The leadership style of managing an organization is a topic that many leaders have heard over the past decade. A quite reasonable question arises: why is leadership important when you can just be a good executive? The concepts of leadership and management are far from identical, but many people do not understand the essence of their differences. This paper aims to provide an overview of leadership and underline how it is different from management.
There are many points of view regarding the nature of leaders and their common characteristics. The article by ERE Media (2015) highlights that leadership and management in a company are two separate complementary systems of action. Each of them has its functions and types of activity characteristic of it. However, while developing leadership abilities in his employees, the company’s head should not forget that a strong leader and a weak manager are not at all better than the other way around. This thought explained in the article and the video (The perils of confusing management and leadership, 2012) stood out to me as it is not apparent.
The article logically ties into ideas presented by Lussier and Achua (2015) in the first chapter. Thus, the textbook categorizes managerial leadership roles into three categories: interpersonal, informational, and decisional. There are ten roles in general, and all of them are focused on motivating people and applying communication and negotiation skills. Moreover, Lussier and Achua (2015) overlap both the article and the video in discussing the nature of a leader, in particular, whether they are made or born. All the sources note that there is no consensus in the psychologists’ world in this regard. The textbook further elaborates on the origin of leadership and states that it indeed can be developed through special techniques.
Several principles could be derived from the sources and applied in the professional fields. For example, talking leadership is primarily associated with the ability to cope with changes adequately. Leadership has taken on a special significance lately. This is due in part to the fact that today’s business world is highly competitive and volatile. As a result, if you act today with yesterday’s methods, even a little better, it will not lead to success.
Often the company faces the challenge of withstanding the onslaught of significant changes and remaining competitive in these new conditions (ERE Media, 2015). And the more serious the changes, the greater the need for an effective leader. Understanding this trend would be beneficial when applying for jobs or striving for a promotion. As a candidate, I would note that a company needs a leader who is not afraid of changes and ready to push teams forwards.
Furthermore, when managing complex structures, a company manager, first of all, carries out planning and budgeting. In other words, they set goals for the future of the company, define in detail the stages on the way to achieving them, and then allocate resources for the implementation of these plans. Concerning leaders who are called upon to make constructive changes in the organization, their work begins with determining the course of development. This involves creating the desired image of the company in the future and developing strategies for implementing the measures necessary to translate this image into life. Hence, I would like to possess particular soft skills that would allow me to motivate people and make them follow me.
References
ERE Media. (2015). What leaders really do. TLNT. Web.
Lussier, R. N., & Achua, C. F. (2015). Leadership: Theory, application, & skill development (6th ed.). Cengage Learning.
The perils of confusing management and leadership. (2012). YouTube. Web.