Miranda Priestly is a leading actress in ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ which she practices different kind of leadership theories of management such as Blake and Mouton's theories of leadership, leadership styles and behavioral approaches to leadership. Miranda Priestley’s personality is highly sophisticated, and work driven to the point she demands excellence. She tends to be a task-oriented leader, which she prioritizes the work on her personal life. This resulted on her success and leadership. However, there is a down side where all of this affect her personal life as well as her professional. It also reflected on her difficulties to establish a relationship in both worlds, at work and outside of her work. The right approach is where to balance between personal life and the best suited leadership styles. This film depicts an image that is maximum popular in organizations. Miranda’s leadership style in interesting to apprehend and analyze.
Regarding leadership styles, there are specific behavioral approaches to leadership styles. On the basis of rewards and penalties, leadership styles are classified into:
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- Wonderful leaders: people who place emphasis on rewards (economic or otherwise), higher worker training, extra demands for independence, etc.
- Terrible leaders: they are folks who area emphasis on threats, fear, harshness, penalties, the overall performance can be a quick time period in this example with excessive human prices, to get work completed. They preserve directly to personal penalties as lack of process, reprimand within the presence of others, punishment with loss of pay, etc. They're more of ‘bosses’ than ‘leaders’ (W., 2007).
Based totally on patterns and the usage of power, leadership styles are labeled into three: autocratic, consultative and participative leaders. Autocratic leaders centralize energy, make decisions on their personal and workout complete authority and full duty in their own decisions. It's far a terrible style and is based totally on threats and punishment. It is positive whilst benevolent autocracy is followed. The advantages of this style are that it is regularly pleasurable for the leader, permits short choices, lets in using less able subordinates, offers security and structure for personnel, and many others. The disadvantages of this style encompass the truth that maximum personnel dislikes it, there are less organizational commitment and excessive turnover and absenteeism prices. Consultative leaders’ method one or more personnel and ask them for inputs previous to you make a decision. Inputs would be used or rejected, if used, personnel are in all likelihood to experience as though they'd a high-quality impact and if inputs are continually rejected, employees are probable to experience that their time has been wasted. Participative leaders decentralize authority and take no unilateral selections. They use inputs from followers and participation via them. The leader and group act as a social unit. The subordinates are endorsed to specific ideas, make tips and take a movement.
On the idea of worker and assignment orientations, leadership styles are categorized into worker orientation and undertaking orientation. Thoughtful leaders are worried approximately human wishes of personnel, build group paintings, provide a psychological guide, help employees with personal issues. Dependent assignment-orientated leaders consider that they get tasks carried out by using keeping humans busy, ignoring private problems and feelings and urging them to provide. A manager may have both orientations in varying stages. But the most successful managers are folks who integrate particularly excessive consideration and structure, giving particularly more emphasis to attention.
An evaluation of Miranda Priestley’s leadership style on the idea of the extraordinary types of management suggests that she is a terrible, consultative in addition to a dependent-assignment orientated leader. It's believed that she makes decisions on her own at maximum times, asking reviews from few of her colleagues, like Nigel, who's been shown as consulted by way of Miranda at certain instances. But she does not fee all her colleagues and subordinates. She ridicules her subordinates Andy and Emily in the front of others, which virtually suggests her inclination toward being a poor leader. Miranda is shown to be extremely undertaking orientated at different times, which includes when she pesters Andy to get her flight tickets to journey to her daughter’s level performance notwithstanding understanding that a natural calamity has afflicted and flights could be canceled. She does now not show any traces of being a thoughtful chief, as she is hardly aware of the non-public lives of any of her co-people. She does not even trouble to recognize. While Andy is a chunk past due in bringing something for Miranda, she says: “Has she died or something?”.
Leadership behavior is a factor that has been theorized via Professor Robert Katz. He said that leadership behavior accommodates three varieties of abilities: technical, human skills and conceptual. Technical ability is the capability to carry out the given activity. Technical competencies help the managers to apply one-of-a-kind machines and gear. It additionally allows them to use diverse procedures and strategies. Low-stage managers require greater technical skills. That is because they are in charge of the operations. Human relation skills also called interpersonal capabilities. It enables the managers to understand, communicate and work with others. Additionally, it enables the managers to guide and inspire crew spirit. Human relation skills are required by through all the stages of the management. Conceptual skill is the ability to visualize the enterprise as an entire. It includes analytical, creative and initiative capabilities. It helps the supervisor to discover the reasons for the problems as well as the symptoms, which makes him/her solve the problems effectively. According to Professor Robert Katz, conceptual abilities are required by the top management since they make plans for the business. The top-level managers require extra conceptual abilities and much less technical abilities. The middle level managers require more technical skills and less conceptual capabilities. Human skills are required equally by all levels of management.
