WMBA 6605 Week 11 Personal Leadership Philosophy Example

Five Commitments for Leading a Close Team: A Personal Leadership Philosophy Built From One Term's Inventory, Feedback, Incident and Case Evidence, With the Conditions Under Which It Would Fail

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6605: Finding Your Inner Leader

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Five Commitments for Leading a Close Team: A Personal Leadership Philosophy Built From One Term's Inventory, Feedback, Incident and Case Evidence, With the Conditions Under Which It Would Fail

The Philosophy

I lead month-end close, a team of six, at Brookfield Dairy Cooperative, a composite Wisconsin cooperative owned by 312 member farms. This is how I intend to lead it.

1. When information is incomplete, I will name who outside my team knows something I do not, and call them before I decide.

2. When people disagree, I will put each position and the condition that would change it on one page, and I will apply the same treatment when I am one of the people disagreeing.

3. When someone proposes changing a process I built, I will ask what it saves before asking how it fits, and I will decide within two closes.

4. When someone brings me a problem, my first response will be to thank them by name and ask what they need, and I will report the problem upward the same day.

5. I will give away the reviews I perform myself once someone else can do them, and keep only a second look.

The rest of this paper shows where each commitment comes from, where it would fail and what will keep it honest.

Commitment 1: Call Before Deciding When Information Is Incomplete

This commitment comes from the January 2026 milk payment delay, analyzed in Week 3. When a software patch broke our payment run the day before payment, I decided within an hour to delay payment to all 312 farms. The decision about accuracy was right; the decision to make it alone was not. The member relations manager later told me he could have named the dozen farms that needed Friday money if I had called him before deciding.

Vroom and Yetton (1973) argued that the right degree of participation depends on the features of the decision, and my Week 3 analysis found that the January decision met the conditions for consulting others: I lacked key information, and members' acceptance mattered. The commitment translates that finding into a rule I can follow under pressure. It also answers the feedback from two colleagues in August that I email when I should call, which is why the commitment specifies a call.

Commitment 2: Structure Disagreements, Including My Own

This commitment builds on my most consistent strength. Six of seven colleagues said in August that I help decisions move when disagreements lack structure, and my Week 1 post described the March 2025 accrual dispute, where a single page of positions resolved a dispute stuck for three days.

The second half of the commitment comes from the evidence that the strength fails when I am involved. In October 2025, during the argument over a new reconciliation tool, I was one of the people stuck, and our CFO had to decide. My Week 2 inventory, with cautiousness at the 91st percentile and adventurousness at the 23rd, predicted that pattern. Applying my own method to my own position means writing down, before the argument hardens, what evidence would change my mind.

Commitment 3: Ask What a Change Saves, and Decide Within Two Closes

This commitment answers the clearest disagreement between my self-description and others' view of me. In Week 2 I described myself as open to change but careful. Five of seven colleagues called my caution the biggest drag on the team, and the controller admitted he takes close changes to the CFO first because he expects me to ask for more tests. The Week 7 audit found a proposal to combine two duplicate reconciliation steps that took four months to adopt, costing about twenty-four hours of staff time.

Kaiser and Overfield (2011) found that managers commonly overdo the behaviors they are best at, producing lopsided leadership. My strength in building structure becomes a weakness when I defend the structure against changes that would improve it. Asking first what a change saves keeps attention on the outcome the structure exists to serve. The two-close limit, from my Week 9 development plan, makes the commitment measurable.

Commitment 4: Thank, Ask, Then Report the Same Day

This commitment joins two values from Week 4. One is reporting a problem to the controller on the day I discover it; the other is that I give credit in the room where a problem is reported. In June 2026 these collided when an analyst found her own error and asked for a night to fix it before I reported it. I sent the report that afternoon, crediting her with finding the error and fixing it.

The Mulally case in Week 10 sharpened why the order of my response matters. Ford's weekly review produced honest information only after the chief executive responded to the first red slide with applause and an offer of help. Edmondson (1999) showed that teams in which members could raise problems without fear of embarrassment learned more, including from their errors. My team's willingness to bring problems early depends less on my reporting rules than on what they see happen to the person who brings the first one. Thanking that person by name, and asking what they need before anything else, is the part of my response they will remember.

Commitment 5: Give Away My Reviews

This commitment comes from the Week 7 audit of my second strength, checking. I have personally reviewed every farm payment run for three years. Errors are rare, but my senior accountant, Dana, has never owned the review, and in January the cooperative depended on me alone. Two colleagues said in August that I should delegate it.

Dana took over the payment review in September, with me as second reviewer for three cycles. The commitment generalizes that step: any review I perform that someone else could perform should be handed over, with my role reduced to a second look and then to exceptions.

The Limits of This Philosophy

This philosophy fits a stable, rules-driven team that can tolerate a day's delay to consult or decide well. It would fit badly in an organization where decisions must be made in minutes, such as plant operations during an equipment failure, where calling around before deciding could cause harm. It would also fail with a team that lacks the skill to take over reviews; Commitment 5 assumes people like Dana, and with a newer team it would raise errors before it raised capability.

The philosophy would also fail if my organization rewarded the opposite. If the controller or CFO judged me mainly by whether problems ever reached them, Commitment 4 would expose me to criticism every time I reported early. It works because my controller, by his own account, prefers to hear early.

Finally, the philosophy rests on self-knowledge gathered over a single term. The inventory was a self-report, the feedback came from seven people mostly inside finance and the incident was one bad day. The commitments may be fitted too closely to the evidence I happened to collect.

Practices That Keep It Honest

Commitments decay unless something checks them. Gollwitzer (1999) found that tying an intention to a specific situation makes follow-through far more likely, and each practice below ties a commitment to a recurring moment.

For Commitments 1 and 4, the member relations manager and the controller have agreed to tell me when they learn of a decision or problem late. For Commitment 3, I keep a log of every proposed close change with its date and decision, reviewed monthly with the controller. For Commitment 5, I list in January every review I still perform and name who could take each one. For Commitment 2, before any disagreement I am part of, I will write my own position and the evidence that would change it, and share the page.

Once a year, I will repeat the August feedback with the same three questions and a wider group, including two plant managers and the board's finance committee chair. If the answers to "When do I slow things down?" do not change, the philosophy is a description of who I want to be rather than of who I am, and it will need to be rewritten.

References

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54(7), 493-503. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.7.493

Kaiser, R. B., & Overfield, D. V. (2011). Strengths, strengths overused, and lopsided leadership. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 63(2), 89-109. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024470

Vroom, V. H., & Yetton, P. W. (1973). Leadership and decision-making. University of Pittsburgh Press.