Personal Leadership Philosophy

 Personal Leadership Philosophy

Leadership is a very common and popular theme of contemporary discussions and researches. However, there is still no certain definition of this concept. Scientists specify different leadership styles and try to find the traits that are common to the successful leaders to guess the principal scheme of effective influence on others but all they have provided are only general characteristics in gogetessays

The reason for the complication of the leadership definition and description lies in the variety of its styles. There are no at least two similar leaders in the world since there is no leader who acts according to former prescribed order and, at the same time, demonstrates great results. Everyone who applies effective leadership mechanism is flexible and creative; furthermore, he/she tends to use analytical thinking. Such leader does not follow certain style or strategy but mixes many of them in accordance to the situation. What is more, he/she does it unconsciously very often. One must admit that leadership is more practical than theoretical knowledge, and its task is to allow a person to adapt to the situations, solve problems, achieve aims, and take atypical decisions.

Leadership and Leaders

Leadership itself is the art of influencing others and directing them to common goals achievement. It is incorrect to confuse the mission of a leader with the mission of a director or boss. Definitely, the same person can be a boss and a leader simultaneously but someone who holds the highest position is not always a real leader. The main difference between these two notions lies in the recognition and devotion of a team. Each supervisor has financial and governing influence on his/her employees. Their work positions and wage size depend on him/her but the fact that the employees subordinate to a supervisor does not mean that they are ready to follow their ruler under any circumstances. The leader is not the one who is just assigned to rule a group or team but the one whom its members choose and honor. Under effective leadership, the employees are ready to survive hard times of a company. Higher wages or better working conditions of the competitors will not seduce them to change their workplace.

Successful leadership is a phenomenon, which is easier to describe than to implement. People can easily identify a leader in a person when he/she has the talent to inspire, create friendly atmosphere, effectively organize group work, take quick decisions, and set an example for his/her subordinates. However, it is rather hard to implement the leadership theory on practice since besides strategy, many personal traits matter. For this reason, there are the adherents of inbred superiority of leadership who assert that people can only be born the real leaders. Maybe, they are quite right, and it is hard for someone introverted, shy, and unsociable to become a president or create his/her own brand but it is obvious that self-development and right direction can improve the ability to organize and effectively direct the work of other people.

An effective leader should be intelligent, hard-working, passionate, and open-minded. This person should be curious about his/her sphere of interest and the whole world in general to gain new results and search uncommon decisions. Communicational and listening skills of an effective leader should be highly developed. These people must be full of energy, inspiration, and motivation and share them with their employees every day. An effective leader is the source of aspiration for his/her group. Thus, he/she should be confident and knowledgeable about what he/she is doing since a real leader has no right to show despair, tiredness or weakness to the team.

Inappropriate leaders are more power than team-oriented. Income matters more than value to them. They work to fulfil their self-ambitions. The results these leaders get are regarded as their personal achievements, not the achievements of a team. However, the faults of the leadership mechanism are often considered the consequences of poor teamwork. The egotism and narcissism, which often follow the ruling power, sometimes make the leaders blind to see new approaches and fresh ideas of their team members. The subordinates are nothing more than the executors of the tasks for bad leaders. Due to greed, absence of pity, and lack of sympathy to others, which such leaders often possess, one may clearly see their antisocial behavior, which often leads to ineffective management.

Personal Models of Leadership

As it was mentioned previously, leadership depends on personal features and moral values. Being a person who loves life and people around, I would like to demonstrate sympathy, empathy, and care about those who go in one direction with me. I am aware of the fact that sometimes, it would be hard to keep my ethics especially in critical and risky situations but I would try to do everything to commit to excellence, treat my group members as meaningful and precious stimulators of ideas, create harmonic atmosphere at the workplace, and consider the subordinates’ needs and problems.

Taking into consideration my worldview, authentic-like leadership model is the most appropriate for me. According to it, the uniqueness of every worker is appreciated. A group should be regarded as a big family, which strives to solve problems together. The employees develop strategies together with their leader. Uniqueness, fairness, respect, truth, and harmonic interrelations lie in the foundation of this leadership model. This approach will allow everyone in the group to feel more optimistic and brave.

The second model of leadership will fortify the first. It is the servant leadership model, which prefers serving the group needs to caring about own profit and ambitions. The proposed approach eliminates selfishness and egocentricity of a leader. It requires treating everyone equally and caring about privileged and less privileged workers with the same attention. The employees’ positions or ranks do not matter in this case. Everyone should be listened to with empathy and awareness of this/her worries and troubles. While doing business spiritual, a true leader should look at the profit-making goals through the prism of group will and growth.

The third model of leadership may help me in critical and risky situations. It bases on the adaptive leadership style. This model may be the hardest to implement on practice since it requires many individual traits of the character. They are courage, low stress disposition, the quickness of thoughts, and the ability to see the perspective. However, positive group atmosphere and support should help a leader to gain enough confidence, have clear vision, and perform as well as he/she can.

The mixture of the above-mentioned models of leadership should assist in getting recognized and respected team disposition. Such kind of management prevents a leader from demonstrating improper and/or unethical behavior. I plan to apply my leadership competencies learnt within the course not only in my further workplace but also in personal and social life. They are equally useful in non-profit volunteering and business branches. The most important thing is to find the sphere, which my personal features of character and inclination suit the best.

Effective leadership includes not only intelligence, flexibility, and well work organization. It requires inner energy and passion from a leader. He/she should inspire, unite, and raise the productivity of the group members. Strong moral values, honesty, adherence to ethics, and inner harmony are the traits, which distinguish effective leaders from the average ones.