Leadership plays the most significant role in business prospering and flourishing. The question we are find a response to in the following paper is as follows: are leadership skills acquired in the wake of experience in a particular field or are they hereditary and inborn?
Here we must make a reservation that we will mainly deal with the task-oriented leadership defining the latter as the leadership which is mostly pre-determined by the leader’s overrunning concern with efficacious allocation of personnel and equipment.
Discrete leadership theories in the modern managerial science have left the mark on our perception of business as a highly competitive entity. The most monumental ones are the theories that differentiate between cardinal types of leadership thus recognizing that there can be many approaches to running a company.
It was already at the end of the World War two that consideration and initiating structure, leadership as two dimensions of the phenomenon in question were discriminated. So significant was this notion that it has exerted tremendous influence on the contemporary science remaining one of the basic tenet of it. Let us see for ourselves on what ground the two dimensions are assessed.
Firstly, in order to have an all-embracing analysis of the subject we need to date it back to history. Long before the year 1945 had scientists tried to describe the concept of leadership in simple terms or, in other words, an earnest attempt was undertaken to expose intrinsic character traits of a real leader to the public eye. That had yielded, however, limited success: there had been too much discrepancy and variance in the data output.
Only then did Ohio scientists suggest the idea that leadership can, after all, be defined in regard to just two features: consideration and initiating structure. Being far from a fortuitous discovery, it would shape the theory of leadership much further than anybody could have expected at the time. So what is the difference between the factors of consideration and initiating structure?
Consideration is the factor which is directly linked to the leader’s display of concern for certain aspects of business such as welfare of employees or efficiency of production. Indeed, such consideration is always thinking in terms of business and management or, in other words, it cannot be thought just for reasons not connected to the prosperity of the company. Any consideration on the part of the leader presupposes that he takes into account all details of his job and comes to a timely and most appropriate decision on where to invest money and resources into.
It is important to note, however, that the consideration approach is always people-oriented since the employee factor is arguably the most pivotal in the company’s effective work. ‘People-orientedness’ of leadership underlies certain characteristics inherent to the leader such as friendliness, accessibility and approachability. These characteristics of the leader contribute to the productive atmosphere in the company, trust and loyalty among its personnel.
Initiating structure is the leader’s potential to pose himself as the head of the company, his skill and ability to allocate tasks to his subordinates. The leader serves as a role model to them in the case.
The typical characteristics of ‘the initiating leader’ include daring, boldness, exemplariness, brightness and non-standard solutions of the main challenges and problems.
In the real life situation leadership is always about combining the two dimensions we have dwelt upon above. In fact, there are no leaders that can disregard one of the essential characteristics for the sake of the others. The characteristics described in this context are the most basic ones that have defined the essence of leadership for more than half a century. Yet this is a theory. As we know from our experience, practice does not always necessarily overlap theory and in order to provide a deeper insight into leadership, we cannot restrain ourselves to just abstractive way of looking from the outside. What is needed is a look from the inside as well. This implies that the value of every theory should be seen in its practical usefulness in regard to a life situation.
With this purpose in mind, we must peruse our own experience of managing people and the possibility of reshaping this skill in our future job which is very likely will be concerned with the task.
Every person, it goes without saying, has to be a leader once. If he flinches the responsibility, it does not make much sense: any person needs to engage in communication, cooperation, with other people and every group of people social or otherwise is closely determined by its leader or leaders. It is the leader that sets the general line for the group, it is the leader who is the ground-breaker, it is the leader who electrifies his fellow citizens
Let us come back to the original question, we brought forward at the very beginning of the paper. It was about the nature of leadership and whether it can be developed at the end of the day. The answer we can provide to the question is: yes, definitely.
Indeed, some people have a natural proclivity towards becoming leaders from the cradle. The characteristics which are absolutely indispensable for the right leader simply run in their blood or in their family. Indeed, the question of leadership skills being inherited goes far beyond our work and would be a proper subject for any kind of genetic theory which we without any degrading this particular branch of science we have always found sort of tricky.
What we know is that leadership skills as any other skills are developed. The statement going beyond an assertion can be easily proved by numerous examples from our personal life as well as by the data provided by a number of latest researches. However, it is our sincerest intention no to pack too much data in the paper to make it more readable and concise as well as up to the point.
What we believe is that every person by just taking over some simple social roles like being a monitor of group or being on a duty can exercise his leadership skills and find an ‘outlet’ for them. Furthermore, as we have already indicated, it is absolutely necessary for a person to take over since it is the one rule of society that has proved the most enduring.
These little ‘instances of leadership’ might provide not only glimpses on the phenomenon of leadership, but give a quite bright picture of it.
We have to say that during our studies we have had a plenty of opportunities to be in the limelight of leadership and most of us have been very competitive both in the catching up with better students and challenging those ahead of us in any other aspect of our students’ life, be it sport or IT.
What we have learned is important for our future professional success. A true leader, we have learned, must be always reliable. A true leader has no right to let down his team – he must be a part of team and the most essential part of it. Yet the team must always remain with the team. Put otherwise, the leader must hear other voices apart from his own inner voice which, indeed, is very important, but not that important to eliminate all team activities.
History knows that one man is prone to make fatal and incorrigible mistakes. History is very well aware that one man can never outdo a group of men that work together and see the goal ahead of them, the group that is loyal and faithful in its way of ‘sticking to its guns’.
On the other hand, neither a leader nor his team should be stubborn. Determined and consistent they should be, but not stubborn. In fact, the ability to acknowledge one’s mistake is one of the most striking and terrific skills that the leader of the future will need.
The person who persists in his wrong, when wrong is self-evident and obvious, will never be a good leader who can electrify his co-workers to do great job and to carry out their responsibilities.
Fallaciousness is always seen through. When the leader sticks in the quagmire of his own mistakes, he stalls and paralyzes the work of the whole company.
In the end, we have to say that the leader must being approachable by any member of the team he runs and, on the other hand, the leader must himself always approach his superior (let us do away with the superstition that the leader is always the head of the company – the leader is the one who exhibits leadership skills, we believe) on the most vital issues regarding the company.
The latter aspect of leadership has been raised above all in the Harvard Business Review journal (Kets de Vries, 2013) as well as a number of other authoritative publications.
In the paper we, however, mostly base our judgment on our own experience and in this light we can claim that daring to stand up to anybody and fight for what deems and in the long run is the right move, is the greatest feature of character that can be named as the leadership feature – so prominent it is.
We can never know in advance, but anticipate events we must: in the modern world the leadership skills have become absolutely indispensable.
References
Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries, (2013). The Eight Archetypes of Leadership, Harvard Business Review.
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