The Role And The Function Of Leadership Management Essay

What makes a leader. What is leadership. What do leaders do. After 100 years of modern studies, these remain cogent questions. Many writers have offered either general or specific answers over the years, but the discussion continues unabated. People have not yet resolved these questions to the satisfaction of most, and the search for acceptable answers continues.

Understanding the role and the function of leadership is one of the most important intellectual tasks of this generation, and leading is one of the most needed skills. The reason is simple. Leaders play a major role in helping us shape our life. Leaders define business and its practice. They determine the character of society. They define our teams, groups and communities. They set and administer government policy. In all walks of life, leader’s behavior sets the course others follow and determines the measures used to account for group actions.

Success in the new millennium, as in the past, will depend on how well leaders understand their roles, the leadership process and their own values and vision as well as those of their groups. Their behavior sets the course others follow and determines the values and other measures used to account for group actions.

Understanding leadership is, like all of the important aspects of life, a thing of the mind more than of an objective reality. Traditionally, leadership has been thought of in terms of the heads, or chief officers of organizations, regardless of the tasks or functions they may perform. It is easy to think about leaders and leadership in terms of authority and headship and to talk about leadership as management.

Management, as a role for heads of organizations, involves control over others’ behaviors and actions. For most people a position of leadership centers around the management role, its tasks and techniques-its technology. It conjures up ideas like controlling interpersonal relations, making decisions, aligning individual member actions and perceptions with corporate goals, planning, budgeting and directing the effort of the several followers engaged in the work with us. The manager role involves insuring that group activity is timed, controlled and predictable.

The idea of business management is pervasive and powerful in society. It defines those human attributes which are thought appropriate to success in the formal corporation, like competition, ambition and financial astuteness. The Western myth of managerial man is one of the dominant myths of our age. The central feature of this concept is the idea of management. Since the early days of the twentieth century until today, management has been given prominence over other, some arguably more important, human activities related to emotional needs, wider family relationships and social or intellectual aspirations. For many people, management has become the metaphor of the twentieth and twenty first century, encompassing work, workers and work cultures.

In accordance with www.businessdictionary.com, a leader is “a person who holds a dominant or superior position within his or her field, and is able to exercise a high degree of control or influence over others”. Eight major traits that differentiate leaders from non-leaders are: responsibility, integrity, ability to make decisions, ability to deal with facts, vision of the big picture, optimism, resilience and excellence.

There are two types of leaders: transactional and transformational. Transactional leader “approaches followers with an eye to exchanging one thing for another”, while transformational “recognizes and exploits an existing need or demand of a potential follower and looks for potential motives in followers, seeks to satisfy higher needs, and engages the full person of the follower” (Burns, 1972)

In order to manage one-on-one communication effectively, a leader has to meet four basic criteria. They are: achievable, inspiring, measurable and shared. Since the result is probably the most important thing in any human activity, it is extremely important for a leader to be achievable. A good leader also has to be inspiring in order to make others achieve.

Some people are leaders because of their formal position in an organization or a group, whereas others are leaders because of the way other group members respond to them. These two common forms of leadership are called assigned leadership and emergent leadership. Leadership that is based on occupying a position in an organization is an assigned leadership. Emergent leadership, in its turn, is not assigned by position; rather, it emerges over a period through communication of a leader with his followers.

In our contemporary society in order to survive any business has to reshape itself to the needs of constantly changing world. It is not enough to just satisfy consumer’s needs and wants. In order to withstand severe market competition it has become important to follow consumers’ ever-changing requirements.

Leaders reshape their teams using two ways: episodic and continuous change methods. Each method is used depending on the scale of changes needed and type of the environment a person works in. Also, different exhibition of leadership is needed to perform such changes.

Continuous changes take place when a company or a team adapts to the external environment constantly and during a long period of time. Changes appear as endless modifications to working and production processes on micro levels. Working environment constantly evolves, trying to recognize, track and respond to changing market conditions, putting an emphasis on long-run adaptability. This, however, sometimes means organization’s or team’s inability to remain stable. Leader in this particular case plays a role of a sense maker who redirects changes, however does not play a role of a person who leads the changes in the company. Leadership is revealed through a success of the team in long-run.

Episodic changes, on the other hand, are occasional, infrequent and discontinuous changes that dramatically alter the way of doing business inside the company or the team. During a short-run period a group of people strives to adapt to the external environment, being inert and unable to do this using continuous adaptation. Changes take place on macro levels and are usually very distant and global. Leaders are considered as one of the five triggers to such changes. They provide a strong sense of purpose of the change, are passionate, inspire others, making people follow them, and actually make changes happen.

Principles of leadership excellence

A Focus on Quality

The leader’s job is to encourage and sustain high-quality products and service to all who have a stake in the group’s work. Excellence leadership incorporates ideas that energize and inspire followers to unified action to increase and maintain high-quality services and products. Leaders focus on high-quality performance in all aspects of work. They foster team approaches to task activity that delegate more discretion over the work to the team and to individuals. They set standards of conduct and performance that implement cultural values and behaviors. The leadership model includes encouraging the formation of traditions that foster and inculcate the core-value vision. Often it includes dramatizing the core-value vision in ways that explain and interpret it to organization members.

