period 1
Period 2
Period 3
Indicator#1
Indicator#2
Indicator#3
Goal # 4 Activty#1
Activity#2
Activity#3
Period 1

Period 2
Period 3
Indicator#1
Indicator#2
Indicator#3
Making It in America
In the past decade, the flow of goods emerging from U.S.
factories has risen by about a third. Factory employment has
fallen by roughly the same fraction. The story of Standard
Motor Products, a 92-year-old, family-run manufacturer based
in Queens, sheds light on both phenomena. It’s a story of hustle,
ingenuity, competitive success, and promise for America’s
economy. It also illuminates why the jobs crisis will be so
difficult to solve.
By Adam Davidson
Image credit: Dean Kaufman
I first met Madelyn “Maddie” Parlier in the “clean room” of
Standard Motor Products’ fuel-injector assembly line in
Greenville, South Carolina. Like everyone else, she was
wearing a blue lab coat and a hairnet. She’s so small that she
seemed swallowed up by all the protective gear.
Tony Scalzitti, the plant manager, was giving me the grand tour,
explaining how bits of metal move through a series of machines
to become precision fuel injectors. Maddie, hunched forward
and moving quickly from one machine to another, almost
bumped into us, then shifted left and darted away. Tony, in
passing, said, “She’s new. She’s one of our most promising
Level 1s.”

Later, I sat down with Maddie in a quiet factory office where
nobody needs to wear protective gear. Without the hairnet and
lab coat, she is a pretty, intense woman, 22 years old, with
bright blue eyes that seemed to bore into me as she talked, as
fast as she could, about her life. She told me how much she
likes her job, because she hates to sit still and there’s always
something going on in the factory. She enjoys learning, she
said, and she’s learned how to run a lot of the different
machines. At one point, she looked around the office and said
she’d really like to work there one day, helping to design parts
rather than stamping them out. She said she’s noticed that
robotic arms and other machines seem to keep replacing people
on the factory floor, and she’s worried that this could happen to
her. She told me she wants to go back to school—as her parents
and grandparents keep telling her to do—but she is a single
mother, and she can’t leave her two kids alone at night while
she takes classes.
I had come to Greenville to better understand what, exactly, is
happening to manufacturing in the United States, and what the
future holds for people like Maddie—people who still make
physical things for a living and, more broadly, people (as many
as 40 million adults in the U.S.) who lack higher education, but
are striving for a middle-class life. We do still make things
here, even though many people don’t believe me when I tell
them that. Depending on which stats you believe, the United
States is either the No. 1 or No. 2 manufacturer in the world
(China may have surpassed us in the past year or two).
Whatever the country’s current rank, its manufacturing output
continues to grow strongly; in the past decade alone, output
from American factories, adjusted for inflation, has risen by a
third.
Yet the success of American manufacturers has come at a cost.
Factories have replaced millions of workers with machines.
Even if you know the rough outline of this story, looking at the
Bureau of Labor Statistics data is still shocking. A historical
chart of U.S. manufacturing employment shows steady growth

from the end of the Depression until the early 1980s, when the
number of jobs drops a little. Then things stay largely flat until
about 1999. After that, the numbers simply collapse. In the 10
years ending in 2009, factories shed workers so fast that they
erased almost all the gains of the previous 70 years; roughly one
out of every three manufacturing jobs—about 6 million in
total—disappeared. About as many people work in
manufacturing now as did at the end of the Depression, even
though the American population is more than twice as large
today.
I came here to find answers to questions that arise from the
data. How, exactly, have some American manufacturers
continued to survive, and even thrive, as global competition has
intensified? What, if anything, should be done to halt the
collapse of manufacturing employment? And what does the
disappearance of factory work mean for the rest of us?
Across America, many factory floors look radically different
than they did 20 years ago: far fewer people, far more high-tech
machines, and entirely different demands on the workers who
remain. The still-unfolding story of manufacturing’s
transformation is, in many respects, that of our economic age.
It’s a story with much good news for the nation as a whole. But
it’s also one that is decidedly less inclusive than the story of the
20th century, with a less certain role for people like Maddie
Parlier, who struggle or are unlucky early in life.
The Life and Times of Maddie Parlier
The Greenville Standard Motor Products plant sits just off I-85,
about 100 miles southwest of Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s a
sprawling beige one-story building, surrounded by a huge
tended lawn. Nearby are dozens of other similarly boxy factory
buildings. Neighbors include a big Michelin tire plant, a
nutrition-products factory, and, down the road, BMW’s only car
plant on American soil. Greenville is at the center of the 20-
year-old manufacturing boom that’s still taking place
throughout the “New South.” Nearby, I visited a Japanese-
owned fiber-optic-material manufacturer, and a company that

makes specialized metal parts for intercontinental ballistic
missiles.
Standard makes and distributes replacement auto parts, known
in the industry as “aftermarket” parts. Companies like Standard
directly compete with Chinese firms for shelf space in auto-
parts retail stores. This competition has intensified the pressure
on all parts makers—American, Chinese, European. And of
course it means that Maddie is, effectively, competing directly
with workers in China who are willing to do similar work for
much less money.
When Maddie says something important, something she wants
you to really hear, she repeats it. She’ll say it one time in a flat,
matter-of-fact voice, and then again with a lot of upstate South
Carolina twang.
“I’m a redneck,” she’ll say. “I’m a reeeeeedneck.”
“I’m smart,” she told me the first time we met. “There’s no
other way to say it. I am smaaaart. I am.”
Maddie flips back and forth between being a stereotypical
redneck and being awfully smart. She will say, openly, that she
doesn’t know all that much about the world outside of Easley,
South Carolina, where she’s spent her whole life. Since her
childhood, she’s seen Easley transform from a quiet country
town to a busy suburb of Greenville. (It’s now a largely
charmless place, thick with chain restaurants and shopping
centers.) Maddie was the third child born to her young mother,
Heather. Her father left when Maddie was young, never visited
again, and died after he drove drunk into a car carrying a family
of four, killing all of them as well.
Until her senior year of high school, Maddie seemed to be
headed for the American dream—a college degree and a job
with a middle-class wage. She got good grades, and never drank
or did drugs or hung out with the bad kids. For the most part,
she didn’t hang out with anybody outside her family; she went
to school, went home, went to church on Sundays. When she
was 17, she met a boy who told her she should make friends
with other kids at school. He had an easy way with people and

he would take Maddie to Applebee’s and cookouts and other
places where the cool kids hung out. He taught her how to fit in,
and he told her she was pretty.
Maddie’s senior year started hopefully. She had finished most
of her high-school requirements and was taking a few classes at
nearby Tri-County Technical College. She planned to go to a
four-year college after graduation, major in criminal justice,
and become an animal-control officer. Around Christmas, she
found out she was pregnant. She did finish school and, she’s
proud to say, graduated with honors. “On my graduation, I was
six months pregnant,” she says. “Six months.” The father and
Maddie didn’t stay together after the birth, and Maddie couldn’t
afford to pay for day care while she went to college, so she gave
up on school and eventually got the best sort of job available to
high-school graduates in the Greenville area: factory work.
If Maddie had been born in upstate South Carolina earlier in the
20th century, her working life would have been far more secure.
Her 22 years overlap the final collapse of most of the area’s
once-dominant cotton mills and the birth of an advanced
manufacturing economy. Hundreds of mills here once spun raw
cotton into thread and then wove and knit the thread into clothes
and textiles. For about 100 years, right through the 1980s and
into the 1990s, mills in the Greenville area had plenty of work
for people willing to put in a full day, no matter how little
education they had. But around the time Maddie was born, two
simultaneous transformations hit these workers. After NAFTA
and, later, the opening of China to global trade, mills in Mexico
and China were able to produce and ship clothing and textiles at
much lower cost, and mill after mill in South Carolina shut
down. At the same time, the mills that continued to operate
were able to replace their workers with a new generation of
nearly autonomous, computer-run machines. (There’s a joke in
cotton country that a modern textile mill employs only a man
and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there
to keep the man away from the machines.)
Other parts of the textile South have never recovered from these

