The 2 Most Important Keys to Effective Leadership

According to a study by the Hay Group, a global management consultancy, there are 75 key components of employee satisfaction (Lamb, McKee, 2004). They found that:

• Trust and confidence in top leadership was the single most reliable predictor of employee satisfaction in an organization.


• Effective communication by leadership in three critical areas was the key to winning organizational trust and confidence:
  
  
  
  1. Helping employees understand the company's overall business strategy.
  
  
  2. Helping employees understand how they contribute to achieving key business objectives.
  
  
  3. Sharing information with employees on both how the company is doing and how an employee's own division is doing — relative to strategic business objectives.
  
  
  
  

The Ability to Lead with Integrity

Leadership is about character, integrity and courage more than being the smartest, strongest or the best at something. The foundation of a leader is integrity and must be displayed. The dictionary states integrity as; soundness of moral character; honesty. Simply put integrity means true to your word, owning up to your mistakes, not making excuses and taking responsibility for your actions. Courage is doing the right thing, for the right reasons even when no one is around. The ability to act is truly courage, action is how you are courageous to go against all the odds when you know something is right.

Do what you say. The saying, lead by example, are the actions of a leader. Think of someone you have personally known who you thought was a good leader, but it turned out they were not. They were saying all the right things and you probably believed them, but their actions did not reflect what they were saying. These are the actions of a leader who have their own agendas and do not possess the courage to do what is right for their people.

Leaders never give up on something, once they have chosen their dream. Many leaders have failed countless times, that is how they have learned. If you try to avoid failure, you will also be avoiding action. The ability to persevere and never give up is how you become a leader.

Integrity, lead by example and perseverance these are the qualities of a great leader. The greatest leaders are also compassionate towards others, but are not easily influenced. I will now leave you with a quote that shows the power that a single leader can produce. “I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion”… Alexander the great.

Source successfuleducation.com

A Great Leader Guides!

A leader is a person who guides others toward a common goal, showing the way by example, and creating an environment in which other team members feel actively involved in the entire process. A leader is not the boss of the team but, instead, the person that is committed to carrying out the mission of the Venture. Below are some qualities a strong leader may possess.

Qualities of a Leader

Good Listener:

Your teammates may have a great way to improve your idea. By keeping your mind open to other ideas, you can come up with new ways to accomplish your goals. It is your job to make sure that everyone in the group is being heard. Listen to their ideas and accept their constructive criticisms.

Focused:

Constantly remind yourself and the group of your Venture’s goals and mission. If you stay on track and keep others on track, the team will stay motivated and be more productive. As leader of the group, it is important that you schedule time to meet with your Venture Team to establish and check-in about the goals you hope to achieve.

Organized:

A leader can set the tone for the team. A leader who is organized helps motivate team members to be organized as well.

Available:

As a leader, you’re responsible for a lot and you’re probably going to be very busy at times. However, you still need to find time to talk with your team. A good way to do this is to set frequent group meetings, so that no question or concern goes too long without attention.

Include others:

A leader should not do all the work. Doing everything yourself is a poor use of time and prevents your Venture from growing. Instead, a leader should work with his/her teammates and learn how to delegate responsibility while being mindful of everyone’s interests, goals, and strengths.

Decisive:

Although an important part of being a leader involves listening to the people around you, remember that you are not always going to be able to reach a compromise. When this happens, don’t be afraid to make the final decision, even if some team members disagree with you.

Confident:

This could be the most important characteristic of a leader. If you don’t believe in yourself and the success of your Venture, no one else will. Show others that you are dedicated, intelligent, and proud of what you are doing.

Define Your Leadership Style

Leadership has a formal aspect (as in most political or business leadership) or an informal one (as in most friendships). Speaking of “leadership” (the abstract term) rather than of “leading” (the action) usually it implies that the entities doing the leading have some “leadership skills” or competencies.

Types of leadership styles

The bureaucratic leader (Weber, 1905) is very structured and follows the procedures as they have been established. This type of leadership has no space to explore new ways to solve problems and is usually slow paced to ensure adherence to the ladders stated by the company. Leaders ensure that all the steps have been followed prior to sending it to the next level of authority. Universities, hospitals, banks and government usually require this type of leader in their organizations to ensure quality, increase security and decrease corruption. Leaders that try to speed up the process will experience frustration and anxiety.

The charismatic leader (Weber, 1905) leads by infusing energy and eagerness into their team members. This type of leader has to be committed to the organization for the long run. If the success of the division or project is attributed to the leader and not the team, charismatic leaders may become a risk for the company by deciding to resign for advanced opportunities. It takes the company time and hard work to gain the employees’ confidence back with other type of leadership after they have committed themselves to the magnetism of a charismatic leader.

The autocratic leader (Lewin, Lippitt, & White, 1939) is given the power to make decisions alone, having total authority. This leadership style is good for employees that need close supervision to perform certain tasks. Creative employees and team players resent this type of leadership, since they are unable to enhance processes or decision making, resulting in job dissatisfaction.

