Stan Grant's Leadership Style And Challenges: An Essay Analysis.

1. Briefly describe this leaders background including details such as their current role and organisation, work history, educational background, family background if relevant, industry involvement.

2. Describe their approach to leadership, drawing on at least one leadership theory from the academic literature. Provide evidence to support your assessment of their leadership approach. That is, describe two specific examples of actions they have taken that demonstrate this particular leadership approach you have described.

3. What are two key challenges they have faced as a leader? How have they managed this challenge? What could they do differently to be even more effective?

4. What have you learned about leadership from studying this particular leader? 

Leader’s Background

In today’s competitive business world, effective leadership is very important. It assists in creating difference between success and failure of an organization.  Leadership is the behavior or trait, by which a person influences other people or followers to attain a mutual objective and leads them in a way, which makes the organization more organized and rational. When the individuals try to learn about leadership, then the skills and knowledge is managed by leader, can be affected by his/her attributes, traits, behaviors, values and beliefs.  Each and every leader possesses a leadership style. There are different leadership styles of leaders in different departments, like; politics, business, journalism or other area. This report includes the discussion about a famous Australian journalist and newscaster for the ABC television networks, i.e. Stan Grant. The report is divided into different parts to understand the leadership style and approaches of Stan Grant. In addition, it analyzes key challenges, which the leader has faced as a leader.

Stan Grant is a famous journalist in Australia and anchor for ABC television networks. Stan Grant was born on September 30, 1963 at Griffith in New South Wales (NSW). Basically, Grant is of the native ancestry from Wiradjuri. He was born to parents Elizabeth Grant and Stan Grant Sr. His father, Stan Grant Sr. had worked in Sawmills. Currently, he is the indigenous affairs editor for a Guardian Australia. Stan Grant, a journalist since the year 1987, he has worked for ABC television network, Seven Network and SBS and since 2013 he has worked as international editor for Sky News Australia. From the year 2001 to 2012, he functioned for CNN International as a presenter in Hong Kong, before transferring to Beijing as news communicator (Indegenous Australia, 2012). In December 2015, Grant joined Guardian Australia. In the role of journalist, Grant has received many esteemed Australian and international awards. He won Walkley Award in the year 2015 for reporting of indigenous affairs and he is the authors of “Talking to My Country” and “The Tears of Strangers”.

When living in Canberra, the education of Stan was disturbed first time in his life. Canberra was a center for Aboriginal activism and he believes that this provided him a great knowledge and understanding and higher ambitions. After completing high school education, Grant met to Marcia Langton.  She was an aboriginal activist. She is the lady, who motivated him to join the bachelor’s course at University of New South Wales (NSW).

Grant is the member of Wiradjuri community of indigenous Australian population. First, he was married to Karla Grant and he had three children with her. In the year 2000, he had broken up with her and started a relationship with a popular TV celebrity “Tracey Holmes”. She was a white woman and after one year she gave birth to their child Jesse.

Thus, a 53 year old man has a varied and long career in the television industry of Australia and won various prestigious award. Now, Grant has become ambassador of the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation (Ryan & Tipu, 2013).

Approach to Leadership

There are different leadership styles of different leaders. It is the style of giving direction, implementing the strategies and plans and motivating the members of team. As a leader in the area of journalism, Stan Grant has shown some special leadership characteristics and traits (Adair, 2011). He has proven himself as a good and effective leader. As a successful author, multi-award winning host and adventurer, he has written his keynotes. Grant’s key notes are engaging, perceptive and professional and sometimes, controversial. Aboriginal heritage of Stan Grant has developed his strong and dynamic. There are so many behaviors and traits, which can teach the people to become a successful person and leader in today’s world. Stan is a man with incredible abilities to express his experiences and of his people.

Stan Grant played his leadership role as a visionary leader. He continuously speaks about his passion about his work and ideas. He is passionate about the humanity and justice (Collins, 2016). As an indigenous journalist and leader, he always supported indigenous people in Australia and fight for them. He always thinks that passion can have a positive impact on the commitment of the people. The leadership style, which is adopted by Stan Grant, is the passionate leadership style. From the beginning of his career in journalism, he is passionate about the humanity and justice. His role as international reporter has provided his a better knowledge and understanding about that how the people and world works. Grant is occupied in the politics and history of Middle East and Asia (Mcquire, 2016). Being an indigenous journalist, he is able to link the significance of leadership and effect of history.

Furthermore, Stan Grant is adopting affirming dimension of leadership. Affirmative leaders are the leaders, who are approachable, friendly and nice to their people. These leaders are very positive and easy going. The affirmative leaders work to develop the atmosphere, which are caring and pleasant and where each and every person is respected (Northouse, 2015). About Stan Grant, people and followers say that he is very friendly, generous and approachable with his knowledge and time. He is challenging leader in respectful manner and he gave people so many things to consider.