two blows, but upstate South Carolina—thanks to its proximity
to I-85, and to foresighted actions by community leaders—
attracted manufacturers of products far more complicated than
shirts and textiles. These new plants have been a godsend for
the local economy, but they have not provided the sort of wide-
open job opportunities that the textile mills once did. Some
workers, especially those with advanced manufacturing skills,
now earn higher wages and have more opportunity, but there are
not enough jobs for many others who, like Maddie, don’t have
training past high school.
Maddie got her job at Standard through both luck and hard
work. She was temping for a local agency and was sent to
Standard for a three-day job washing walls in early 2011.
“People came up to me and said, ‘You have to hire that girl—
she is working so hard,’” Tony Scalzitti, the plant manager, told
me. Maddie was hired back and assigned to the fuel-injector
clean room, where she continued to impress people by working
hard, learning quickly, and displaying a good attitude. But, as
we’ll see, this may be about as far as hustle and personality can
take her. In fact, they may not be enough even to keep her
where she is.
The Transformation of the Factory Floor
To better understand Maddie’s future, it’s helpful, first, to ask:
Why is anything made in the United States? Why would any
manufacturing company pay American wages when it could hire
someone in China or Mexico much more cheaply?
I came to understand this much better when I learned how
Standard makes fuel injectors, the part that Maddie works on.
Like so many parts of the modern car engine, the fuel injector
seems mundane until you sit down with an engineer who can
explain how amazing it truly is.
A fuel injector is a bit like a small metal syringe, spraying a
tiny, precise mist of gasoline into the engine in time for the
spark plug to ignite the gas. The small explosion that results
pushes the piston down, turning the crankshaft and propelling
the car. Fuel injectors have replaced the carburetor, which, by

comparison, sloppily sloshed gasoline around the engine. They
became common in the 1980s, helping to solve a difficult
engineering problem: how to make cars more efficient (and
meet ever-tightening emission standards) without sacrificing
power or performance.
To achieve maximum efficiency and power, a car’s computer
receives thousands of signals every second from sensors all over
the engine and body. Based on the car’s speed, ambient
temperature, and a dozen other variables, the computer tells a
fuel injector to squirt a precise amount of gasoline (anywhere
from one to 100 10,000ths of an ounce) at the instant that the
piston is in the right position (and anywhere from 10 to 200
times a second). For this to work, the injector must be perfectly
constructed. When squirting gas, the syringe moves forward and
back a total distance of 70 microns—about the width of a human
hair—and a microscopic imperfection in the metal, or even a
speck of dust, will block the movement and disable the injector.
The tip of the plunger—a ball that meets a conical housing to
create a seal—has to be machined to a tolerance of a quarter
micron, or 10 millionths of an inch, about the size of a virus.
That precision explains why fuel injectors are likely to be made
in the United States for years to come. They require up-to-date
technology, strong quality assurance, and highly skilled
workers, all of which are easier to find in the United States than
in most factories in low-wage countries.
The main factory floor of Standard’s Greenville plant is, at
first, overwhelming. It has the feel of a very crowded high-
school gym: a big space with high ceilings but not a lot of light,
a gray cement floor that’s been around for a long time, and row
after row of machines, going back farther than the eye can see,
some the size of a washing machine, others as big as a small
house. The first two machines, in the first row as you enter, are
the newest: the Gildemeister seven-axis turning machines, two
large off-white boxes each about the size of a small car turned
on its side. Costing just under half a million dollars apiece, they
gleam next to all the older machines. Inside each box is a

larger, more precise version of the lathe you’d find in any high-
school metal shop: a metal rod is spun rapidly while a cutting
tool approaches it to cut at an exact angle. A special computer
language tells the Gildemeisters how fast to spin and how close
to bring the cutting tool to the metal rod.
A few decades ago, “turning machines” like these were operated
by hand; a machinist would spin one dial to move the cutting
tool large distances and another dial for smaller, more precise
positioning. A good machinist didn’t need a lot of book smarts,
just a steady, confident hand and lots of experience. Today, the
computer moves the cutting tool and the operator needs to know
how to talk to the computer.
Luke Hutchins is one of Standard’s newest skilled machinists.
He is somewhat shy and talks quietly, but when you listen
closely, you realize he’s constantly making wry, self-
deprecating observations. He’s 27, skinny in his dark-blue
jacket and jeans. When he was in his teens, his parents told him,
for reasons he doesn’t remember, that he should become a
dentist. He spent a semester and a half studying biology and
chemistry in a four-year college and decided it wasn’t for him;
he didn’t particularly care for teeth, and he wanted to do
something that would earn him money right away. He
transferred to Spartanburg Community College hoping to study
radiography, like his mother, but that class was full. A friend of
a friend told him that you could make more than $30 an hour if
you knew how to run factory machines, so he enrolled in the
Machine Tool Technology program.
At Spartanburg, he studied math—a lot of math. “I’m very good
at math,” he says. “I’m not going to lie to you. I got formulas
written down in my head.” He studied algebra, trigonometry,
and calculus. “If you know calculus, you definitely can be a
machine operator or programmer.” He was quite good at the
programming language commonly used in manufacturing
machines all over the country, and had a facility for three-
dimensional visualization—seeing, in your mind, what’s
happening inside the machine—a skill, probably innate, that is

required for any great operator. It was a two-year program, but
Luke was the only student with no factory experience or
vocational school, so he spent two summers taking extra classes
to catch up.
After six semesters studying machine tooling, including endless
hours cutting metal in the school workshop, Luke, like almost
everyone who graduates, got a job at a nearby factory, where he
ran machines similar to the Gildemeisters. When Luke got hired
at Standard, he had two years of technical schoolwork and five
years of on-the-job experience, and it took one more month of
training before he could be trusted alone with the Gildemeisters.
All of which is to say that running an advanced, computer-
controlled machine is extremely hard. Luke now works the
weekend night shift, 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., Friday, Saturday, and
Sunday.
When things are going well, the Gildemeisters largely run
themselves, but things don’t always go well. Every five minutes
or so, Luke takes a finished part to the testing station—a small
table with a dozen sets of calipers and other precision testing
tools—to make sure the machine is cutting “on spec,” or
matching the requirements of the run. Standard’s rules call for a
random part check at least once an hour. “I don’t wait the whole
hour before I check another part,” Luke says. “That’s stupid.
You could be running scrap for the whole hour.”
Luke says that on a typical shift, he has to adjust the machine
about 20 times to keep it on spec. A lot can happen to throw the
tolerances off. The most common issue is that the cutting tool
gradually wears down. As a result, Luke needs to tell the
computer to move the tool a few microns closer, or make some
other adjustment. If the operator programs the wrong number,
the tool can cut right into the machine itself and destroy
equipment worth tens of thousands of dollars.
Luke wants to better understand the properties of cutting tools,
he told me, so he can be even more effective. “I’m not one of
the geniuses on that. I know a little bit. A lot of people go to
school just to learn the properties of tooling.” He also wants to

