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Leadership demands following roles that can set examples for followers and increase the overall performance of a group of people being led. Below are the functional and ethical roles and duties that a leader has to follow.
Functional Leadership Duties:
The first and foremost duty that a leader has to perform is that he or she has to prioritize needs related to the task, teams, and people. When a leader is clear in this regard, the decision-making process becomes a lot easier as it becomes possible for the leader to establish a framework for action. The second important role that a leader must perform is that they must have a focus on action rather than merely making promises and speeches. In addition to that, the followers of a leader should be able to relate and identify certain actions that have been performed by their leader that they can look at as lighthouse for guidance. There should be tangible proof of fitness with the leader when it comes to leadership.
A good leader is the one that has a focus on results rather than getting too obsessed with the details. A result oriented leader is the one that knows the ultimate goal of undertaking a set of activities and makes an effort in smoothening out the path that leads to that desirable outcome. Milestone fulfillment is not a success, and a leader should make sure that he sees the tasks he or she takes through to the end (Ulrich, Zenger & Smallwood, 2013). However, a leader needs to understand the humanism involved in tasks and activities and hence has to be flexible enough to allow certain mistakes and personal disabilities of people in teams. To rigid leadership can cause severe damage to the motivation and morale of the team members as they become too afraid of
making mistakes to practice any kind of innovation (Copeland, 2014).
Another functional role of a leader is to understand the individual responsibilities of all the members of a work team. Each person has his or her own specialties and disabilities and their specialties become useful for their teams and sometimes they need their teams to back them up to overcome their weaknesses. It is a leader’s role to play when it comes to organizing personal efforts and capabilities and channeling them in a way that they contribute towards the accomplishment of team goals. When getting a group to work as a unit, a leader is actually summing all the strengths and the weaknesses together to formulate a fine balance that makes use of peoples’ talents and covers their weaknesses. A leader takes the entire team and takes them along the way in a compelling manner. This means that a leader does not simply leave people on their own to perform their solo acts but makes them realize how important their inputs are towards the acquisition of the desirable output. In addition to that, the leader makes the team members realize that they have an obligation to fulfill towards their organization and that they need to deliver in order to justify their place on the team. All of this count towards the motivation of organizational members that compels them to perform better than they already are.
Ethical Duties of Leadership:
The first ethical role and duty that a leader has to perform when leading a group of people is that he or she must not over promise the followers, which means that the followers should be given realistic and truthful insight of what they should expect from the organization as an outcome of the set of activities that they are performing. It is very easy for a person to over
promise potential followers and lure them in for greed and hence accomplish personal aims and goals, but it is equal as difficult for a true leader to keep people clinging to him or her despite giving them the bad news and making them aware of risks involved in the future ventures.
Another fair thing to expect from a leader in his or her ethical capacity is that the leader should be daring enough to step out as an example setter rather than pushing others to demonstrate activities. Though it is at the discretion of the leader to ask for his or her team members to initiate an activity, but it is a moral duty of the leader to be the first one to step out and to lead by example for others to follow his or her footsteps (Home-Douglas, 2015). After all, it is the duty of a leader to make things easier for the followers and not more difficult. Guidance of team members without fearing that one of them would take the place of the leader is also a selfless act of leadership that is expected from a good leader. A person who pulls legs of people or forbids them to perform up to their full potentials is not a leader by definition. Hence, a leader has to have an open heart and mind for when it comes to the progress of other members of the organization.
References:
Copeland, M. K. (2014). Improving Organizational Financial Outcomes through Flexible Leadership.
Home-Douglas, P. (2015). LEADING BY EXAMPLE. ASEE Prism, 25(1), 32.
Ulrich, D., Zenger, J., & Smallwood, N. (2013). Results-based leadership. Harvard Business Press.
