Introduction
Leadership as a factor of production plays a vital role in management, supervision, co-ordination, and execution of responsibilities within organizations and institution. In the individual perspective, everyone harbors imaginary and dormant leadership skill often relevant in personal decision-making and actions undertaken.
However, in a large entity composed of different individuals, it takes gradual development of skills, decision-making capabilities, and uttermost tolerance to develop great leadership structure necessary for success. In a black box perspective, leadership styles, capabilities, and success depend on continuous development, correction, and appreciation of different styles in management and co-ordination of both human and capital resources.
Thesis Statement
As an art, leadership undergoes continual improvement, evolution, changes in form, and embraces creativity and innovativeness. From a scientific perspective, leadership depends upon dynamic techniques and principles that undergo continuous changes and improvements.
In leadership and management studies, innovation and creativity stand out as the leading qualities among successful leaders. This implies that in order to develop a great culture of leadership, an individual must embrace principles and techniques of dynamism cognizant with the dynamic changes within the areas of jurisdiction. For this reason, it becomes evident that leadership remains a dynamic concept that embraces evolution and continuous changes.
This paper explores the argument that leadership goes further than innate human characters. Similarly, the paper aims to ascertain the dynamism in the culture of leadership based on the continuous training and improvement of strategies to improve performance.
The best leaders are continuous learners
Currently, the world remains in a constant state of change and dynamism. For this reason, leadership positions require development of leadership learning tendencies as Hackman (23) describes in his analysis of the role of learning, innovation, and creativity on leadership. Based on functional leadership theory, leaders fulfill their roles in teamwork through systematic processes under continuous changes.
In order to keep up with this dynamism, continuous learning and innovation become vital. Contrary to the relatively static innate characters, leadership through learning ensures proper structuring and evaluation of an organization’s goals and objectives based on the dynamic resource capabilities.
Likewise, through a process of learning from experience and trial systems, leaders develop concrete plans necessary for the realization of the set goals and objectives (Kouzes and Posner 13). Since plans remain based on probability of success, failure chances exist. This implies that leaders must learn from failures accrued from previous plans. Leaders drawing inspiration from innate characters believe in the self-conviction thus remain relatively conservative with accepting mistakes from previous plans.
In such a circumstance, the chances of success remain bleak given the dynamism that leadership needs in the current world. After creation of organization goals and development of achievement strategies, leaders require adequate skills in management of resources necessary for the execution of the plans in place. Human resource management becomes crucial for the school of thought that believes in innate leadership.
Selection of an execution team requires an in depth understanding of human resource skills, capabilities, and experience among the individual employees. Different management and leadership scholars believe in different leadership theories despite uniform belief in the importance of teamwork as well as training and development among workforce to ensure successful leadership.
Teamwork presents a variety of talent, skills, competencies, and abilities through which leaders learn and develop other employees and staff members. These take place through shared mental models, information and knowledge sharing, and creation of meta-cognition in teamwork. Such factors coupled with group cohesion and collective efficiency help in employee training and development for future leadership roles.
Equally, engagement in teamwork gives leaders and the subordinates the opportunity to learn new techniques in leadership, thus improving chances of success (Kouzes and Posner 15). All these factors indicate improvements in performance. In essence, leadership styles take place through a process of information sharing, experience, and engagement of all employees in the execution of their specific responsibilities. Clearly, confining leadership skills to innate characters becomes invalid.
Leadership depends on context
Leadership requires vital skills in situational analysis to come up with viable solutions to the different contexts at the workplace. For example, in an organization, a managing director supervises the roles employees play in all the departments. The finance, human resource, marketing, and other departments have different problems. Therefore, vital characters are needed to develop plans to execute an organization’s strategies (Antonakis 114).
For the managing director to understand all the factors important for the development of interdepartmental goals within an organization, adequate understanding of each of the concepts in every department becomes vital. Innate abilities never cover all the factors and departments in organizational structures.
This implies that understanding the different departmental needs takes place through a series of engagement and sharing of experience between the departmental heads and the managing director to ensure development of sustainable goals and objectives. The existence of difference facets in leadership acts an evidence for the need for continuous learning, training, and experience sharing in leadership. Such process improves strategies in leadership, creating high chances for organization success (Hareli and Rafaeli 45).
Emotional intelligence based on the different working environment plays a vital role on ensuring leadership success. With the growing demands for better leadership styles amid dynamism in market competitions and business demands, evidence indicates that for successful implementation of an organization’s plan, leaders require a wide range of capabilities, which are absent among the innate leaders (Kouzes and Posner 16).
Emotional intelligence sets out clear combination of decision-making skills necessary for development of strategies or implementation within the different organizational contexts. Strategies that flexible leadership styles put in place for implementation depend on the organizational contexts and situations. For example, flexible leadership remains in charge during team formation in a unit responsibility, but takes the coaching role when the unit becomes self-sustaining.