learn more about metallurgy, and he’s especially eager to study
industrial electronics. He says he will keep learning for his
entire career.
In many ways, Luke personifies the dramatic shift in the U.S.
industrial labor market. Before the rise of computer-run
machines, factories needed people at every step of production,
from the most routine to the most complex. The Gildemeister,
for example, automatically performs a series of operations that
previously would have required several machines—each with its
own operator. It’s relatively easy to train a newcomer to run a
simple, single-step machine. Newcomers with no training could
start out working the simplest and then gradually learn others.
Eventually, with that on-the-job training, some workers could
become higher-paid supervisors, overseeing the entire
operation. This kind of knowledge could be acquired only on
the job; few people went to school to learn how to work in a
factory.
Today, the Gildemeisters and their ilk eliminate the need for
many of those machines and, therefore, the workers who ran
them. Skilled workers now are required only to do what
computers can’t do (at least not yet): use their human judgment.
This change is evident in the layout of a factory. In the pre-
computer age, machines were laid out in long rows, each
machine tended constantly by one worker who was considered
skilled if he knew the temperament of his one, ornery ward.
There was a quality-assurance department, typically in a lab off
the factory floor, whose workers occasionally checked to make
sure the machinists were doing things right. At Standard, today,
as at most U.S. factories, machines are laid out in cells. One
skilled operator, like Luke, oversees several machines,
performing on-the-spot quality checks and making appropriate
adjustments as needed.
The combination of skilled labor and complex machines gives
American factories a big advantage in manufacturing not only
precision products, but also those that are made in small
batches, as is the case with many fuel injectors. Luke can

quickly alter the program in a Gildemeister’s computer to
switch from making one kind of injector to another. Standard
makes injectors and other parts for thousands of different makes
and models of car, fabricating and shipping in small batches;
Luke sometimes needs to switch the type of product he’s
making several times in a shift. Factories in China, by contrast,
tend to focus on long runs of single products, with far less
frequent changeovers.
It’s no surprise, then, that Standard makes injectors in the U.S.
and employs high-skilled workers, like Luke. It seems fairly
likely that Luke will have a job for a long time, and will
continue to make a decent wage. People with advanced skills
like Luke are more important than ever to American
manufacturing.
But why does Maddie have a job? In fact, more than half of the
workers on the factory floor in Greenville are, like Maddie,
classified as unskilled. On average, they make about 10 times as
much as their Chinese counterparts. What accounts for that?
The Remnant Workforce
Tony Scalzitti, the factory manager, guides me through the logic
of Maddie’s employment. He’s bookish and thoughtful—nothing
like my mental image of a big, hulking factory manager.
Trained as an engineer, he is constantly drawing charts and
making lists as he talks, in order to explain modern American
manufacturing. Sitting at a table in his office in the
administrative area off the factory floor, Tony takes out a pen
and writes down the definitions.
“Unskilled worker,” he narrates, “can train in a short amount of
time. The machine controls the quality of the part.”
“High-skill worker,” on the other hand, “can set up machines
and make a variety of small adjustments; they use their
judgment to assure product quality.”
To show me the difference between the two, Tony takes me
from Luke’s station through an air lock and into Standard’s
bright-white clean room—about a quarter the size of the dirtier,
louder factory floor—where dozens of people in booties,

hairnets, and smocks, most of them women, stand at a series of
workstations.
Tony points out that most of the factory’s parts go through
roughly the same process. Metal is cut into a precise shape in
the “unclean” part of the factory and is then washed in a huge
industrial washing machine to remove any bits of dirt, flakes of
skin, or other contaminants, and, pristine, enters the clean room.
Here, machines build the outer housing of the fuel injector, the
part that is open to the engine and doesn’t require anything like
the precision of the inner workings.
The injectors progress through a series of stations, at each of
which an unskilled worker and a simple machine perform one
task. The machines here are much smaller, and are in one key
respect the opposite of the Gildemeisters; these machines can
work in only one way and require little judgment from the
operator. This is not a throwback to the old system, in which
workers manually ran single-purpose machines. This new
technology is the other side of the computer revolution in
manufacturing. Computers eliminate the need for human
discretion; the person is there only to place the parts and push a
button.
Take Maddie’s station. She runs the laser welding machine,
which sounds difficult and dangerous, but is neither. The laser
welder is tiny, more like a cigarette lighter than like something
you might aim at a Klingon. Maddie receives a tray of sealed
injector interiors, and her job is to weld on a cap. The machine
looks a little like a microscope; she puts the injector body in a
hole in the base, and the cap in a clamp where the microscope
lens would be. The entire machine—like most machines in the
clean room—sits inside a large metal-and-plexiglass box with
sensors to make sure that Maddie removes her hands from the
machine before it runs. Once Maddie inserts the two parts and
removes her hands, a protective screen comes down, and a
computer program tells the machine to bring the cap and body
together, fire its tiny beam, and rotate the part to create a
perfect seal. The process takes a few seconds. Maddie then

retrieves the part and puts it into another simple machine, which
runs a test to make sure the weld created a full seal. If Maddie
sees a green light, the part is sent on to the next station; if she
sees a red or yellow light, the part failed and Maddie calls one
of the skilled techs, who will troubleshoot and, if necessary, fix
the welding machine.
The last time I visited the factory, Maddie was training a new
worker. Teaching her to operate the machine took just under
two minutes. Maddie then spent about 25 minutes showing her
the various instructions Standard engineers have prepared to
make certain that the machine operator doesn’t need to use her
own judgment. “Always check your sheets,” Maddie says.
By the end of the day, the trainee will be as proficient at the
laser welder as Maddie. This is why all assembly workers have
roughly the same pay grade—known as Level 1—and are seen
by management as largely interchangeable and fairly easy to
replace. A Level 1 worker makes about $13 an hour, which is a
little more than the average wage in this part of the country.
The next category, Level 2, is defined by Standard as a worker
who knows the machines well enough to set up the equipment
and adjust it when things go wrong. The skilled machinists like
Luke are Level 2s, and make about 50 percent more than
Maddie does.
For Maddie to achieve her dreams—to own her own home, to
take her family on vacation to the coast, to have enough saved
up so her children can go to college—she’d need to become one
of the advanced Level 2s. A decade ago, a smart, hard-working
Level 1 might have persuaded management to provide on-the-
job training in Level-2 skills. But these days, the gap between a
Level 1 and a 2 is so wide that it doesn’t make financial sense
for Standard to spend years training someone who might not be
able to pick up the skills or might take that training to a
competing factory.
It feels cruel to point out all the Level-2 concepts Maddie
doesn’t know, although Maddie is quite open about these
shortcomings. She doesn’t know the computer-programming

language that runs the machines she operates; in fact, she was
surprised to learn they are run by a specialized computer
language. She doesn’t know trigonometry or calculus, and she’s
never studied the properties of cutting tools or metals. She
doesn’t know how to maintain a tolerance of 0.25 microns, or
what tolerance means in this context, or what a micron is.
Tony explains that Maddie has a job for two reasons. First,
when it comes to making fuel injectors, the company saves
money and minimizes product damage by having both the
precision and non-precision work done in the same place. Even
if Mexican or Chinese workers could do Maddie’s job more
cheaply, shipping fragile, half-finished parts to another country
for processing would make no sense. Second, Maddie is cheaper
than a machine. It would be easy to buy a robotic arm that could
take injector bodies and caps from a tray and place them
precisely in a laser welder. Yet Standard would have to invest
about $100,000 on the arm and a conveyance machine to bring
parts to the welder and send them on to the next station. As is
common in factories, Standard invests only in machinery that
will earn back its cost within two years. For Tony, it’s simple:
Maddie makes less in two years than the machine would cost, so
her job is safe—for now. If the robotic machines become a little
cheaper, or if demand for fuel injectors goes up and Standard
starts running three shifts, then investing in those robots might
make sense.
“What worries people in factories is electronics, robots,” she
tells me. “If you don’t know jack about computers and
electronics, then you don’t have anything in this life anymore.
One day, they’re not going to need people; the machines will
take over. People like me, we’re not going to be around
forever.”
The Fragility of Industrial Profit
It’s tempting to look to the owners of Standard Motor Products
and ask them to help Maddie out: to cut costs a little less
relentlessly, take slightly lower profits, and maybe even help
solve America’s jobs crisis in some small way.

