A leader has been defined as a person who has authority to influence the social behavior of other people with an aim of accomplishing common tasks or established targets.
A good leader is one who recognizes the importance and value of other people in the organization, is ready to share information with others, has characters that are unquestioned within the organization, uses his or her good traits for the better of others, is well skilled and competent, visionary, and is ever accessible, accountable, and approachable.
As far as creating and communicating organization vision is concerned, a leader has a very important role to play. In creating the vision, the leader should influence others to come up with possible ways that will achieve the primary goals of the organization.
This will help the organization to come up with an inspiring practical vision that has shared values. In communicating the vision, the leader should lead by example in pursuing the change implied in the vision, demonstrate high confidence in the vision and encourage a down up approach to decision making in the organization.
Shared values are values practiced in an organization that engenders trust in the organization and encourages a good interpersonal relationship. It is a unique identity that brings out a clear difference between one organization and another. These values should incorporate both individual and corporate objectives.
In communicating organization vision, the leader should lead the changes implied in the vision but not managing the changes. A leader should have well thought out strategies that will lead the organization to practical breakthrough, be in position to manage the organization moods, and always inform people on the progress.
To achieve all these attributes, the leader should lead by example. Leading by example is the only approach that leaders use to influence other people. Using this approach will enable the leader to practically demonstrate confidence in the vision. The confidence in the leader will convince other people to have trust in the communicated vision.
To give a good illustration where leadership principle has both worked well and poorly, the author analyzed two Apple Inc. CEOs namely Steve Jobs and Timothy Cook. Under the leadership of Steve Jobs, Apple Inc. recorded good performance, which was reflected in the rapid growth of Apple franchise.
Until his death, the author learned from his profile that it is important for a leader to be charismatic, flexible and posses a good sense of direction. These traits enabled him to lead the company by example and thus through his leadership, the company came up with different mobile phone models such as Xerox PARC and Apple Lisa.
On the other hand, Timothy Cook, the current CEO who replaced Jobs, has been branded more of a manager than a leader. Having analyzed his recent speeches, the author learned that he rarely embraced the shared values as was the case with his predecessor.
This has contributed to most of the current employees losing confidence in his leadership style hence reduced morale. No wonder the company has performed poorly during the first few years of his leadership. In fact, ‘Cook’ factor is one of the challenges facing the company.
Empowerment, Trust and Ethical Leadership
Empowerment is an act of building up the capacity of an individual or a group to make sustainable decisions or choices and to transform the choice or decision into desired outcomes. A key issue to empowerment is the action that builds either individual or group assets, and building up the efficiency of the institution or organization’s context that monitors the utilization of the asset.
On the other hand, trust is having confidence or reliance in the strength, integrity, ability, or surerity that through the chosen means of action, the targeted results will be achieved efficiently and effectively.
Ethical leadership refers to a leadership that respects an organization’s appropriate anddesirable morals and values subject to what the society expects from it. In a broader approach, ethics dictate the purity and intentions of an individual. It guides leaders in deteriming what is good or bad in a given scenario.
Ethical leadership encourages fainess in treatment and equality within an organization. In so doing, the organization wins employees trust and empowers them to exploit their talents and expertise in their workplaces. Although leaders expect positive impacts from empowering and trusting their employees, there are several negative impacts that they are exposed to.
Other than encouragingcreativity, job satisfaction, job loyalty and rational or idealized decision making, empowering employees has several negative impacts.
These includes the increased arrogance attributed to a rise in confidence, serious security risks due to trust, lack of experience, and promotion of poor interpersonal relationship amongst the work force. To explore more, below are candid illustrations of both negative and positive impacts of empowering and trusting employees.
Several researchers have conducted studies on employee empowerment in Multinational Companies (MNC). In these studies, they have pointed out that most companies, if not all, have come to recognize that employee empowerment and trust remains paramount. This is because most organizations view it as a very important predictor to good performance.
They go ahead to reveal that the sample companies they studied had realized several benefits from employee empowerment. These include quick decision making, employee confidence, employee loyalty, faster attainment of goals.
On the other hand, empowering and trusting their employees has led to several negative impacts. These include unethical behaviors such as theft, security breaches, and underperformance by some employees.
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