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Leadership Defined

"Leadership is influencing people to get things done to a standard and quality above their norm. And doing it willingly."¹⁵

As an element in social interaction, leadership is a complex activity involving:

1. a process of influence

2. actors who are both leaders and followers

3. a range of possible outcomes - the achievement of goals, but also the commitment of individuals to such goals, the enhancement of group cohesion and the reinforcement of change of organizational culture.¹⁶

Effective Leadership as a Source of Competitive Business Advantage

Leadership is imperative for molding a group of people into a team, shaping them into a force that serves as a competitive business advantage. Leader know how to make people function in a collaborative fashion, and how to motivate them to excel their performance. Leaders also know how to balance  the individual team member's quest with the goal of producing an outcome that exceeds the sum of individual inputs. Leaders require that their team members forego the quest for personal best in concert with the team effort.⁹

Role, Task, Responsibility, and Source of Power of a Leader

• The role of a leader is to create followers.

• The task of a leader is to bring about constructive and necessary change.

• The responsibility of a leader is to bring about the change in a way that is responsive to the true and long-term needs of all stakeholders.

• The greatest source of power available to a leader is the trust that derives from faithfully serving followers.

Learning to Lead

Effective leaders recognize that what they know is very little in comparison to what they still need to learn. To be more proficient in pursuing and achieving objectives, you should be open to new ideas, insights, and revelations that can lead to better ways to accomplishing goals. This continuous learning process can be exercised, in particular, through engaging yourself in a constant dialogue with your peers, advisers, consultants, team members, suppliers, customers, and competitors.

Leading others is not simply a matter of style, or following some how-to guides or recipes. Ineffectiveness of leaders seldom results from from a lack of know-how or how-to, nor it is typically due to inadequate managerial skills. Leadership is even not about creating a great vision. It is about creating conditions under which all your followers can perform independently and effectively toward a common objective.

James O'Tool⁷, a noted management theorist proposes a new vision of leadership in the business world - a values-based leadership that is not only fair and just, but also highly effective in today's complex organizations. It is based on:

• your ideas and values

• your understanding of the differing and conflicting needs of your followers

• your ability to energize followers to pursue a better goal that they had thought possible

• your skills in creating a values-based umbrella large enough to accommodate the various interests of followers, but focused enough to direct all their energies in pursuit of a common good.

Building Better Leaders through Attributes

Leadership attributes are the inner or personal qualities that constitute effective leadership. These attributes include a large array of characteristics such as values, character, motives, habits, traits, motives, style, behaviors, and skills...More

Results-Based Leadership

What is missing in most leadership-related writings and teachings, is the lack of attention to results. Most of them focus on organizational capabilities - such as adaptability, agility, mission-directed, or values-based - or on leadership competencies - such as vision, character, trust, and other exemplary attributes, competencies and capabilities. All well and good, but what is seriously missing is the connection between these critical capabilities and results¹. And this is what results-based leadership is all about: how organizational capabilities and leadership competencies lead to and are connected to desired results...More

Positioning of a Leader

Anyone who gets a leadership position has not made it. It is only the beginning. Being a leader doesn't make you one. After you get to be the leader of a group, you are going to have to do a lot to earn the acceptance of the group members and have an influence on their behavior.

To be a leader you have to be first to get into the mind of the prospect - and then follow the strategies to stay there. The essential ingredient in securing the leadership position is getting into the mind first. The essential ingredient in keeping that position is reinforcing the original concept.

Emotional Task of the Leader

Great leaders move people - they work through emotions.¹³ They have found effective ways to understand and improve the way they handle their own and their followers' emotions. As a leader, you should act as your group's emotional guide. When you drive emotions positively you bring out everyone's best. Your ignite people's passion, inspire the best in them, and create resonance. The key to making this work lies in your competencies of emotional intelligence (EI): how you handle yourself and your relationships.

Coaching - a Vital Skill for Leaders

The new breed of leaders recognizes that autocracy no longer works, yet that employee empowerment alone is not enough. The skills of coaching have lately been rediscovered by more effective organizations and teams. Your cannot be a leader without a following, and you have to delegate appropriately. The leader is best placed to enhance the performance and learning abilities, on the job, of colleagues. Coaching aims to enhance these abilities. "It involves providing feedback, but it also uses other techniques such as motivation, effective questioning and consciously matching your management style to the coachee's readiness to undertake a particular task"¹⁰... More

Employee Self-Leadership - the Key to Success in the New Economy

Self-leadership is an extensive set of strategies focused on the behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that we use to exert influence over ourselves. In the new economy, given the rapid change, complexity, high-tech autonomous work roles and employee empowerment in the knowledge-based enterprises, the new organizational structures are typically run by people who demand a different kind of culture than the old command-and-control format. Today, people are better educated and demand from their jobs more entrusted responsibilities and opportunities for personal growth, not just a paycheck. Talented and empowered employees are the prime ingredient of organizational success and they need to be able to lead themselves.

Super-Leadership - Leading Others to Lead Themselves

Super-leaders help each of their follower to develop into an effective self-leader by providing them with the behavioral and cognitive skills necessary to exercise self-leadership. "Super-leaders establish values, model, encourage, reward, and in many other ways foster self-leadership in individuals, teams, and wider organizational cultures".⁵

An important measure of a leader's own success is he success of his or her followers. The strength of a leader is measured by the ability to facilitate the self-leadership of others. The first critical step towards this goal is to master self-leadership. If leaders want to lead somebody, they must first lead themselves... More

Integrity

While leadership is always important to corporate performance, there is a growing realization that effective leaders with integrity are absolutely crucial to successfully navigating the New Economy of the 21^st Century. In addition there is also a growing realization that the characteristics of the Leader of the 21^st century are dramatically different than the leader of the past, even the recent past...More

NLP Solutions: Pacing and Leading

Pacing is having the flexibility to meet another person in their model of the world, rather than making them come to yours. Matching body language, voice tonality and words, and respecting beliefs and values are examples of what NLP calls pacing. You need a strong sense of self to pace others well.

Pacing establishes a bridge. Once you have that, you can lead another person to other possibilities. "By matching body language with an angry or upset person, for example, you acknowledge what is important to him, so he no longer needs to insist on the validity of his experience and becomes more available. You then lead him to a calmer state by moderating your voice and changing your posture. You cannot lead without first pacing and gaining rapport".⁴

Case in Point: GE Leadership Effectiveness Survey

General Electric (GE) provides a good example of a company that makes the most of the leadership attribute model for building a deploying better leaders. The company uses the concept of competences, bundles of leadership behaviors, to improve leaders and has become renowned among the best as developing industry leaders. GE uses the leadership competencies stipulated in the Leadership Effectiveness Survey (LES) to integrate a number of management practices with the purpose of building quality of leadership...More

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