I tracked down the people who run Standard to put this
possibility to them. I was surprised to learn they were based in
Long Island City, Queens, a quick subway ride from my house.
Standard’s headquarters is in the same massive but elegant Art
Deco building, curving along Northern Boulevard, that has been
its home since 1936. Until the late 1990s, Standard made many
of its auto parts here as well; the company filled the six floors
with machinery and workers. But running a factory in New York
City is expensive and filled with logistical hassles, and over
time, these problems became more severe. As early as the
1960s, the company had begun to move some production to
lower-cost locations: Puerto Rico; Independence, Kansas;
Grapevine, Texas; Mexico; Poland; and, of course, Greenville.
The last part made in Queens—a distributor—came off the line
in 2008. The building was sold soon after and is now home to a
variety of small offices and an art gallery. Senior executives of
Standard Motor Products and a host of engineers and
salespeople occupy much of the second and sixth floors.
Larry Sills, age 72, is nothing like what I imagined the CEO of
one of America’s largest aftermarket auto-parts companies
would look like. His easy smile, scattered curiosity, and
rumpled look seem more characteristic of a college professor.
His hair—thick, brown, and tightly curled—looks almost like a
joke wig sitting on his head. I met him in his large office—
dominated by his wife’s paintings and mementos of their time in
Africa—and asked him about his business. But before he got
into that, he said he wanted to show off the crazy thing up on
the roof, an organic farm: some young hipsters had brought 650
tons of dirt to start it. (“That was scary,” Larry says. “We didn’t
know if the building could hold it.”) They grow fresh vegetables
and have a farmers’ market every Wednesday. “Sometimes
someone gets a bit excited with a pitchfork and cuts through our
roof and we got water on a desk. But I love it. I love it.”
Larry was born into Standard Motor Products. The company was
founded by his grandfather, Elias Fife, a Jewish immigrant from
Lithuania who knew nothing about cars but saw an opportunity,

in 1919, when he learned that many people were frustrated with
Ford and the other car manufacturers because they never made
enough replacement parts, since all the money was in building
new cars. The tiny aftermarket auto-parts industry was a mess:
countless mechanics and hobbyists made parts by hand in their
garages, and many of these parts didn’t fit or would break. Fife
decided to build a trustworthy, reliable brand whose products
met or exceeded the quality of the original parts.
Elias worked until he died, at which point his son, Bernard, and
son-in-law, Nathaniel Sills, took over the company. Larry,
Nathaniel’s son, was never particularly interested in cars and
dreamed of being a reporter for The New York Times. He spent
a few years as a country manager for Pfizer in Ghana, where he
had some adventures. But by 1967, he knew it was time to come
home and start work at Standard. “Nobody ever told me I had
to,” he says. “I just knew it was expected.” He’s never regretted
that decision, he told me.
When Larry came to work, the aftermarket had matured since its
wild early years, but was still a fairly sleepy business. Standard
was one of hundreds of aftermarket manufacturers and
distributors, many still owned by the founder, in many cases an
immigrant, or his children. These companies sold to thousands
of small garages or distribution warehouses, many also run by
old families that the Sillses had known for years. It was rare for
a customer to demand lower prices or to stop buying from
Standard altogether. Even if one did, the bottom line didn’t
suffer all that much.
“Our biggest customer was about 1 percent of our business,”
Larry says. “That’s changed. Now, our biggest four customers
are more than 50 percent of our business.”
As Autozone, Napa, and other huge auto-parts stores expanded
their reach, they used the bargaining power that comes with size
to pressure companies like Standard to lower their prices.
Failure to do so could cost them the chain stores’ business,
which could mean bankruptcy. Larry says this new price
pressure came exactly when many of his old friends in the parts

trade were retiring and couldn’t persuade their kids to join the
business. Throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, dozens of
Larry’s old friends and competitors gave up and sold out.
Larry’s son, Eric, decided to work at Standard after college and
now runs many of the company’s manufacturing operations.
As his friendly competitors retired, Larry bought many of their
companies. He paid for these acquisitions by borrowing money
or selling more company shares. For years, Standard had been,
technically, a publicly traded company, but since the Sills and
Fife families owned most of the stock, it had been run more like
a family business. But eventually, to fund acquisitions, the
families gave up majority ownership. They now hold less than
10 percent of the company stock.
Standard might have grown too quickly. The company was
deeply in debt in 2009 when the financial markets seized up.
Like countless companies during that chaotic time, Standard
couldn’t raise enough money to pay off the bonds it had already
sold. Larry began to fear bankruptcy. “It was awful,” he says.
“The only time in my career I lay awake worrying.”
Acting quickly, he sold the building in Queens, laid off 10
percent of the administrative staff, and cut costs everywhere he
could. Standard did survive, of course, and is actually doing
quite well now. Larry paid off most of the debt, and by
concentrating on what the company is best at, he has increased
its profits. Economic slowdowns are, perhaps paradoxically, a
good time for the aftermarket auto-parts business. Many people
delay the purchase of a new car, instead replacing parts on their
old one.
While the business is doing well today, “the main thing I think
about is survival,” Larry says. Standard is now the last of the
old breed of family-run companies. Its stock is worth about
$400 million, which is far more than Larry’s grandfather would
have dreamed of; but that’s only a small fraction of the market
value of Bosch, Denso, or NGK—three of the big, global parts
suppliers the company competes with.
To keep the business of the giant auto-parts retailers, Standard

has to constantly lower costs while maintaining quality. High
quality is impossible without good raw materials, which
Standard has to buy at market rates. The massive global
conglomerates, like Bosch, might be able to command discounts
when buying, say, specially formulated metals; but Standard has
to pay the prevailing price, and for years now, that price has
been rising. That places an even higher imperative on reducing
the cost of labor. If Standard paid unskilled workers like
Maddie more or hired more of them, Larry says, the company
would have to charge its customers more or accept lower
profits. Either way, Standard would collapse fairly soon.
(Industrial profit margins are notoriously thin to begin with—
typically in the low single digits—and reduced profits or losses
would drive down Standard’s stock price, making it a likely
target for predatory acquisition.)
The Continual Offshoring Calculus
I came to think of Standard Motor Products as an enormous
machine that regularly scans every tiny part of every engine in
every car on the streets of the United States to answer two
closely related questions: What makes sense to manufacture
here in the U.S., and what should be made in a low-wage
country, like Mexico or China?
Standard’s customers, the big auto-retail stores and wholesalers,
see the company more as a distributor than as a manufacturer.
They expect Standard to be able to deliver any part in its
categories—known as engine management and temperature
control—to any place in the U.S. in less than 48 hours. Standard
doesn’t sell the big stuff—batteries, engine blocks—but it does
sell many of the cables and sensors and electrical components
that surround those large things. If you look at your car’s
engine, Standard has, in stock, many of the small parts that you
can’t identify—for your car and for every other make and model
with more than 10,000 vehicles on American roads. Standard’s
enormous warehouse in Disputanta, Virginia, has tens of
thousands of different sorts of parts ready to ship at any
moment.

