Key Elements that form the core of leadership.

May 26, 2009 by kutenk
Filed under: Leadership 

There are numerous definitions of leadership and equally many different ways of categorising leadership. Yet despite this, there are very few leaders who really inspire or who can generate the kind of vision and values that are essential for organisational success. Sadly, there are many chief executives and senior managers in business today who are not leaders but good managers and understanding the difference between the two is crucial. Being a manager is a position in the organisation and it comes with power and responsibility, but it does not mean that the position necessarily inspires people to ‘follow’.
Unless the needs of people within the organisation are taken into account, leadership will be ineffective. People need to give their permission for leaders
to lead and have a desire for to follow them.

Leaders need to generate ‘followership’. So how can they do that? What are the key elements that form the core of leadership? The capability to lead must be coupled with the practical skills that leaders need to have to manage their day-today affairs. This has distilled the views of today’s great thinkers on leadership and developed a categorisation of leadership, the essence of which is noted here:




    Leadership can be considered to be a special type of power which can command and focus resources to achieve a particular vision, change or goal. Leaders can transform a business by creating a vision of the future, then investing heavily to share that vision with the rest of the organisation.
    Leaders should live the values that they share with the organisation. In other words ‘practise what they preach’. Without this, they lack integrity and their ‘followership’ will disintegrate.
    Leadership involves broad capabilities, including having the skills and ability to handle the mundane, operational and daily transactions of corporate life.
    Leaders need to have a high degree of people skills, to manage the complex human interactions that take place between people to ensure they get the best out of them. They recognise that they need to involve other people to achieve success.




    Leaders need to have good conceptual skills and good judgement to enable them to see opportunities where others are not able to.
    Leaders need to be politically astute. They need to know how to use their power in awkward situations and not just to seek power for the sake of it.
    Leadership requires character, namely: ambition, ability, conscience and integrity, so that leaders can follow an ethical and appropriate way forward. Sadly it is these two last aspects of character that are so frequently missing in many leaders, which has led to the recent failures of corporate America.
    Finally, leadership does not necessarily mean that you are the ‘boss’. Leadership can be exerted by people who are not in a position of authority.

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