REMEMBER THE TITANS- Leadership Styles

REMEMBER THE TITANS- Leadership Styles

This movie is about a high school football team that is suffering from racial tensions and a new coach called Coach Boone takes over Coach Yoast as head coach. This shows how they overcome the hostile community and link together to gain team glory. Coach Boone and Coach Yoast have different leadership styles, which both contribute to the strong relationship in the team. Leadership is very important in building relationship in all types of team, especially in the business world as people have to work together in a range of different situations. Its the leader’s role to help keep control over the team and in this blog, I will be looking at the different leadership types of the coaches.

I’m going to start off by looking at Coach Boone leadership traits and when he came in he lacked support, as his race and removing Coach Yoast from his position. I think that Boone was an Autocratic leader at the beginning of the movie as he had little flexibility. This was seen when Coach Boone took a player off as he was not performing right, this shows that he is not flexible with any problems and he is willing to make the hard decisions. An autocratic leader also holds most of the authority in the team and this is also seen at this point because Coach Yoast decide to put the player back on but in a different position. This went well, however Coach Boone still was angry with him going against his decision. This shows that Boone doesn’t like to delegate authority to subordinates. I think that this leadership style is only effective on certain people, as it could cause people to respond negatively and become demotivated. This would work best on people that are motivated by monetary rewards, as the Autocratic style could threaten people with loss of wages to help motivate them. This would also work well with employees that work well under pressure and this forces people push themselves. I think that in the Remember the titan’s situation, this leadership style was not useful because it seemed to demotivate the player and he was there by choice, so he could of left if he wanted to. This leadership style also links to the next one because I thought that he had a dictatorship trait of leadership. This was shown by how Coach Boone made all the decision and never delegated to subordinates like Coach Yoast. Personal I dislike a Dictatorship style of leadership as I feel in a team everyone should have an input into decision, as the more idea the higher the chance of a successful one. When I was in collage as a part of our business a level we had to create a business idea and we choose a leader that had a dictator style. This caused a lot of problems as people became unhappy with the decisions and didn’t put effect into the project as a consequence to this. Towards the end to the movie I felt that he moves to more a of a Democratic leader as he started to trust the players to make decisions that impacted the team. This was seen when he let the captain kick a player off the team for being disrespectful to a team mate and not covering him on purpose. Democratic leaders have active communication up and down the hierarchy and this allows delegation to happen easier. I feel like this leadership works best with people that are motivated by success, as the contribution they make to the business helps motivate them. This worked better in movie as a bigger relationship with the coach and team player was created. I feel like this could be applied to business situations when the team members are not communicating enough.

Compare to Coach Yoast, who already had the strong relationship with half of the team, he had more of a charismatic leadership style. This is when followers look up to you as a leader because they like their values and benefits. This was seen right at the begin when Coach Yoast lost his position as head coach and half of the players said they was leaving because of this. I feel like this is one of the best leadership style because employees will respect your decision and will remain motivated to make it work. A good example of a real-life example would be Sir Richard Branson, as a lot of people seek employment off him purely off his accomplishments and experience. I personal think this leadership type cannot be put in all business situations, as its highly unlikely that all people on a team can agree in the same values and beliefs. However, I like the leadership trait as motivation is normally really high in these situations as they want to impression their leader. Coach Yoast also showed some Autocratic leadership when needed, as when a player wasn’t there to support his team, he was put on the bench for a few games as punishment. These leadership styles are a good mix because sometimes even when all the employees look up to you they will still step out of line and need to be made aware of this. I think that because of Coach Boone spending time around Coach Yoast, he develops more of a charismatic leadership style.

X and Y Theory Leaders

When I was watching this movie, I got the feeling that Coach Boone came across as a Theory X leader at the beginning of the movie. He liked to keep control of the players and felt like he needed to push them to be more productive. This came across when he forced everyone up in the middle of the night to go on a run. Theory X leaders seem to work best with employees that are not easily motivated and only care about the money rewards of the business. I think that I would personally not like to have a theory X manager as I would like to have some authority and not be constantly controlled. Theory X managers would work best in low paid jobs and low levels jobs, this is because they will lack the creativity and skills to work more independently. However, I feel like Coach Yoast is more of a Theory Y, as he feels that the players are motivated more by being a part of the team.  Theory Y managers have less of a aggressive nature to their leadership traits and this would work best with employees that excel when authority is delegated to them, as they like self-management.

From this I have learnt that there is not just one leadership style that fits all teams and depending of the general type of employees in the team, depends on the style. Continuing this, the better leaders have a mixture of leadership traits, as different situations need different leadership approaches. If I was in the position of Coach Boone and Coach Yoast, I would have used a range of different leadership styles, as they had a large team that had a range of didn’t personalities. I would use one at the start and get to know the players and see which one would work best for each player.