Standard makes only about half of the parts it stocks; it buys the
rest from other manufacturers, most of them in China. The
company’s engineers are constantly reviewing the parts they
buy, to see whether they could make the parts more cheaply in-
house. Not infrequently, Standard finds that by doing so it can
control costs, quality, and delivery speed far better, and thus
can better serve the superstores.
I sat in on a meeting between two engineers—the tall and
talkative John Gasiewski, and the shorter, less outgoing Marty
Doelger—who were reviewing a new batch of crankshaft-
position sensors, tiny parts that monitor precisely where in its
rotation a crankshaft is at any microsecond.
Marty dumps a box of the sensors—each about the size of a
thumb drive—on the table. The new sensor that General Motors
uses is a no-brainer, he says: of course Standard should make it.
More than 3.5 million cars on the road are equipped with this
family of sensors, and many of those cars are brand-new, which
means this business will be huge, peaking many years from
now. “We’ll be selling a lot of these in 2018,” John says,
smiling.
The sensor is made up of a magnet and coil inside a plastic
housing attached to a mounting bracket. Its size can vary
considerably without causing any problems in the engine, and
for that and other reasons, John says, its manufacture requires
nothing like the precision needed for making a fuel injector, so
it doesn’t need to be made on the most expensive machinery by
the most highly skilled workers. The part’s mounting bracket is
even less precise. “Feel it,” Marty says. “It’s rough. They just
shear it. There’s no precision at all.” So while Standard will
make this part, it will do so at its plant in Reynosa, Mexico.
A few months ago, in a meeting like this one, Standard
engineers evaluated a type of ignition coil—the tiny voltage
transformer that sits on top of a spark plug and converts the
battery’s 12 volts into the 30,000 volts needed to fire a spark.
It’s a precision part, since the wires on the coil need to be
wrapped just so, and Standard was at the time manufacturing the

coil in Greenville. Recently, though, the plant Standard owns in
Bialystok, Poland, had been impressing the company’s top
engineers, and the production of some of these coils will be
moving there. “Poland is also low-cost, and they’ve got some
really qualified engineers,” Larry says. “They do good work.”
These meetings can lead the company to move dozens of jobs to
another country or, in some cases, to create new jobs in the U.S.
When Standard decided to increase its fuel-injector production,
it chose to do that in the U.S., and staffed up accordingly (that’s
how Maddie got her job). Standard will not drop a line in the
U.S. and begin outsourcing it to China for a few pennies in
savings. “I need to save a lot to go to China,” says Ed Harris,
who is in charge of identifying new manufacturing sources in
Asia. “There’s a lot of hassle: shipping costs, time, Chinese
companies aren’t as reliable. We need to save at least 40
percent off the U.S. price. I’m not going to China to save 10
percent.” Yet often, the savings are more than enough to offset
the hassles and expense of working with Chinese factories.
Some parts—especially relatively simple ones that Standard
needs in bulk—can cost 80 percent less to make in China.
Nearly every manufacturing company in the U.S. goes through
this same process: regularly, carefully studying its products to
see if they could be made more cheaply in a lower-wage
country. The calculation constantly changes, because the world
changes. Sometimes that’s bad news for American industrial
workers, other times it’s good news. Workers in China and
Poland and Mexico, for example, have become more highly
skilled, and their factories are now able to produce more-precise
goods than they could a decade ago. But at the same time, the
wages of those workers have risen, as have shipping costs.
Unrest in northern Mexico or an oil-price spike caused by
trouble in the Middle East can encourage manufacturers to keep
production lines in the United States. The development of
increasingly complex machinery can do the same: because
expensive machines are more likely to pay off when they can be
counted on to run 24 hours a day, every day, the availability of

steady electricity, for instance, is essential.
Yet however chaotic and contradictory these forces can be at
any moment, over the years and decades they point in one
direction: toward fewer jobs for low-skilled American workers.
People who can be replaced by machines or lower-paid workers
somewhere else, eventually will be. Unless people like Maddie
learn how to do things that computers and overseas workers
aren’t able to do, they are likely to lose their jobs one day.
Workers’ Paradise?
Since at least the 1970s, when the farsighted could see the
consequences of Japan’s rising manufacturing power, some
observers have declared a crisis in American manufacturing,
and have called for the federal government to fix it. Some
suggestions, such as higher tariffs or fewer free-trade
agreements, have been politically attractive but economically
unconvincing. (Retreating from global trade might help save
some manufacturing jobs in the short term, but at the cost of
making the entire country poorer.) Other proposals have been
self-serving and unlikely to have much impact, like subsidies
and tax cuts for manufacturers (the benefits of which go
disproportionately to the owners of factories, not to the
workers, who still must compete with legions of ever-cheaper
robots). Probably the most popular rallying cry lately has been
the demand that China stop interfering with currency markets.
Just about every economist would argue that China should stop
artificially cheapening its currency, but getting it to do so
would not dramatically increase low-skill manufacturing
employment in the U.S. Most analyses show that in response to
a rising yuan, American manufacturing companies would more
likely shift production to other low-wage countries—like
Indonesia, Bangladesh, or Mexico—than to U.S. factories.
Is there a crisis in manufacturing in America? Looking just at
the dollar value of manufacturing output, the answer seems to
be an emphatic no. Domestic manufacturers make and sell more
goods than ever before. Their success has been grounded in
incredible increases in productivity, which is a positive way of

saying that factories produce more with fewer workers.
Productivity, in and of itself, is a remarkably good thing. Only
through productivity growth can the average quality of human
life improve. Because of higher agricultural productivity, we
don’t all have to work in the fields to make enough food to eat.
Because of higher industrial productivity, few of us need to
work in factories to make the products we use. In theory,
productivity growth should help nearly everyone in a society.
When one person can grow as much food or make as many car
parts as 100 used to, prices should fall, which gives everyone in
that society more purchasing power; we all become a little
richer. In the economic models, the benefits of productivity
growth should not go just to the rich owners of capital. As
workers become more productive, they should be able to
demand higher salaries.
Throughout much of the 20th century, simultaneous
technological improvements in both agriculture and industry
happened to create conditions that were favorable for people
with less skill. The development of mass production allowed
low-skilled farmers to move to the city, get a job in a factory,
and produce remarkably high output. Typically, these workers
made more money than they ever had on the farm, and
eventually, some of their children were able to get enough
education to find less-dreary work. In that period of dramatic
change, it was the highly skilled craftsperson who was more
likely to suffer a permanent loss of wealth. Economists speak of
the middle part of the 20th century as the “Great Compression,”
the time when the income of the unskilled came closest to the
income of the skilled.
The double shock we’re experiencing now—globalization and
computer-aided industrial productivity—happens to have the
opposite impact: income inequality is growing, as the rewards
for being skilled grow and the opportunities for unskilled
Americans diminish.
I went to South Carolina, and spent so much time with Maddie,
precisely because these issues are so large and so

