8607-520 Assignment Example

Unit 8607-520 asks you to step back from the day-to-day and conduct what amounts to a leadership audit — first of your organisation, then of yourself within it. Unlike units that focus purely on personal development planning, this unit requires you to map how leadership actually operates around you before turning the lens inward. The seven assessment criteria build a structured argument: what styles exist, what impact they create, and where your own capability sits relative to organisational needs.

This assignment example demonstrates how a mid-level operations manager in a 120-person logistics company approached each AC with evidence-based analysis, moving from organisational diagnosis to personal implementation. Every claim is supported by either workplace evidence or academic theory.

Learning Outcome 1 — Understand Leadership Styles Within the Organisation

AC 1.1 — Review the Prevailing Leadership Styles in the Organisation

Reviewing prevailing leadership styles requires more than listing theories — it demands observational evidence from the workplace mapped against a credible framework. Goleman’s (2021) six leadership styles provide the analytical structure here because they distinguish styles by emotional competency rather than simple authority gradients, which better captures how leadership operates in practice across organisational layers.

At senior management level, the prevailing style is pacesetting. The managing director sets high performance standards and expects self-direction from the senior team. Board meetings focus on KPI dashboards and exception reporting rather than developmental discussion. This produces results — the company has achieved 97% on-time delivery rates for three consecutive quarters — but the quarterly staff engagement survey (Q2 2025) recorded that 68% of senior managers describe the leadership environment as ‘pressured rather than supportive.’ In Goleman’s framework, pacesetting works when teams are already competent and motivated, but erodes morale when sustained without balancing styles (Goleman, 2021).

At middle management level, the dominant style is affiliative. Team leaders and operations supervisors prioritise harmony, flexible scheduling, and personal relationship-building. This is visible in how shift handovers operate: supervisors spend the first ten minutes checking in with staff personally before discussing operational matters. Turnover in warehouse operations sits at 12% annually — significantly below the logistics sector average of 24% (CIPD, 2024). However, underperformance conversations are frequently delayed. Two formal capability reviews that should have commenced in January 2025 remained unstarted by April, suggesting the affiliative style was functioning as avoidance rather than genuine people-centredness.

A third style operates informally among frontline team leaders: coaching. Three of six team leaders hold ILM Level 3 qualifications and apply developmental conversations during one-to-one meetings. One team leader’s direct reports showed a 15% improvement in order-processing accuracy over six months (internal quality audit, March 2025), suggesting the coaching approach produces measurable skill development. However, this style is unevenly distributed — it depends on individual team leaders rather than organisational policy.

AC 1.2 — Assess the Impact of the Prevailing Leadership Styles on the Organisation’s Values and Performance

The organisation’s stated values are reliability, teamwork, and continuous improvement. These are displayed on the intranet, referenced in induction materials, and included in the annual appraisal template. The question AC 1.2 raises is whether the prevailing leadership styles reinforce or undermine these values in practice.

The pacesetting style at senior level strongly reinforces the reliability value. High standards and KPI focus have driven operational consistency — customer complaints fell 22% year-on-year (2024-2025 operations report). However, the same style undermines continuous improvement. When senior leaders treat deviations from standard as failures rather than learning opportunities, staff become risk-averse. The 2025 innovation audit found that only four process improvement suggestions were submitted via the staff portal in the preceding twelve months, compared to seventeen the year before when a previous operations director used a more coaching-oriented approach.

The affiliative style at middle management level supports teamwork — cross-functional collaboration between warehouse and transport teams is described as ‘good’ or ‘very good’ by 74% of staff (engagement survey, 2025). Yet it weakens performance management. Northouse (2022) argues that affiliative leadership without corrective mechanisms creates a culture where mediocrity becomes normalised because managers prioritise relationship preservation over honest feedback. The delayed capability reviews identified in AC 1.1 illustrate this directly.

The coaching pockets among team leaders align with continuous improvement in isolated areas. However, because coaching is personality-dependent rather than structurally embedded, its impact on organisational performance remains inconsistent. Western (2024) describes this as the difference between ‘leadership as individual competence’ and ‘leadership as organisational capability’ — the former improves individual teams while the latter transforms culture. Currently, coaching operates as individual competence only.

The cumulative picture is a leadership ecosystem that delivers operational reliability but struggles with development and accountability — a tension between the pacesetting and affiliative styles that leaves the coaching style insufficiently supported to scale.