What is Leadership?
Abstract
Leaders are central in inspiring people and leading them, hence the entire concept of leadership is an important phenomenon in changing the status quo. Given that leadership involves the process of influencing people for a common objective, it’s important to know what constitutes an effective leader with a focus on the key qualities. This paper explored the definition of leadership, what constitutes effective leadership with some examples drawn from personal experiences and general examples from Canada. Part of the paper was reflective to determine the leadership style I possess and what to do in order to be an effective management leader.
Leadership
Leadership according to Silva (2016) is defined as the interactive process of influence where people decide to recognize a leader from their midst for common goals to be achieved. The entire aspect of leadership revolves around a process that has to lead to results. The interactive process between the leader and the followers is what makes the entire aspect of influence work well.
Leadership involves having that inner ability to lead people. It can either be an inborn capacity or one can alternatively choose to learn. It’s an acquired skill to have at the same time it involves the action the leader would uphold. Leaders have an effect on followers hence regarded as an interactive process. Followers would often listen to their leaders because they have entrusted them to achieve a common goal. There are many approaches to looking at what leadership is all about and Northouse (2019) summarizes leadership as a trait, an ability, a skill, behavior, relationship, and an influence process.
Leadership as a trait is to means it can be born, that some of us if not all have that leadership complex in them. As an ability to mean the capacity to lead is there. One can wake up and learn how to be a leader given its natural capacity that can grow through work and practice. Leadership is a skill meaning it’s a competency that one knows how to do it. This can come from experience and it’s available to everyone. Leadership is behavior showing the actions of leaders both the task and process and an effective leader would combine both of the aspects. With a relationship, it illustrates leadership as the communication between the leader and the follower. Lastly is the influence process which is the interactive session. The leader influences the followers towards achieving a common goal.
Leadership in Canada has been well embraced in prominent businesses. For instance, TD Bank Financial usually talks about the importance of leadership. The company has a Build for the Future program which is attended by 30 senior members team and the agenda is usually on discussing aspects of strategy and leadership of the company. Both the president and the CEO Ed Clark have never missed a session showing the importance of the meeting. For the second meeting, the focus is usually on coaching and this helps the executives to gain most skills that the company values and be ready to be future leaders when an opportunity arises for a promotion for instance. There is also another program called Build for the Future Pipeline that is offered to those managers just below the executive level. The bank trusts the programs because they enable the employees to learn from their supervisors, who also learn from the superiors above them. The aspect the company goes by is just not waiting for born leaders to find this opportunity but for people to grow into them. A perfect example is Tim Hockey who is now the group head and the CEO of TD Canada Trust. His work just started as a teller part-time while he was in university and then transitioned into the senior roles of the company.
At RBC financial, leaders do not just pass the criteria by meeting financial goals, instead they are measured by how well they are able to cultivate the leadership qualities in their teams. The leaders have set standards they need to meet and their paycheque also depends on it. The company gives high regard to promoting leaders from its own talent pool, with the belief that the right training will promote the employees to the upper management positions.
At GE Canada, the company is 130 years old with leadership as the key to innovation. The leaders are well trained when it comes to understanding the value of people and making sure they are making progress. For the company, leadership is an integral part as it involves training the employees, mentoring them to grow and develop at their highest potential which in turn motivates employees to work to their full potential.
Effective Leadership
Effective leadership involves when the set of common goals have been achieved. This is achieved when the leader responds to a challenge by acting with courage, firmness, and skill and creates a change suitable for the common good. According to Turaga(2017), most organizations are looking for effective leaders rather than managers. Such organizations recognize the need to motivate, encourage, and even support team members, and hence the entire approach is not just centered on the task but also the people. An effective leader strategizes on the future of the organization and each day is taken up to solve a particular challenge. Effective leadership involves the leader creating a synergy whereby teams can work together in projects that could not have otherwise be met with only individual efforts. Effective leadership also involves clearly defined roles and relationships and how the roles are going to be accomplished.
Effective leadership furthermore is built on the leaders’ characteristics. This includes the values the leader upholds of trust, honesty, and integrity(Muteswa, 2016). The role involves empowerment to fellow work colleagues through motivation, innovation at the same time be knowledgeable of the various functions of the organization like finance, human resource, marketing, and operations. The most important characteristic of an effective leader is to lead by example as most people will follow. According to Fruetche(2019), effective leadership involves leaders initiating the change and relaying their goals to the team members to allow for an interactive discussion. It’s the leaders’ task to determine what motivates the individual followers as increased motivation often leads to productivity.
The Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau demonstrated effective leadership when he built a team of people to assist in finding real solutions to problems and did not once disagree with conflicting views. The leader in fact encouraged such conversations and open them up widely. His leadership was very clear in that once he stepped into office he made his leadership style clear for the people. This was a good quality of transparency that is admired as ineffective leadership. For the prime minister, leadership was to extend the opportunity to the people you serve and in turn, the result becomes creativity.
Ryan Reynolds is a great Canadian actor who has acted in multiple movies. His hometown is Vancouver and as a media personality, he demonstrated various roles and personalities in all the movies he was part of. For instance, in the movie 6 Underground, Ryan Reynolds is the leader of the crew that partake in faking their own deaths and righting wrongs. Reynolds specifically chose the six skilled people with the sole task of hunting down the dictator in the Middle East. The movie demonstrates Reynolds’s effective leadership in assigning roles to each of the operatives with a clear transparent form of action with a clear end goal. Reynolds further gives room for ideas later on in the film and the operatives all work together. Despite the movie involving some killings, Reynolds illustrates amicable leadership by being transparent with the team, trusting them, and above all working in unison for a common goal.
Pierre Trudeau, Justin’s father is regarded as one of the best leaders in the history of the country from 1968 to 1979 and 1980 to 1984 as the prime minister of Canada. Pierre was strategic as he had a long-term social vision. His good leadership stemmed from the fact that he was different. He had a vision for his people to all be equal under the law with no form of discrimination and he fought for it till his last breath. He demonstrated effective leadership by fighting for his people’s rights and upholding his values.
I have been an effective leader to date. I usually partake in being a leader during my volunteering activities outside school. Am not much of a delegator and I usually like rolling up my sleeves and getting my hands dirty as I work with the rest of my teammates. My responsibility is usually to ensure everyone is organized with their set of roles as I figure out the best way to liaise everything else to be smooth and running. During my previous volunteer activities, I managed to put up a fundraiser for the children’s home which had not been successful in the previous years. I liaised with my fellow members to help with the marketing of the fundraiser via their phones in order to support an important cause all of us were volunteering for in the first place. I demonstrated my leadership role by taking initiative as I had already seen the importance of the resources for the children. I have also been a leader in my class group discussions on the assigned topics given. For complex projects, I would divide the workload equally for every member to attempt than give everyone a chance to present their ideas. However, my weak spots were usually when it came to taking up the teams’ ideas and agreeing with them.
However, there is a certain time I was ineffective as a leader. The task was a class activity and it involved sitting in groups to have discussions. One time the group members were arguing on the answers and being the group leader, I was biased to the point that I considered the side that was agreeing with my point without listening to the other teams’ argument. Once the task was submitted for marking and came back with a very low mark, I was not accountable and I never took action to admit I was wrong. My worst part was leaving the members hanging without so much of an apology. My ineffective leadership could be seen in how I wanted everything to go according to my plan most of the time though not all the time. This resulted in a cost for the whole group and was really wrong of me as a leader.
In the future, I would need to be a critical thinker and be aware of the potential problems that are likely to happen. As asserted by Den(2016), a key factor to put into consideration is to always listen keenly to the team as feedback would especially be very important when it comes to project matters. It’s also important to note that learning does not end and in order to be an effective leader, I would need to constantly learn and challenge myself in order to know how to deal with changing patterns and how to address issues as well as learn from other people’s leadership styles and emulate them if possible. To increase my leadership effectiveness more in the future, I will need to be sustaining positive relationships with the team members as well as respecting the individual differences each one has.
Other small steps I would need to take in the future to improve my leadership effectiveness would involve learning how to lead by example that means being constantly involved in good practices with no bad behavior (Müller, Pintor and Wegge, 2018). Whenever there’s a conflict of some sort of obstacle in the future, I need to learn to always keep a positive attitude, remain calm then control the situation. It’s always good to learn also from other leaders and I believe this will especially help me with becoming more effective. This is in terms of learning from the mistakes of other leaders and ensuring not to repeat the same mistakes again.
To students starting grade 12, what I can say is that everyone can be a leader if they want to. It’s not born it can be learned. There is a greater form of responsibility one learns by being part of something. Becoming a leader helps you prioritize yourself, organize your time, and plan well. Plus, the feeling of actually leading is fulfilling especially when you have the passion to achieve a certain goal. Leadership can start as simple as standing up to bullies, taking responsibility for your actions when you have done something wrong. Knowledge is power and people will tend to follow people who are knowledgeable. Don’t stop reading and always start up with accomplishing little agendas before going to the big ones.
