describe how the military can best
prepare their leaders to be able to lead in a world with increased diversity. In your
experience, how do leaders inspire members that are foreign to their organization?
ANSWER
Teams comprise of different individuals who possess diverse skills working together as a
unit to attain a universal objective for which they are held jointly responsible and, one of the
essential components of a team is diversity (Park and Kim, 2015). While maintaining the
philosophy and culture of the military, Halpin (2011) stated that military leaders should possess
the skills necessary to handle diverse teams to improve performance and productivity. However,
because of inadequate interpersonal similarity, team members have less common points to create
universal feelings towards one another, which make them develop smaller subgroups, for
instance, men, young, or American people and as a result, these groups increase conflict risks
and develop team mistrusts that, in turn, risk breaking the team. Therefore, this paper will
discuss how military leaders can be prepared to lead the world with increased diversity. Besides,
the paper will assess how leaders inspire foreign members in their organizations.
Leaders should be trained to ensure that each member contributes their knowledge to the
team’s discussions using careful structure and management (Morath, Leonard & Zaccaro, 2011).
To achieve this, for instance, roles should be divided into various components, and each
multicultural team is assigned one component. In addition, leaders should acquire skills that will
enable them to create and execute efficient techniques to prevent language barriers, and in this
case, they should allow team members to organize small groups communicating the same
language to enable them to brainstorm issues and then select one fluent member to report the
essential findings and decisions. Similarly, team members can be encouraged to discuss their
problems using their language and after, other team members can translate what they are talking
about, and this will ensure that the military leader is successful while handling diverse members.
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According to Park and Kim (2015), diversity is something that human beings face in their
daily activities, and leaders should be careful while leading to ensure that no member is
discriminated they should not be biased while making decisions. Military leaders can use the
fusion strategy, which allows coexistence of dissimilarities and active participation. The fusion
strategy ensures that there is work cooperation to attain the set goals and objectives. The
American military faces daily diverse situations and this strategy has the primary aim of allowing
all members to make their contributions to attain the purposes of the team. Dartey-Baah (2015)
asserted that the fusion strategy ensures that all differences are coexisted and discussed.
Alternatively, military leaders can also adopt a traditional cooperation approach to become
successful in a more diverse world. In a convenient form, leaders collect information from team
members to provide direction, and they are the ones who make the final decision. While using
this approach, a leader acknowledges the differences in the team and ensures that they align with
his, and incorporate the perspectives of his team members. Besides, the approach ensures that the
team is culturally intelligent by encouraging communicative contributions from team members to
make a final and practical decision.
Lastly, effective leaders inspire foreign members in the organization by advancing their
opportunities at work. Employees feel subdued when their jobs are not growing or moving too
long at the same point, without any changes, and this demotivates even the most determined
foreign workers. Nevertheless, when foreign employees are offered the opportunities to advance
or improve, they become enthusiastic about performing better, and one strategy to attain this is,
promoting foreign employees from within the organization instead of employing external
professionals. However, salary increment or getting a new job title is not the only strategy to
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inspire foreign employees but rather, training and offering educational opportunities motivates
and inspire them at work.