Leaders: The Strategies for taking Charge Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge (original) (raw)

Leaders : the strategies for taking charge

HarperPerennial eBooks, 1985

Many people talk about the decline of the work ethic. In reality, it is not the work ethic which has declined. Rather, it is leaders who have failed. Leaders have failed to instill vision, meaning and trust in their followers. They have failed to empower them. Regardless of whether we're looking at organizations, government agencies, institutions or small enterprises, the key and pivotal factor needed to enhance human resources is leadership. Commonalities Among Leaders 1. All leaders face the challenge of overcoming resistance to change. Some try to do this by the simple exercise of power and control, but effective leaders learn that there are better ways to overcome resistance to change. This involves the achievement of voluntary commitment to shared values. 2. A leader often must broker the needs of constituencies both within and outside the organization. The brokering function requires sensitivity to the needs of many stakeholders and a clear sense of the organization's position. 3. The leader is responsible for the set of ethics or norms that govern the behavior of people in the organization. Leaders can establish a set of ethics in several ways. One is to demonstrate by their own behavior their commitment to the set of ethics that they are trying to institutionalize.

Leaders and leadership – many theories, but what advice is reliable?

Strategy & Leadership, 2012

A plethora of guidance awaits managers seeking to become better leaders, but much of the advice is based on questionable evidence, most of it anecdotal. Leading academics don't even agree on what constitutes leadership or which leadership practices can be successfully emulated. In the endless avalanche of self-help books on leadership managers will find recommendations for how to become a leader, behave like a leader, train other leaders, be a pack leader, a change leader, a mentor leader, a Zen leader, a tribal leader, a platoon leader, an introverted leader or a triple-crown leader. The popular press offers us a myriad of case histories, countless studies of leaders from Steve Jobs to the captain of the "best damned ship in the US Navy," which showcase an example of success, formulate a set of principles based on it and prescribe those practices for leaders everywhere. None of the books I've seen, however, takes the next step and describes how managers who adopted the recommended practices fared as compared with their competitors who did not. Despite this lack of proof of efficacy, managers' continuing need and appetite for leadership advice propels a massive market. Amazon offers almost 60,000 different books on the leader and over 80,000 on leadership, a more than six-fold increase over the past ten years. Google cites millions of references to leaders and leadership, and their recent Ngram analysis shows that the term "leader" has appeared in the literature from 1990 to 2008 almost 50 percent more often than the term "manager"-and ten times more often than the term "follower." Some working definitions Despite this deluge, we lack a Grand Unifying Theory, a tested leadership paradigm that identifies the source code or essence of leaders and a definition of the conditions that produce leadership. So we have to make do with working definitions of leadership, which include:  The early simplistic paradigm (leadership is good management)  The semantic description (leadership is the process of leading)  The transactional model (leadership is a social exchange between leaders and followers)  The situational notion (leadership is a phenomenon that precedes and facilitates decisions)  The esthetic formulation (leadership is an art or a craft)

CHANGING LEADERSHIP PARADIGMS

Though change is a way of life, in any socio-political setting it is defined by its locus rather than its nature. Reform: when the change agent exists within the existing system Revolution: when the change agent exists outside the existing system. Our study indicates that Change in the post 2005 era is nonlinear and non-Newtonian. There is concurrent collapse of structures and functions. As the forces of competition intensify capital get increasingly centralized and concentrated. Effective leadership is one of the keys to our future success and survival. Scholars have argued, that in its broadest sense, leadership can be defined as the ability to influence others toward the accomplishment of some goal. That is, a leader leads a collaborator or team of collaborators towards some end. When the universe is fuzzy defining leadership becomes both necessary and important. We are beginning to live in the " information age " with the knowledge worker calling the shots. The nature of social change itself has changed with the increasing preponderance of technology. The moot question then arises: Is the leader becoming irrelevant as system takes over? Hence the manager is forced out of the somnambulistic era of the feudal-mercantilist-trader mindset and forced by circumstances to adopt the creative-innovative-entrepreneurial mindset. While the system does become important and the leadership becomes critical to incremental change. Such is the dialectic of growth! We argue that man cannot fully comprehend leadership in terms of either traits (as in the 1950s and 60s) or styles (as in the 1970s and 80s) or for that matter in terms of power and politics (as in the 1990s and for the decade thereafter). We need to trace its path of change from absolutist-paternalism to value centered leadership. The paradigm begins to shift. This paper challenges the technocratic industrial engineering based position of persons like Mohanty and Deshmukh and in the process posits a direction in which future management sciences scholarship on leadership will and should be directed.

Leadership Strategies for a Changing World

Leadership is arguably one of the most important aspects in today’s organizations since it is through this avenue firms are able to achieve their objectives and goals. However, the changing world presents new challenges across all organizations probably due to the ever-changing trends in the business world. These challenges tend to affect the smooth and fruitful enforcement of the role of managers in the workplace, thus calling for the need of effective leadership strategies that could enable these personnel smoothly undertake their responsibilities within organizations. In this regard, business leaders are required to come up with effective management policies and strategies to be able to achieve their goals in the workplace. This essay examines some of the common difficulties faced by leaders in organizations, providing models and theories that can be used to address these challenges.