The democratic leader (Lewin, Lippitt, & White, 1939)listens to the team’s ideas and studies them, but will make the final decision. Team players contribute to the final decision thus increasing employee satisfaction and ownership, feeling their input was considered when the final decision was taken. When changes arises, this type of leadership helps the team assimilate the changes better and more rapidly than other styles, knowing they were consulted and contributed to the decision making process, minimizing resistance and intolerance. A shortcoming of this leadership style is that it has difficulty when decisions are needed in a short period of time or at the moment.

The laissez-faire (”let do”) leader (Lewin, Lippitt, & White, 1939) gives no continuous feedback or supervision because the employees are highly experienced and need little supervision to obtain the expected outcome. On the other hand, this type of style is also associated with leaders that don’t lead at all, failing in supervising team members, resulting in lack of control and higher costs, bad service or failure to meet deadlines.

The people-oriented leader (Fiedler, 1967) is the one that, in order to comply with effectiveness and efficiency, supports, trains and develops his personnel, increasing job satisfaction and genuine interest to do a good job.

The task-oriented leader (Fiedler, 1967) focus on the job, and concentrate on the specific tasks assigned to each employee to reach goal accomplishment. This leadership style suffers the same motivation issues as autocratic leadership, showing no involvement in the teams needs. It requires close supervision and control to achieve expected results. Another name for this is deal maker (Rowley & Roevens, 1999)[4] and is linked to a first phase in managing Change, enhance, according to the Organize with Chaos approach.

The servant leader (Greenleaf, 1977) facilitates goal accomplishment by giving its team members what they need in order to be productive. This leader is an instrument employees use to reach the goal rather than an commanding voice that moves to change. This leadership style, in a manner similar to democratic leadership, tends to achieve the results in a slower time frame than other styles, although employee engagement is higher.

The transaction leader (Burns, 1978)  is given power to perform certain tasks and reward or punish for the team’s performance. It gives the opportunity to the manager to lead the group and the group agrees to follow his lead to accomplish a predetermined goal in exchange for something else. Power is given to the leader to evaluate, correct and train subordinates when productivity is not up to the desired level and reward effectiveness when expected outcome is reached.

The transformation leader (Burns, 1978) motivates its team to be effective and efficient. Communication is the base for goal achievement focusing the group in the final desired outcome or goal attainment. This leader is highly visible and uses chain of command to get the job done. Transformational leaders focus on the big picture, needing to be surrounded by people who take care of the details. The leader is always looking for ideas that move the organization to reach the company’s vision.

The environment leader ( Carmazzi, 2005) is the one who nurtures group or organisational environment to affect the emotional and psychological perception of an individual’s place in that group or organisation. An understanding and application of group psychology and dynamics is essential for this style to be effective. The leader uses organisational culture to inspire individuals and develop leaders at all levels. This leadership style relies on creating an education matrix where groups interactively learn the fundamental psychology of group dynamics and culture from each other. The leader uses this psychology, and complementary language, to influence direction through the members of the inspired group to do what is required for the benefit of all.

From en.wikipedia.org

Leadership Skills and Leadership Qualities

Leadership qualities matter in business, in education. Yet the doctoral student can't find information on leadership skills. If the discipline isn't leadership she has to cry for help: What're leadership qualities?! Others would like to know too what are the personal qualities of leadership! Business leadership is important. Educational leadership is in demand. But, what are leadership skills, qualities?

Reason for Leadership

Interest they have in business or educational leadership. Perhaps also leadership qualities. Knowledge of what is leadership, not. If they see a worker a few times resting who routinely unloads, sorts, stacks, rests, repeats, he is lazy. That's not good leadership! If leadership qualities or skills are lacking it causes annoyance, loss of production.

Need for Leadership

Leadership in education or business are acquirable skills.

In Britain there is confusion on what is leadership. The Department of Employment has publications on how to train, e.g., supervisors. Yet even supervision are known to have been deemed by the Training & Enterprise Councils to be an inherent quality, by the Employment Tribunals with members from the Trades Union Congress and the Confederation of British Industry not an acquirable skill. In the USA the position is not dissimilar.

Leadership qualities aren’t the same as leadership skills.

There are exceptional 'born leaders', extraordinary circumstances calling for inherent leadership qualities for exceptional motivation with no apparent incentives. But routine administration, business leadership or educational leadership demand only professional acquirable skills.

Leadership qualities are different than leadership skills.

Popularity in Leadership

Approaches to administrative leadership differ. Business leadership strategies vary. Educational leadership policies change. So do leadership skills. The value of leadership qualities never change.

Leadership is about people. Good leadership is popularity based. A French emperor called his soldiers his children, after a defeat again raised volunteer armies. A popular Scottish preacher got nominated for the US senate.

Leadership qualities are inherent. But leadership skills often suffice. Both involve popularly interesting people.