overwhelming. I wanted to see how this shift affected regular
people’s lives. I didn’t come away with a handy list of policies
that would solve all the problems of unskilled workers, but I did
note some principles that seem important to improving their
situation.
It’s hard to imagine what set of circumstances would reverse
recent trends and bring large numbers of jobs for unskilled
laborers back to the U.S. Our efforts might be more fruitfully
focused on getting Maddie the education she needs for a better
shot at a decent living in the years to come. Subsidized job-
training programs tend to be fairly popular among Democrats
and Republicans, and certainly benefit some people. But these
programs suffer from all the ills in our education system;
opportunities go, disproportionately, to those who already have
initiative, intelligence, and—not least—family support.
I never heard Maddie blame others for her situation; she talked,
often, about the bad choices she made as a teenager and how
those have limited her future. I came to realize, though, that
Maddie represents a large population: people who, for whatever
reason, are not going to be able to leave the workforce long
enough to get the skills they need. Luke doesn’t have children,
and his parents could afford to support him while he was in
school. Those with the right ability and circumstances will,
most likely, make the right adjustments, get the right skills, and
eventually thrive. But I fear that those who are challenged now
will only fall further behind. To solve all the problems that keep
people from acquiring skills would require tackling the toughest
issues our country faces: a broken educational system, teen
pregnancy, drug use, racial discrimination, a fractured political
culture.
This may be the worst impact of the disappearance of
manufacturing work. In older factories and, before them, on the
farm, there were opportunities for almost everybody: the bright
and the slow, the sociable and the awkward, the people with
children and those without. All came to work unskilled, at first,
and then slowly learned things, on the job, that made them more

valuable. Especially in the mid-20th century, as manufacturing
employment was rocketing toward its zenith, mistakes and
disadvantages in childhood and adolescence did not foreclose
adult opportunity.
For most of U.S. history, most people had a slow and steady
wind at their back, a combination of economic forces that didn’t
make life easy but gave many of us little pushes forward that
allowed us to earn a bit more every year. Over a lifetime, it all
added up to a better sort of life than the one we were born into.
That wind seems to be dying for a lot of Americans. What the
country will be like without it is not quite clear.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/making-
it-in-america/8844/
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights
Reserved.
Suggested Leadership Diagnostic Tools
Complete Three of the following diagnostic tools to assess your
leadership strengths
and weaknesses:
1. Self-Confident Test
2. Team Leadership Skills
3. Emotional Intelligence Test
4. Locus of Control: Self-assessment
5. Diversity Management Capability: Self-assessment

6. Cultural Intelligence: Self-assessment
7. Ability to Work under Ambiguity/Uncertainty/Change: Self-
assessment
How Self-Confident Are You?
Indicate the extent to which you agree with each of the
following statements. Use a 1-to-5 scale: (1)
disagree strongly; (2) disagree; (3) neutral; (4) agree; (5) agree
strongly.
DS D N A AS
1. I frequently say to people, “I’m not sure.”
5 4 3 2 1
2. I have been hesitant to take on any leadership assignments.
5 4 3 2 1
3. Several times, people have asked me to be the leader of the
group to
which I belonged.
1 2 3 4 5

4. I perform well in most situations in life.
1 2 3 4 5
5. At least several people have told me that I have a nice, firm
handshake.
1 2 3 4 5
6. I am much more of a loser than a winner.
5 4 3 2 1
7. I am much more of a winner than a loser.
1 2 3 4 5
8. I am cautious about making any substantial change in my life.
5 4 3 2 1
9. I dread it when I have to learn a new skill, such as reading a
foreign
language.
5 4 3 2 1
10. I freely criticize other people, even over minor matters such
as their
hair style or word choice.

5 4 3 2 1
11. I become extremely tense when I know it will soon be my
turn to
present in front of the group or class.
5 4 3 2 1
12. Speaking in front of the class or other group is a frightening
experience for me.
5 4 3 2 1
13. When asked for my advice, I willingly offer it.
1 2 3 4 5
14. I feel comfortable attending a social event by myself.
1 2 3 4 5
15. It is rare that I change my opinion just because somebody
challenges
me.
1 2 3 4 5
Scoring and Interpretation: Calculate your total score by adding

the numbers circled. A tentative
interpretation of the scoring is as follows:
65–75: Very high self-confidence, with perhaps a tendency
toward arrogance
55–64: A high, desirable level of self-confidence
35–54: Moderate, or average, self-confidence
15–34: Self-confidence needs strengthening
Source: DuBrin, A. (2015) Leadership: Research findings,
practice and skills, Cengage Learning, US
Assessing your team leadership skills
Answer the following questions on the basis of what you have
done, or think you would do, in response to
the team situations and attitudes described. Check either mostly
true or mostly false for each question.
Mostly
True
Mostly
false
1. I am more likely to handle a high-priority task than to assign
it to the
team
T F
2. An important part of leading a team is to keep members

informed
almost daily of information that could affect their work
T F
3. I love communicating online to work on tasks with team
members T F
4. Generally, I feel tense while interacting with team members
from
different cultures
T F
5. I nearly always prefer face-to-face communications with team
members over email
T F
6. Building trust is very important for building a team T F
7. I enjoy doing things in my own way and in my own time T F
8. If a new member were hired, I would expect the entire team
to
interview the person
T F
9. I become impatient when working with a team member from
another
culture
T F
10. I suggest ways each team member can make a contribution
to the
project

T F
11. I am uneasy interacting with people from different ethnic or
racial
groups
T F
12. If I were out of the office for a week, most of the important
work of the
team would get accomplished anyway
T F
13. Delegation is hard for me when an important task has to be
done
right
T F
14. I enjoy working with people with different accents T F
15. I am confident about leading team members from different
cultures T F
Scoring and interpretation
The answers for effective team leadership are as follows:
1. Mostly false 6. Mostly true 11. Mostly false
2. Mostly true 7. Mostly false 12. Mostly true
3. Mostly true 8. Mostly true 13. Mostly false
4. Mostly false 9. Mostly false 14. Mostly true
5. Mostly false 10. Mostly true 15. Mostly true
If your score is 12 or higher, you understand the ingredients to
be a highly effective team leader. If your

score is 6 or lower, you might have an authoritarian approach to
leadership or be uncomfortable with
culturally diverse team membership or virtual team
communications, such as email. Questions 1, 2, 6,
7, 8, 10, 12 and 13 pertain to authoritarian versus participative
team leadership. Questions 4, 9, 11, 14
and 15 pertain to cultural differences. Questions 3 and 5 pertain
to virtual team communications. Which
aspects of team leadership reflect your leader strengths? Your
leader weaknesses? Team leadership
requires that the leader learn to share power, information and
responsibility, be inclusive of diverse
members and be comfortable with electronic communications.
Source: Daft and Pirola-Merlo [2009] The Leadership
Experience, 4e, Cengage Learning, Australia
Emotional Intelligence Test
• How well a person manages his or her emotions and those of
others influences
leadership effectiveness.
• Emotional intelligence refers to qualities such as
understanding one’s feelings,
empathy for others, and the regulation of emotions to enhance
living.
• Four key factors are included in emotional intelligence:
• (1) self-awareness helps you understand your impact on

others;
• (2) self-management is the ability to control one’s emotions
and act with
honesty and integrity in a consistent and adaptable manner;
• (3) social awareness includes having empathy for others and
having
intuition about organizational problems;
• (4) relationship management includes the interpersonal skills
of
communicating clearly and convincingly, disarming conflicts,
and building
strong personal bonds
Take a test @
• http://globalleadershipfoundation.com/geit/eitest.html
Locus of Control: Self-assessment
This questionnaire is designed to measure locus-of-control
beliefs. Researchers using this questionnaire
in a study of college students found a mean of 51.8 for men and
52.2 for women, with a standard
deviation of 6 for each. The higher your score on this
questionnaire, the more you tend to believe that you
are generally responsible for what happens to you; in other
words, higher scores are associated with
internal locus of control. Low scores are associated with
external locus of control. Scoring low indicates

that you tend to believe that forces beyond your control, such as
powerful other people, fate, or chance,
are responsible for what happens to you.
For each of these 10 questions, indicate the extent to which you
agree or disagree using the following
scale:
1 _ strongly disagree
2 _ disagree
3 _ slightly disagree
4 _ neither disagree nor agree
5 _ slightly agree
6 _ agree
7 _ strongly agree
1. When I get what I want, it is usually because I worked hard
for it. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
2. When I make plans, I am almost certain to make them work. 1
2 3 4 5 6 7
3. I prefer games involving some luck over games requiring
pure skill. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
4. I can learn almost anything if I set my mind to it. 1 2 3 4 5 6
7
5. My major accomplishments are entirely due to my hard work
and ability. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
6. I usually don’t set goals because I have a hard time following
through on them. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
7. Competition discourages excellence. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8. Often people get ahead just by being lucky. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