The leadership style of Grant can be seen by looking at his actions. He always drew the attention towards the social issues, which have overwhelmed several indigenous societies. He fought against injustice and racism in Australia. Thus, these actions of Grant indicate his passionate and affirming leadership approach.

As a leader, Grant has faced some specific challenges. When Grant was working for the indigenous community, he has faced various challenges related to prejudice and racism in Australia. The problems of indigenous community are the biggest challenges to the leadership style of Grant. To deal with these challenges, Grant has taken the assistance from the Australian political leaders and government (DuBois et al, 2015). As a leader he always fought for the goodness of the people of his community. He has given a speech on racism in Australia, which has influenced the people greatly. In the previous year, he delivered an influential speech about the plague of racism in Australia (Giltinane, 2013). In his speech, he said that “The Australian dream is rooted in racism”. In his speech, Grant stated that racism is damaging the dream of Australia. Grant’s work has included various aspects of social change and he always remained with the jurisdiction indigenous justice. He always tries to motivate the indigenous people to fight for their rights. He has conducted an aboriginal language program, which was focused other community leaders (DuBrin, 2015). This program motivated the young people in learning the language and developing identify and pride. In addition, Grant always emphasized of the wishes and views of local community.

Key Challenges

However, Grant handled these challenges very effectively, but he can use some effective approaches to overcome these challenges. He can use the democratic leadership style in his actions. By using this action, this leader can involve the people in the processes (Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee, 2013). Democratic leadership is most preferred leadership style, which involve justice, fairness, courage, honesty and creativity.

The leadership style and approaches of Stan Grant can help in learning so many things in life. The leadership style can help in learn that you are responsible for the people around you (Fairhurst and Connaughton, 2014). There is a requirement to pay the attention on team and their emotional variables. As a leader, there should be a willingness to listen the people, as it increases trust among people or team. From this leadership style, it can be learned that the people should know that their leader values them and their participation in the team. This kept them engaged and more motivated. An effective leader can help his team to overcome all the challenges in the way (Khan, Khan & Nawaz, 2016). The leadership style of Stan Grant stated that conducting programs for community assists in make identity and pride stronger and aids them in reconnecting with the culture. Furthermore, it can be learned that leaders should be very caring, friendly, approachable to the public, so they can share their things with the leader.

Conclusion

Leadership is very important aspect in each and every area of life. Leadership style shows the traits and behaviors of an individual leader. From the above discussion, it can be concluded that Stan Grant is a great journalist and current affair editor from Australia. He travelled to so many places for his job. With the job as a journalist, he emphasized on the development of aboriginal people in Australia. He is working with a passion towards the humanity and justice. In his actions, he is adopting affirming and visionary leadership, which show that he is very passionate about his vision and vary caring towards the people. As a leader, he faced all the challenges very effectively. There are so many things, which can be learned from the leadership methods and approaches of Stan Grant. Thus, the above report concludes that he is great in his work and towards his people.

References

Adair, J, 2011, John Adair's 100 Greatest Ideas for Effective Leadership, John Wiley & Sons. 

Collins, B, 2016, Stan Grant speech: 'a beautiful opportunity that was missed' says Indigenous business leader, Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-25/stan-grant-speech-a-beautiful-opportunity-that-was-missed/7112384. 

DuBois, M., Hanlon, J., Koch, J., Nyatuga, B. and Kerr, N., 2015. Leadership styles of effective project managers: Techniques and traits to lead high performance teams. Journal of Economic Development, Management, IT, Finance, and Marketing, 7(1), p.30.

DuBrin, A.J., 2015. Leadership: Research findings, practice, and skills. Nelson Education.

Fairhurst, G.T. and Connaughton, S.L., 2014. Leadership: A communicative perspective. Leadership, 10(1), pp.7-35.

Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R.E. and McKee, A., 2013. Primal leadership: Unleashing the power of emotional intelligence. Harvard Business Press.

Giltinane, C.L., 2013. Leadership styles and theories. Nursing Standard, 27(41), pp.35-39.

Indegenous Australia, 2012, Grant, Stan (1963–?), retrieved from https://ia.anu.edu.au/biography/grant-stan-17827.

Khan, Z.A., Khan, I. & Nawaz, A, 2016, Leadership Theories and Styles: A Literature Review, Journal of Resources Development and Management. 

Mcquire, A, 2016, The Viral Rise Of Stan Grant: Why Diplomacy Won’t Be Enough For Our People, Retrieved from https://newmatilda.com/2016/02/26/the-dizzying-rise-of-stan-grant-why-diplomacy-wont-be-enough-for-our-people/. 

Northouse, P.G., 2015. Leadership: Theory and practice. Sage publications.

Ryan, J. C. & Tipu, S. A, 2013, Leadership effects on innovation propensity: A two-factor full range leadership model, Journal of Business Research, 66, 2116 – 2129.