- Personal definition of leadership
Reading leadership theories and interacting with leaders for developing my projects contributed to forming new perspectives about leadership. While I still strongly maintain some of the initial considerations about what leadership is, I have gained knowledge about new leadership principles and theories that shaped a new vision for me about leadership.
Therefore, while I firmly support the fact that leadership defines people who can influence others, who can set themselves as models and examples to be followed by their teams, I now know that not everybody is meant to be a leader, because the challenge of instigating trust, power and courage to other people might be a task too difficult to handle for many people, and this ability to guiding and instigating all these values for the team members need to come in a natural and easy manner.
Besides motivating and determining employees to pursue their goals, I have learned that leaders need to coach, to invest time in the employees s/he works with for improving their skills, abilities and competencies. Another aspect that changed in my understanding about leadership is that leaders need to be permanently prepared to answer their followers’ questions regarding the work issues, therefore, they should demonstrate accuracy in whatever they do, in order for the employees to consider them proficient, experienced and worthy of confidence.
As I have learned from my previous assignments, leaders should be able to create communities, to bring people together and to generate a pleasure of working in an environment that celebrates the diversity. Therefore, a change that intervened in my perception about leadership is that leaders need to remove their own preconceptions and to embrace the variety of cultures represented by the team members, inspiring others to do the same.
Allowing people to make (controllable) mistakes is another significant aspect that I have learned and that changed the way I define leadership. This indicates allowing the team members to be autonomous, so that they will learn from their own mistakes, understanding like this the significance of team work and leadership coordination, although it implies a simple guidance or advising.
- Working together with people and leading by example is a significant aspect for motivating employees (Kouzes & Posner 16). Although the leader I have worked with had good intentions in helping the team, I considered these intentions insufficient for actually inspiring people, as this leader lacked the knowledge, competency and the know-how required for performing her job at high standards and for motivating others to do the same.
As conceptualized by Northouse (5), a leader should express both professional traits (demonstrating vision regarding the developed processes and being in the middle of the work, and sustaining change and development) and personal traits (characteristics that leaders possess that make them pleasant and charismatic) for determining others to accomplish tasks.
Although the leader that I worked with was very pleasant, I felt that she could not impose herself within the team through her competencies, she could not gain authority because she was not sufficiently prepared to coordinate the team and the fact that she was aware of the weakness of not having enough know-how to cope with this role, made her more unconfident in her ability to lead. For me, this was visible and this is why I could not recognize her authority after getting to know her as a leader.
Things got a new turn when the leader understood her position, and raised up to the expectations that the team members and the company had from her. Before every meeting she documented attentively and could answer our questions regarding the work process, which indicated that she also managed to form a vision. With this change in attitude, I started to change my opinion about her leadership style and she continued to act more as a leader as she gained more self – confidence, as she knew what she was doing and how to obtain the results.
Therefore, she advocated for change, leading us smoothly into it, by not compromising the other activities, but optimizing them for reaching improved results. This showed me that leadership can happen anywhere, at any time (Kouzes & Posner 9).
Our leader also told us about how all of us, the team members, although having distinct activities, must reach the same goal and she gave clear directions, determining us to understand how we can improve our team work by helping each other, because, as she said it, “the work of one counts for the work of all and for the overall results and the sooner we get our work done the better”. This attitude demonstrates yet again that she improved her leadership style, as she managed to bring us together to achieve a goal, which is a leadership principle characterized by the fact that one individual influences other individuals, part of a group to achieve a common goal (Northouse 5).
- The leader that I worked with notably improved her leadership skills and this was visible in our work as a team and in the fact that we were encouraged to be more creative, gaining the autonomy for our ideas. Besides this team work, creative oriented, visionary side that our leader improved, I still consider that there are other aspects that could be improved in order to increase the effectiveness of her work and of course, of the team’s work.
As Andre S. Grove (cited in Lepsinger & DeRosa 3) states, we are working in a global world, where information is revolutionizing every day and it can produce significant shifts and changes from a moment to another and this is why, it is important for leaders to know to shape flexible organizations, for efficiently responding to unpredictable events, just as firemen react rapidly and firmly, although they cannot anticipate fires.
Flexibility, this is what I would recommend our leader to adjust for improving the team’s effectiveness. However, this does come initially with the exercise of anticipating how things could turn based on a decision and to be able to rapidly and firmly come with solutions and anticipate their outcomes as well.
For gaining more authority and determining the team members to maintain their motivation and enthusiasm in working, while managing the ongoing changes that are necessary in a flexible organization for staying competitive, our leader should develop her credibility. Kouzes and Posner (57) believe that achieving increased credibility means to have one’s own voice and when one speaks people to recognize the one who speaks, as that person has developed her own ideas, and adapted those ideas to her leadership style.
Having a flexible organization and quickly adapting to changes would bring improved performances to our organization, as the flexibility could represent for our company a competitive advantage. If our leader could manage to improve this leadership ability, based on leadership theories, the effectiveness of our team work would be sensed at organizational level, as our company would register increased sales performances due to the fact that it can easily adjust to changes and to various requirements of the clients.
Credibility, or having a voice of her own in terms of decisions, visions, workflow, and organizational behavior processes would make our leader be known and respected for her leadership style, and admired for her professional and personal traits. This would mean that she would be able to lead by example (Kouzes & Posner 16), and when this is happening the teams’ performances increase significantly, being inspired by the values generated by the leaders.
- The leader that I analyzed in this paper demonstrated improved leadership qualities in terms of getting people together to pursue the same goal, using this leadership practice effectively and successfully implementing it within our team, as we achieved better results following this leadership action. Moreover, she effectively used a straightforward thinking and demonstrated intelligence and honesty (valuable leadership qualities that determine people to admire their leader (Kouzes & Posner 30)) when she told us that we need more creativity on our team, hence more time was to be given to this side of the work process, while she taught us how to optimize the more technical part of our activities.
Competence is a significant aspect for me and the lack of this trait determined me initially to be reluctant regarding my leader’s leadership style. From my point of view, leadership should start by showing competence, preparedness to proficiently answer any given challenge regarding one’s activity area. This is the first quality that I would integrate in my leadership practice. Next, I would have to determine my team to pursue the same goal(s), so that everybody should clearly understand that they are a team, working together and not separately, disregarding the others’ work. Just as our leader did with us, I would explain all the team members how they should achieve the common goal through their diversified activity. Another aspect that I would also integrate in my leadership practice would be the flexibility, aiming to maintain a sense of constancy, however, as people need this for feeling united and for relying on their leader (Kouzes & Posner 29).
In my leadership practice, I would integrate flexibility by allowing my team to propose working solutions for meeting the clients’ goals and I would be permanently informed with what changes are occurring in the industry, so that I can competently inform and coach my team about these changes and also to adjust the team’s work to these changes, while clearly describing them (using my own words) the way they should face up these changes while focusing on managing their activities, adapted to the applied changes.
References
Kouzes, James, M & Posner, Barry, Z. The Leadership Challenge, 4th edn. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2007. Print.
Lepsinger, Richard & DeRosa, Darleen. Virtual Team Success: A Practical Guide for Working and Leading from a Distance. San Francisco, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2010. Print.
Northousem Peter, G. Leadership: Theory and Practice, 6th edn. California, Sage Oublicatiions, Inc. 2013.