9. On any sort of exam or competition, I like to know how well
I do relative to everyone else. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
10. It’s pointless to keep working on something that’s too
difficult for me. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Scoring and Interpretation
To determine your score, reverse the values you selected for
questions 3, 6, 7, 8, and 10 (1 =7, 2 = 6, 3 =
5, 4 = 4, 5 = 3, 6 = 2, 7 = 1).
For example, if you strongly disagree with the statement in
question 3, you would have given it a value of
1. Change this value to a 7.
Reverse the scores in a similar manner for questions 6, 7, 8, and
10. Now add the point values for all 10
questions together.
Your score ________
Source: https://www.16personalities.com/free-personality-test
Diversity Management Capability: Self-assessment
For each of the following questions, circle the answer that best
describes you.
1. Most of your friends
a. Are very similar to you
b. Are very different from you and from each other
c. Are like you in some respects but different in others

2. When someone does something you disapprove of, you
a. Break off the relationship
b. Tell how you feel but keep in touch
c. Tell yourself it matters little and behave as you always have
3. Which virtue is most important to you?
a. Kindness
b. Objectivity
c. Obedience
4. When it comes to beliefs, you
a. Do all you can to make others see things the same way you do
b. Actively advance your point of view but stop short of
argument
c. Keep your feelings to yourself
5. Would you hire a person who has had emotional problems?
a. No
b. Yes, provided the person shows evidence of complete
recovery
c. Yes, if the person is suitable for the job
6. Do you voluntarily read material that support views different
from your own?
a. Never
b. Sometimes
c. Often

7. You react to old people with
a. Patience
b. Annoyance
c. Sometimes a, sometimes b
8. Do you agree with the statement, “What is right and wrong
depends upon the time, place, and
circumstance”?
a. Strongly agree
b. Agree to a point
c. Strongly disagree
9. Would you marry someone from a different race?
a. Yes
b. No
c. Probably not
10. If someone in your family were homosexual, you would
a. View this as a problem and try to change the person to a
heterosexual orientation
b. Accept the person as a homosexual with no change in feelings
or treatment
c. Avoid or reject the person
11. You react to little children with
a. Patience

b. Annoyance
c. Sometimes a, sometimes b
12. Other people’s personal habits annoy you
a. Often
b. Not at all
c. Only if extreme
13. If you stay in a household run differently from yours
(cleanliness, manners, meals, and other
customs), you
a. Adapt readily
b. Quickly become uncomfortable and irritated
c. Adjust for a while, but not for long
14. Which statement do you agree with most?
a. We should avoid judging others because no one can fully
understand the motives of another
person.
b. People are responsible for their actions and have to accept
the consequences.
c. Both motives and actions are important when considering
questions of right and wrong.
Scoring and Interpretation
Circle your score for each of the answers and total the scores:
1. a = 4; b = 0; c = 2
2. a = 4; b = 2; c = 0
3. a = 0; b = 2; c = 4

4. a = 4; b = 2; c = 0
5. a = 4; b = 2; c = 0
6. a = 4; b = 2; c = 0
7. a = 0; b = 4; c = 2
8. a = 0; b = 2; c = 4
9. a = 0; b = 4; c = 2
10. a = 2; b = 0; c = 4
11. a = 0; b = 4; c = 2
12. a = 4; b = 0; c = 2
13. a = 0; b = 4; c = 2
14. a = 0; b = 4; c = 2
Total Score
0–14: If you score 14 or below, you are a very tolerant person
and dealing with diversity comes easily to
you.
15–28: You are basically a tolerant person and others think of
you as tolerant. In general, diversity
presents few problems for you; you may be broad-minded in
some areas and have less tolerant ideas in
other areas of life, such as attitudes toward older people or
male/female social roles.
29–42: You are less tolerant than most people and should work
on developing greater tolerance of people
different from you. Your low tolerance level could affect your
business or personal relationships.
43–56: You have a very low tolerance for diversity. The only
people you are likely to respect are those
with beliefs similar to your own. You reflect a level of
intolerance that could cause difficulties in today’s
multicultural business environment.

Cultural Intelligence: Self-assessment
The job of a manager demands a lot, and before long your
activities will include
situations that will test your knowledge and capacity for dealing
with people from other
national cultures. Are you ready? To find out, think about your
experiences in other
countries or with people from other countries.
To what extent does each of the following statements
characterize your behavior?
Please answer each of the following items as Mostly True or
Mostly False for you.
Mostly
True
Mostly
False
1. I plan how I’m going to relate to people from a different
culture before I meet them.
2. I understand the religious beliefs of other cultures.
3. I understand the rules for nonverbal behavior in other
cultures.
4. I seek out opportunities to interact with people from
different cultures.

5. I can handle the stresses of living in a different culture
with relative ease.
6. I am confident that I can befriend locals in a culture that
is unfamiliar to me.
7. I change my speech style (e.g., accent, tone) when
a cross-cultural interaction requires it.
8. I alter my facial expressions and gestures as needed to
facilitate a cross-culture interaction.
9. I am quick to change the way I behave when a cross-
culture encounter seems to require it.
SCORING AND INTERPRETATION: Each question pertains to
some aspect of cultural
intelligence. Questions 1–3 pertain to the head (cognitive CQ
subscale), questions 4–6
to the heart (emotional CQ subscale), and questions 7–9 to
behavior (physical CQ
subscale). If you have sufficient international experience and
CQ to have answered
“Mostly True” to two of three questions for each subscale or six
of nine for all the
questions, then consider yourself at a high level of CQ for a
new manager. If you scored
one or fewer “Mostly True” on each subscale or three or fewer

for all nine questions, it is
time to learn more about other national cultures. Hone your
observational skills and
learn to pick up on clues about how people from a different
country respond to various
situations.
Ability to Work under Ambiguity/Uncertainty/Change: Self-
assessment
Take a moment to fill out the instrument below to see your own
tolerance for ambiguity.
Read each of the following statements. Rate each of them in
terms of the extent to which you (dis)agree
with the statement using the following scale:
Completely Disagree to
Completely Agree
1 2 3 4
5 6 7
Place the number that best describes your degree of agreement
in the blank to the left of each statement.
1. ______An expert who does not come up with a definite
answer probably does not know much.
2. ______I would like to live in a foreign country for a while.
3. ______The sooner everyone acquires similar values and
ideals the better.
4. ______A good teacher makes you wonder about your way of
looking at things.