Even though this style of leadership indicates some form of leadership withdrawal during the good times for a unit, it provides an avenue for successful employee development and retention (Hareli and Rafaeli 55). Organization development and success require inevitable leadership abilities ready to stay up to speed with the emerging changes with business and organization needs.
Organizations, therefore, require leaders with abilities to visualize the future based on the existing conditions and motivate employees towards the projected goals and aspirations of an organization. Leadership structures that motivate and inspire employees create an ample environment for employees’ adaptation to changes and demands of different contexts in resources use and implementation plans.
This implies that static leadership, as defined in the trait theory, lacks the abilities to conform to the dynamic contexts that require quick and varied decision-making skills (Hareli and Rafaeli 57). The dynamism in organizational contexts demands continuous learning process under which leaders develop skills and expertise necessary for combating problems associated with the different organization contexts.
Science in teaching leadership development
Successful leadership depends on scientific techniques and principles. In order to develop a sustainable base for successful leadership, individuals require an in depth understanding of the underlying techniques and principles that form leadership (Northouse 26). Task-focused leadership holds three different types of leadership styles based on the roles and responsibilities of individuals in an organization.
Transactional leadership depends on the ability of the leaders and the subordinate to build dyadic exchanges within which leaders reward subordinate for exceptional services (Antonakis 267). In structural leadership, leaders give commands and directions to the subordinates as they co-ordinate the execution of roles and responsibilities. The leaders develop plans and objectives with clear indication on the roles and responsibilities of the subordinates based on hierarchical structures (Farlow 34).
In the task-focused leadership, emphasis on the material and personnel management stands out as the underlying technique and principle. In order to understand this, leaders require continuous training and retraining. Transformational leadership, empowerment, consideration, and motivation fall in the person-focused school of thought in leadership (Northouse 28).
Transformational leaders inspire and influence subordinates through vision and high performance goals. Such leaders encourage their subordinates to take up the goals and objectives, hence ensuring improved performance. Empowerment, according to Farlow (37), emphasizes the development of leadership and management skills and abilities among subordinates.
Leaders engaged in the principle of empowerment improve the leadership capabilities of the subordinates through continuous training and sharing of experience. Consideration here focuses on the ability of leaders to develop a long-lasting trust with their subordinates, thus improving chances of experience sharing and open relationships necessary for skill development.
Motivation emphasizes promotion and recognition of individual efforts among the subordinates. In order to understand these techniques and principles in leadership, training, development, continuous improvement, and expertise sharing remains compulsory.
Counter-argument – Leadership is innate
Leaders are born with unique characters and traits that inspire subordinates explore exceptional goals. According to Great Man and Trait theories of leadership, leadership qualities and abilities are inherent. Trait theory argues that leadership remains privy to people with specific innate characteristics such as charisma, drive for power and success, and extrovert behaviors (Salo 20).
These theories use leaders in the previous world, without proper education and experience in leadership positions, such as Italy’s father of Fascism, Benito Mussolini, Aristotle, and Prince William of England as examples of personalities with extreme leadership traits despite inadequate expertise, skill sharing, and peer experience sharing (Bligh 139). As Salo (33) argues, understanding characters of a leader requires an in depth analysis of the innate traits within the leaders.
Innate characteristics such as high energy level, physical stamina, and high stress tolerance level enable effective leaders execute their roles in the dynamic and chaotic management and leadership responsibilities. Since leadership demand for high investment in physical energy and undeterred level of emotional resilience, it follows that leadership capabilities depend on innate human characters.
Leadership requires high self-esteem and great self-confidence to create vision and inspire sub-ordinates (Bligh 142). According to (Okum 29), self-esteem and self-confidence depend on the personality traits often considered innate. Taking into account the inherent nature of personality traits, it follows that a leader with innate self-esteem and self-confidence makes effective management strategies. This implies that leadership is actually innate.
Conclusion
Leadership success depends on the ability of an individual to grow in his/her ability to inspire growth in others. Based on the techniques and principles in leadership, it is vital to note that organizational success depends on the ability of leaders to inspire and enable subordinates to execute their roles and responsibilities.
Successful leadership boasts of a motivated subordinate structures in which each individual strive for success. Individual success helps an organization achieve its goals and objectives. Since individuals go through continuous training, skill improvement, and knowledge sharing programs to improve productivity, if follows that leadership relies on adequate training and retraining, expertise development, and continuous knowledge sharing for its effectiveness.
Works Cited
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Hackman, James. Leading teams: Setting the stage for great performances. Boston: HBS Press, 2002. Print.
Hareli, Shlomo, and Anat Rafaeli. “Emotion Cycles: On the Social Influence of Emotion in Organizations.” Research in Organizational Behavior 28.7 (2008): 35-59. Print.
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Okum, Paul. Leadership DNA: Why the Accepted Premise That Anyone Can Be a Leader Is Utterly False and the Main Cause of Poor Leadership in America. Bloomington, IN: IUniverse, 2012. Print.
Salo, Mikael. The Chosen One: Characteristics of the Small Group Leader : Research Report. Helsinki: Finnish National Defence U, 2008. Print.