This virtual leadership environment assumes a culture of excellence. Culture includes experience, expectation for the future and values that condition behavior. Without general agreement on acceptable behavior and the values context within which we operate, corporation members are free to follow divergent paths. Coherent, cooperative action is impossible where at least implicit agreement in a common culture is missing. Creating and maintaining a culture conducive to attainment of personal and team excellence goals is, therefore, a hallmark of leadership excellence in any organization.

A Focus on Vision

The principal mechanism for implementing values and purposes the leader desires is the vision statement. A vision statement is a short, memorable motto or statement that encapsulates the core values of the organization. Creating the statement is a personal task done primarily by the leader. The excellent leader adopts a core-value vision that emphasizes quality improvement values.

The impact of vision setting is powerful. It pervades all else the excellent leader does. It is both part of the definition of the excellent leader and the mechanism for integrating context (culture) and technologies. It is the core idea binding the leader and the followers in a common purpose.

A Focus on Service

Also critical is the need for the leader to address questions of high-quality service in attaining corporate goals. In doing this, leaders act to prepare and then empower followers to be of service. This aspect of the service dimension is similar to the training and education programs managers and leaders have been doing routinely. Excellence leaders see value in helping followers broadly develop their capacity to be of service. They also emphasize high-quality, excellent service levels.

The second aspect of the service dimension has to do with the service role of the leader toward followers. The leader’s job is not only to encourage and sustain high-quality service by all stakeholders but to provide needed services to all those who have a stake in the group’s work. Leaders serve coworkers as their needs arise, so they (the followers) can accomplish their set tasks.

Leaders serve followers in ways that energize and inspire them to unified action. The service role casts the leader as a steward in relationships with coworkers. The stewardship role asks the leader to hold in trust the organization, its resources, its people and the common vision of the future.

A Focus on Innovation

Leaders foster innovation in groups. The leadership model sees the leader’s role as transforming the self, followers and the institution to achieve the strategic vision. Leaders see their role as transforming the group. Leaders have a bias for change. They are alert to the expressed and implied needs of customers, employees and clients. They respect both the techniques and the pressures for change.

Leaders develop their followers in appropriate ways to enhance them and improve their performance. Leaders love people. They expend large amounts of energy in seeking, developing and expanding the capacities of those around them. Leadership is in the business of making champions. Champions are group members imbued with the leader’s vision and capable of moving an idea through all the development phases to full implementation.

A Focus on Productivity Improvement

Productivity improvement is also a part of the definition of the excellent leader. Leaders take responsibility for improvement in the productive capacity of the group and its members. These leaders have a results-oriented, not activity-oriented, service style. There is an uncompromising commitment to the customer. They inspire others to think, plan and act with the customer’s need in mind (Fairholm, Real Leadership: How Spiritual Values Give Leadership Meaning, 2011).

Productivity, therefore, becomes a function of directed service. Excellence leaders encourage productivity through reward structures contingent upon the demonstration of desired productivity behaviors (Bernard & Avolio, 1994). Leaders are focused on reward structures that encourage high-quality work. Leaders provide incentives for stakeholders to change to accommodate the vision values. Rewards in excellent leadership emphasize development of individual capacities and respect for group values, norms, work processes and productivity results.

Skills needed for leadership excellence

Excellent leadership appears to be an applied capacity. It is action-oriented, and it cannot be learned in classrooms. Of course, some leadership skills are acquired in the normal way through reading, studying and analyzing theoretical propositions and principles. And some leadership capacity is learned through observation of other leaders. But leadership excellence is learned most fully through leadership action. It is a dynamic process. One study of executives in Virginia (Fairholm, Values leadership: toward a new philosophy of leadership, 1991) identified eight categories of skills that seem to define the technology of excellence. They include:

Ability to assess the situation

Capacity to build on employee strengths

Sensitivity to evolving trends

Political astuteness

Refined sense of timing

Capacity to be inspirational

Technical (job) competence

Ability to focus on a few important things

The factors that promote excellence in organizations across the nation include clarity of mission and vision and effective leadership at the top. Leaders select and support service champions (in-house entrepreneurs). They interact closely with both employees and customers. They understand cultures and structures, emphasize process over product and focus on human factors to get a high-quality product.

These skills run counter to much of the content of professional business school curricula. These schools teach quantitative analysis and rational decision making as primary technologies. Evidence amassed in leadership excellence suggest otherwise. Unlike management, leadership excellence is more a political process of defining the situation, assessing the strengths of actors, sensing nuances in relationships and acting to focus group resources at the right time. Technical competence in the job to be done is less important than political sensitivity.

Preparation for leadership excellence asks embryonic leaders to be political, to be sensitive to the feelings of others and to care about their followers as human beings, not as just cogs in the industrial machine. Leaders who focus too much on traditional managerial goals of tight control will fall short of attainable high-quality performance and can expect failure, even destruction. Quality improvement is a long-term values-change process. There are few quick successes.

Attaining high quality requires total employee involvement at all levels in the organization. It is a matter of cultural change to give high priority to quality values and methods. It requires effort by everyone: workers, middle managers and those at the top. Each needs to play a role in changing the culture to value quality and in performing to attain it.

Producing high-quality products or services also implies quality-of-work-life factors that are difficult to attain. Leaders need to create a culture that meets the needs of all stakeholders both within and external to the organization. They need to give employees something personally meaningful to commit to before they commit themselves to quality goals or anything else

High quality will come only as we move from a situation where workers work because they fear economic deprivation, to a situation where they work because they want to improve themselves and make a difference in the world. It is an empowerment idea.