Leadership
leadership is a process to move people in right direction gaining their commitment and then motivating them to achieve the desired goal. This process also involves inspiring individuals to give of their best to achieve desired result.
Leadership can be divided in to three main categories:
- Role of the leader
- Leadership styles
- Leadership qualities
once these categories defined and explained will show us leadership impact on organisation. In return It will also help us to understand what organisation requires of leaders.
Role of leaders
leaders have two essential roles
- achieve the task
- maintain effective relationship
leaders are required to ensure that the group purpose is fulfilled, if it is not then group will face frustration, disharmony, criticism and at the end group mite disintegrate. Leaders also ensures healthy relationship within the group. Team relationship got two sides to it, first one concerns with team morale and common purpose. Second concerns with individual bases and how they are motivated.
There are three areas of needs which leaders are there to satisfy:
- Task needs – to get the job done
- Group needs – to build and maintain team spirit
- Individual needs – to harmonies the needs of the individual with the needs of the task and the group.(john Adair 1982 & Michael Armstrong).
Adair’s three circle model of leadership
Leadership Styles
Leaders adopt different style which can be classified as:(Michael Armstrong “Managing people”).
Charismatic / non-charismatic
charismatic leaders are visionary leaders who always reply on personality, inspirational qualities and their AURA. They are also achievement oriented they will also take calculated risk plus they are good communicators expressing there views with clear understanding.
Non-charismatic leaders are mostly quiet confident always stay calm always analyze things before dealing with problems. Mostly they rely on other peoples know-how of the problem and they always tend to distribute authorities.
Autocratic / democratic
autocratic leaders force people to do as they are told, mostly they impose their decisions using power of their position. Democratic leaders whenever they take any decision they involve other people by encouraging them.
Enabler / controller
Enabler leaders always empower people to achieve common team goal, they inspire people with there vision of future. Controller leaders always manipulate people to obtain compliance.
Transactional / transformational
transactional leaders to achieve people compliance they trade with money, jobs and security. Transformational leaders they strive people for higher level of goals with clear motivation.
Leadership Qualities
To be and affective leader requires following qualities :(John Adair)
- Enthusiasm
- confidence
- Toughness
- Integrity
- Warmth
- Humility
leaders requires these above mention qualities so that they can communicate properly with other people to get things done. They can do that if they believe in themselves with tenacious and demanding high standards. That brings honesty out of leader which inspires people to trust, on which leader can develop personal relationships. That will lead to willingness of leader to listen to the feedback from other people.
Noted that leadership qualities vary in different situation, effective leaders have above mention generic characteristics which good leaders are likely to have.
Impact of leadership on organisation
Intelligent organisation have to be run by persuasion and consent. Heroic leaders of past “knew all, could do all and could solve every problem”. Post-heroic leaders “asks how every problem can be solved in a way that develops other people’s capacity to handle it”(Charles Handy).
after reading different views of different authors shows there is no ideal leadership style. every thing depends on the factors affecting the situation relative to type of organisation. Three aspects will affect leadership style directly which was discussed above by Mr john Adair the task needs”nature of the task” , group needs”characteristics of the group”, individual needs”personality of the leader”. Different combination of leadership styles will be required for different situation for example in emergency or crisis situation (autocratic, controlling and transactional) approach may be better where leader will have power, with well structured task and formal backing by people or organisation. In less structured situation where leader is lenient toward maintaining good relationships will adopt a style consist of following qualities(Democratic, Enablers, transformational) to obtain good result.
Driver of leadership in organisation
since 1980 increased emphasis on leaders rather then managers. (Watson 1983) presented well known organisational structure framework, based on management consultancy, known as the Seven S’s : where managers tend to rely on first three
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1. Strategy
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2. Structure
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3. System
Leaders deals with:
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4. Style
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5. Staff
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6. Skills
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7. Shared goals
This was further detailed by Kotter (1982) where he mentioned management as predominantly activity based, and leadership dealing with people rather then things.
Research and understanding shows that management deals with “planning and budgeting” where management set targets,allocate resources , establish procedures for reaching targets. After that management will deal with “organising and staffing” where organisation structure is set; recruiting right people with clear incentives. Work needs to be done step by step smoothly which requires “Controlling and Problem-solving” where results are monitored and compared with the actual plan then problems are identified with working solutions.
Leadership deals with “Creating sense of direction” creating future vision. “communicating the vision” vision must be realised and leader must work to give it credibility.”energising, inspiring and motivating” these are pure leaders trades a leader must be seen to do.