5. ______I like parties where I know most of the people more
than ones where all or most of the people
are complete strangers.
6. ______Teachers or supervisors who hand out vague
assignments give a chance for one to show
initiative and originality.
7. ______A person who leads an even, regular life, in which few
surprises or unexpected happenings
arise, has a lot to be grateful for.
8. ______Many of our most important decisions are based upon
insufficient information.
9. ______All problems can be solved.
10. ______People who fit their lives to a schedule probably
miss most of the joy of living.
11. ______A good job is one where what is to be done and how
it is to be done are clear.
12. ______It is more fun to tackle a complicated problem than
to solve a simple one.
13. ______In the long run, it is possible to get more done by
tackling small, simple problems rather than
large and complicated ones.
14. ______Often, the most interesting and stimulating people
are those who do not mind being different
and original.
15. ______What we are used to is always preferable to what is
unfamiliar.
Scoring:
For odd-numbered questions, add the total points.
For even-numbered questions, use reverse scoring (7 means 1,
and 1 means 7), and add the total points.
Your score is the total of the even-numbered and odd-numbered
questions.
A tolerant person would score 15 and an intolerant person 105.
Scores ranging from 20 to 80 have been

reported, with a mean of 45. Company managers had an average
score of about 45, and non-profit
managers had an average score of about 43 though scores in
both groups varied widely.
Typically, people who tolerate ambiguity (low score) will be
comfortable in organizations characterized by
rapid change, unclear authority, empowerment, and movement
toward a learning organization. People
with low tolerance for ambiguity (high score) are comfortable in
more stable, well-defined situations.
However, individuals can grow in the opposite direction of their
score if they so choose.
GOAL
Strengths/Weaknesses
ACTIVITY
TIMEFRAME
MEASUREMENT
Goal # 1
Strength/weakness # 1 (e.g. improve self-confident)
Activty#1
Activity#2
Activity#3
Period 1
Period 2

Period 3
Indicator#1
Indicator#2
Indicator#3
Goal # 2
Strength/weakness # 2 (e.g. improve team leadership skills)
Activty#1
Activity#2
Activity#3
Period 1
Period 2
Period 3
Indicator#1
Indicator#2
Indicator#3
Goal # 3
Activty#1
Activity#2
Activity#3
Period 1
Period 2

Period 3
Indicator#1
Indicator#2
Indicator#3
Goal # 4
Activty#1
Activity#2
Activity#3
Period 1
Period 2
Period 3
Indicator#1
Indicator#2
Indicator#3
Assessment Task Two: Leadership Development
Due Date: Week 09
Type: Individual
Weighting: Total 50%
Length: 2,500 words (+/-10%)

Overview:
This is a Work Integrated Learning (WIL) assessment task that
allows students to apply their knowledge and skills to practical
situations. It is assessed through a real workplace context where
feedback from industry is integral to students’ experience. This
assessment is designed to lead you from critical analysis of your
role model to reflect on how you can improve your own
leadership qualities and effectiveness through three learning
stages: a) Observation/Research; b) Leadership Development
Plan and c) Feedback.
The first stage is to select a person whom you consider to be a
successful and effective leader. Then, through your observation
or research, you will identify the person’s leadership traits,
behaviours and qualities. The learning outcome of this stage is
that you are challenged to apply the theories in this course to
your research or observation.
For the second stage, you are asked to reflect on your own
leadership, based on what you learnt from the
research/observation of your role model, and to consider how
your own leadership qualities could be improved. At this stage,
you are required to create a leadership development plan.
In the final stage, you must seek feedback on your plan from an
established leader. This leader can be anyone you know who
holds a leadership position in an organisation.
By going through these three stages, you should be able to
critically analyse and evaluate leadership theories and practices
and understand how to improve your own leadership
effectiveness and qualities.
Papers that have no in-text referencing and/or no reference list
will lose 10 marks of the 50 available marks. See Course
Canvas for more details
Important Note:
In Week 06, you are required to submit background information
of your leader who will provide feedback on your plan via the
course Canvas (~200 words). You do not need to identify the
person (e.g. name). However, you must provide background

information of your role model (e.g. position, leadership
experience, organisation information etc.). A penalty of 2 marks
of the available 50 marks may apply if you fail to submit the
background information.
Leadership Development – Final Paper
Stage One – Research/Observation
Identify a person who you consider to be a successful or
effective leader. This could be someone you work with or for
(for example: business, professional, sport, volunteer work,
religious organisations etc.) or anyone you judge to be a good
leader. This leader could be someone you can observe in person
or from your past experience or a public figure or someone you
have read about same qualifier as above.
From your research and/or observation, critically analyse:
1. What makes this person a good leader?
2. What you perceive this person’s leadership traits, behaviours
and qualities;
3. How the person uses power and influence to make him/her an
effective leader.
You must be able to apply theories/concepts/models covered in
this course to support your research/observation.
Second Stage – Leadership Development Plan
For the second stage, you are asked to reflect on your own
leadership, based on what you learnt form the
research/observation of your role model, and consider how your
own leadership qualities could be improved.
First, using ideas and knowledge you have gained from the
course and what you learnt from the first stage to guide you,

you are required to diagnose and assess your current strengths
and weaknesses as a leader (or potential leader). To identify
your leadership strengths and weaknesses, you will complete the
‘leadership diagnostic tools’ (see Canvas for Suggested
Diagnostic Tools).
Second, you are then required to create a ‘Leadership
Development Plan’. The plan must at least maintain or further
develop your leadership strengths and improve weaknesses. You
must review the leadership theories and concepts explored in
this course and describe how they relate to you and your
leadership development plan. The plan should consist of key
components such as timeframe, activities, goals and
measurement indicators etc. (see Canvas for Suggested
Leadership Development Plan template).
Stage Three – Feedback
In the final stage, you must seek feedback on your plan from a
leader. This leader can be anyone you know who holds a
leadership position in an organisation. This leader could be the
same person as Stage One or a different leader. To assist with
the feedback stage, you should provide the leader with the
‘Feedback Checklist’ (see Canvas for Feedback Checklist).
At this stage, you must:
1. Describe what and how you have incorporated this leader’s
feedback into your plan;
2. Describe how you will evaluate whether or not you have
reached the level of development set out in your plan (e.g. how
will you know that you’ve achieved the goals set out in your
leadership development plan? what kind(s) of data and
information will inform this?)
Key questions you might think of at this stage: a) what did the
leader have to say about your draft leadership development
plan? b) how have you modified your draft as a consequence?

(For example, if the leader you consulted said that your
timeframe to achieve your leadership goals was unrealistically
short, did you then extend the timeframe top achieve these?)
Format:
This assignment should have the following format:
1) Introduction
2) Body with headings and sub-headings (e.g. Observation,
Leadership Development Plan; Feedback)
3) Conclusion
4) References
5) Appendix (Feedback from leader on the development plan)
Note: 4), 5) and ‘Leader Background Information’ are not
included in the word count.
Referencing:
It is expected that you will use at least 10 academic references,
preferably refereed journal/research articles. Websites, such as
Wikipedia, will not be accepted, other than for providing
general details of the leaders and these will not be counted in
the minimum references required. Correct and thorough
referencing will be a key evaluation element. The quality of
your sources will also be considered in the evaluation of your
assignment. Please ensure that your spelling, grammar and
syntax are correct before you submit your essay. Your tutor will
advise on a variety of support services such as SLAMS and the
SLC. Further information about referencing style is available in
the RMIT Business Referencing Guidelines. For Harvard/RMIT
style referencing (intext and list of references) refer to
easycite The 'live link' http://www.lib.rmit.edu.au/easy-cite/
Assessment Criteria:
· Ability to critically analyse the leader’s leadership
behaviours, traits, qualities and use of power;
· Demonstrate a good understanding of relevant leadership
theories/issues referred to in the observation/research.
· Ability to diagnose leadership strengths and weaknesses as a
result of self-assessment;

· Ability to create a leadership development plan based on self-
assessment;
· Ability to describe how to incorporate the feedback into the
plan
· Ability to identify plan evaluation approach/es
· Quality and quantity of references

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