Within the case of Miranda Priestley, who is a top-level manager, it is obvious that she has conceptual and technical skills, making use of conceptual capabilities are seen most of the times as she makes the final choices regarding the magazine. Her intensive technical expertise is seen in a scene where Andy smirks during a meeting about matching different items together. When a co-worker gave Miranda two different belts, Andy smirks as she feels the two belts look similar to each other. This reply completely infuriates Miranda as she starts explaining the differences about the colors of the belts. Refereeing to one of the belts, it is not blue nor turquoise, but it is cerulean, and she elaborates on how the cerulean collections got here into fashion inside the style enterprise and whilst it has become popular. This scene demonstrates the level of knowledge that Miranda has in her field, which form her access. Even though, Marinda has a decent amount of theoretical and management skills, her lack of communication skills is obvious. This is a weakness in her personality that she has to work on as it is a necessity skill for anyone to be at the top management level.
There are different types of leadership, one of which is the Blake and Mouton Managerial Grid, created by the management theorists Robert Blake and Jane Mouton. It is well known framework for thinning regarding leader’s task versus person orientation. There are two different behavioral dimensions of the Blake-Mouton Managerial Grid: concern for people (this is how much the leader holds member’s needs, interests and territories of self-awareness when choosing how best to achieve an assignment) and concern for results (this is how much the leader highlights goals, organizational performance and high profitability when choosing how best to achieve an assignment). The Blake and Mouton Managerial Grid forms five different leadership styles, which are: impoverished management, produce-or-perish management, country club management, team management and middle-of-the-road management.
- Impoverished management: low results/ low people. The impoverished manager is the worst among the five styles. With a low respect for making frameworks that take care of business, and with little care for making a comforting or motivating group environment, his outcomes are unavoidably complication and disappointment.
- Produce-or-perish management: high results/ low people. Also known as 'authoritarian' managers, individuals in this class trust that their team are basically a way of achieving something. The group's needs are constantly optional to its profitability. This kind of manager is autocratic, has severe work guidelines, methods and systems, and can see discipline as a viable method for inspiring team. This methodology can drive great creation results at first, yet low team and inspiration will eventually influence individuals' execution, and this kind of leader will fight to hold better workers.
- Middle-of-the-road management: medium results/ medium people. A middle-of-the-road or 'status quo' manager attempts to support results and people, yet this methodology is not as successful as it might sound. Through constant trade-off, he disappoints to encourage high production and furthermore ignores people's needs. The outcome is that his group will probably produce just standard performance.
- Country club management: high people/ low results. The country club or 'accommodating' style of manager is most worried about her team's needs and emotions. He/she accept that, as long as they are comfortable and secure, they will work hard. What will, in general, be the outcome is a workplace that is exceptionally relaxed and enjoyable, yet where output suffers because there is an absence of bearing and control.
- Team management: high result/ high people. According to The Blake and Mouton Managerial Grid, team management is the best leadership style. It mirrors a leader who is enthusiastic about his work and who does as well as can be expected for the team he works with. Team managers focus on their corporate's goals and purpose, motivate the team who report to them, and endeavor to get people to extend themselves to achieve excellent outcomes. In any case, in the meantime, they're motivating figures who take care of their groups. Somebody driven by a team manager feels regarded and engaged and is focused on accomplishing her objectives.
According to the Blake and Mouton Managerial Grid, Miranda falls clearly in the produce-or-perish management grid due to her amazingly high performance and extremely low interest in people. Considering her management style, she completes things as productive as she could. However, her employees are not comfortable working with her. Even hearing her name is just enough to bring in a negative feeling. The long-time period pitfalls of this style of leadership are turnover, and this is proven on this movie whilst Miranda’s most efficient assistant Andy leaves in the end. Although Miranda noticed how talented Andy is compared to her past assistants, she is never change herself to impress anyone. In view that Andy becomes quite success orientated, she labored towards all odds that confronted her at the start of joining Runway, like being blind to the fashion industry and being informed that she has no knowledge of fashion. She worked tough to prove her well worth and Miranda give her credit after all. Little did Miranda recognize that everyone has distinctive priorities and whilst Andy found out the load of work she has being doing, to the point she is losing her values and ethics, she realized that it is time to quit. Had Miranda put the effort to understand Andy’s priorities and make certain that Andy is being happy at her workplace by way of incorporating the team management style, Andy might have stayed longer.
As expressed in various speculations and styles of leadership, in a wide sense, a mix of individuals and assignment introduction would dependably work best. In the expressions of Daniel Goleman, “The best leader doesn’t know just one style of leadership they are skilled at several and have the flexibility to switch between styles as the circumstances”. Every pioneer should know about this just as work towards rehearsing the equivalent so they are comprehensively fruitful pioneers.
References
- Blake, M. (1964). The Managerial Grid Model.
- Goleman, D. (2011). Leadership That Gets Results.
- Katz, R. L. (2009). Skills of an Effective Administrator. Harvard Business Press.
- W., J. (2007). Organizational Behaviour-Human Behaviour.
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