Popularity aids leadership qualities. It helps leadership skills. So in business or educational leadership.

What is Leadership?

Charisma alone it isn't. Nor is it love, care, perseverance that enables popularity in successful leadership. It is also an interest in understanding the human nature, knowing what motivates. That is the basis of leadership.

A car plant boss praises the night shift's work, the day shift competes for equal pride, production increases.

A congressional medal, the offer to be Education Secretary, a biographical movie for a Chicago school teacher who enabled exam. success for eleven pupils was because she could get from them what an education authorities' educational leadership skills couldn't.

Personal Qualities of Leadership

Depending on approaches, business and educational leadership classifications vary. Basically all leadership are of two kinds: leadership and exceptional leadership.

The former is leaderships skills; acquired, ordinarily, routinely at work: e.g., leadership in education, business.

The latter is based on inherent leadership qualities. It enables exceptional motivation with incentives hardly perceptible in extreme inappetence. It is the most rare extraordinary leadership, enhanced by the most exceptional leader's charisma, communication ability, wit, trustworthiness, with much philosophical, sociological, psychological insight, high logical reasoning ability, the vision, heroic courage, love, care, dedication, passion of rational sensible idealism, sacrifice in time, effort. This 'moves mountains'; be it leadership in education, culture, religion, politics, business, it reforms: socially and historically visibly, lastingly, memorably changes established culture, life styles, society.

Exceptional leadership, business or educational or other -in one field or more, of historical noteworthiness demands personal qualities, for it begins with popularity that is not coerced but is by virtue of, irrespective of wealth or position, at personal level earned and deserved trust and faith in the genuineness, sincerity of one's intentions -honesty in intention.

Professional Leadership

What is routinely at work is skills based leadership. Mostly it is leadership in education or in business, of the kind that acquirable skills are adequate for. It does not demand any exceptional leadership qualities. Acquirable are interested behavior and competence. Proportionately to one's degree of interest, basic leadership skills often suffice to function as a professional leader, to lead in one's field.

On professional leadership many have written. There are commonly agreed basic modern leadership principles generally adequate in any field of average competence.

Effective Leadership

Leaders with leadership qualities or skills know this: The average employee does like to be so directed as presumes that he generally wishes to avoid responsibility with relatively little or no ambition and dislikes work except to the extent essential for survival with basic security. People have an inherent need in an adult way to exercise their understanding, capacities, skills motivated by incentives also non-economic and culturally varying. This appreciation is a must for effective leadership.

Leadership Values

Trustworthiness is one of the personal qualities of leadership that can never be imitated in professional leadership for truly great achievement. But the skilful appearance of trustworthiness succeeds. Usually the only task of professional leadership is obtaining the co-operation of colleagues and employees.

This is best done, by making the organization's objects or visions pursued or desired of personal significance to people. That must be based on their values and expectations to generate their energy and enthusiasm. Good leadership on that basis can prepare people for the various controllable and uncontrollable changes, appreciating that leadership attitudes matter above all and must be 'trust' based... In the 1990s' England an industrial strike over pay continued after Railtrak agreed: the workers had discovered that the government had secretly sought to influence the negotiations.

Leadership Strategies

Trust is the most useful of leadership values. Good leaders' people feel valued. Job satisfaction enhances performance and productivity and job satisfaction includes feeling valued. This leadership strategy avoids dissatisfaction, increases job satisfaction. Co-operation is based on others feeling valued enough to be trusted.

Information works at two levels: it shows trust and contributes to the leader's objective others' valid views.

The value of others valid views which free flow of information (or the successful [but risky] appearance of it) enables is not overlooked in good leadership. In, e.g., educational leadership staff's familiarity with consumer culture, in business leadership workers' consumer choices reduce the risk of missing the wood for the trees.

In leadership strategies learning from experience by trial & error is unaffordable in the short term. The complexities of long term results necessitate cultured thought.

Leadership Qualities

In leadership it is generally agreed that personal leadership qualities mater. Success in leadership depends also on the degree of the knowledge, understanding and appreciation of the needs and the expectations of those who are to be led, and of how the group is structured -especially as to the relevant situation immediately confronting them in their environment.

What exactly are the personal qualities of exceptional leaders, in leadership of historical noteworthiness, have not been able the psychologists to ascertain in terms of specific character or personality traits. But professional leadership also is people based and it often suffices to 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.'

Leadership Skills

Personal qualities of leadership enhance professional skills. But in no field are called for exceptional personal leadership qualities or even professional skills routinely. In ordinary, e.g., business or educational leadership to envision and enable, to empower and energise routinely basic leadership skills suffice. These comprise simply of the knowledge of, and an honest intention to also cater for, the expectations of those to be lead, any problems faced in terms of their means, abilities, social influences.

In ordinary routine leadership, subject to average competence in one's field, nothing is basically essential other than this leadership appreciation and reasonable honesty -i.e., simply treating people as people.