Why Leadership Is Important Essay

LEADERSHIP AND INTERPERSONAL SKILLS LEADERSHIP AND INTERPERSONAL SKILLS In our severely competitive world today, leadership skills are so essential to any growing business. For example, we can see some outstanding leaders of great firms like Steve Job from Apple or Bill Gates from Microsoft. So how to define what leadership ship is? Leadership is characterized by planning, directing people to achieve the target. If you are an entrepreneur, the role of leadership plays an important part because your employees lean on you how to build a better business.

A good leader make workers understand what is expected of them and how to work more smoothly and thus more efficiently by staying focused on business goals, decreasing lost time and effort; most important of all, most workers are much more comfortable and even “happier” at their jobs with good leadership( James). A good leader also should follow Business ethics; that means running a business ethically is good for business as well as for society. In my opinion, associating ethics in business is very important because a business that behaves ethically will be a model for other businesses and their associates to behave ethically as well.

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A good leadership may be influenced by a person’s world view and inner maturity. A world view reflects about the world, viewpoint of life, a comprehensive system of beliefs. A person’s worldview is affected by many factors such as by their inherited characteristics, background experiences and life situations, the values, attitudes, and habits they have developed, however these vary from one person to another. Therefore, even though some parts of a worldview are shared by many people in a community, other parts differ for individuals.

A person’s world view can influence the ability to lead. If the worldview is shared more by people, leadership skills become more effectively and vice versa. Self awareness, as definition, is a way for us to find out our individual traits, value systems, beliefs, natural tendencies. Because each of us get different in the way of thought and behavior, it’s helpful to occasionally spend time in self-assessment to know more about ourselves. Why is self awareness important?

Self awareness is important because when we have a deep understanding of ourselves, we have chance to renovate ourselves, build up our areas of strength as well as identify areas where we would like to make improvements. Self-awareness is often a first step to goal setting. To assess myself awareness, I took some assessment as the following: 1)Active Listening Skill Inventory: I obtain 55 of 75. There are five dimensions of active listening that I should improve: avoiding, interruption, postponing evaluation, show interest, maintaining interest and organizing information. ) Assessing Flexibility: my score is 127 indicates that I experience considerable stress when my expectation is not met. The refection also points out that I lack full self confidence and tend not to give myself credit for my accomplishment and I sometimes show some inflexibility in relating to others. 3) Assessing Leader-member exchange: my score is 45/60. It shows that I am more dedicated to my job because of my supervisor’s personal qualities. My manager possesses two sources of personal power: referent and expert.

Referent power comes from the willingness of others to do something because they admire, identify with, like or respect the person making the request. 4) What it takes to be a leader: My score is 89 suggesting that I have leadership skills which keep the company on the right track. Whatever position as a leader, I have to maintain personal stability, be productive and keep high self discipline. 5) Team roles preferences scale: my score is broken down in to sub-categories: * Encourager: 14 * Gatekeeper: 13 Harmonizer: 13 * Initiator: 14 * Summarizer: 14 It shows that I have high team spirit. Team spirit nowadays is considered an important factor to a company’s success. 6) What is your preferred Conflict handling style? There are 5 styles for resolving conflict: integrating, obliging, dominating, avoiding and compromising. My rank for each statement is above average. (Minimum=3, maxium=15) Integrating: 10 Obliging: 11 Dominating: 11 Avoiding: 9 Compromise: 14 The results show that I have strength in situation constraint.

To be a good leader, we should learn what kind of theory we should apply. In my opinion, Servant leadership is one of the most popular leadership models around today which was launched by Robert K. Greenleaf. He compared the terms “servant-leader” and “servant leadership. ” This theory put a stress that the servant leader serves the people he/she leads rather than consider them as a means to an organizational purpose or bottom line. (Robert K. Greenleaf) What a servant leader should do?

First, he/she must devote themselves to serving the needs of organization members and focus on meeting the needs of those they lead. Besides, he/she also directs others and encourages their self expression then try to listen and build a sense community. Mentioning about Christian value, I think servant leadership is a kind of it because both emphasize to serve and love people, so that behavior based on spiritual things versus material things. Among philosophy theories around the world, I am interested in Eastern philosophy because it is appropriate to my culture.

The most important characteristic of the Eastern world view is the awareness of the unity and mutual interrelation of all things and events, the experience of all phenomena in the world as manifestations of a basic oneness. Not to do any evil, to cultivate the good, to purify one’s mind and live for everyone( Ancient Eastern philosophy). That point of view is the same with the servant leadership. Buddhism world view is to speak no ill will, to do no harm, to practice self-restraint to devote oneself to higher consciousness. This is the Teaching of the Buddha who offered diligence, discipline and self-mastery.

He also pointed out that hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world; it is appeased by love. Hard to restrain, unstable is this mind; it flits wherever it lists. Good is it to control the mind. A controlled mind brings happiness. According to the teaching of the Buddha, the idea of self is imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of ‘me’ and ‘mine’, selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities and problems.

It is the source of all the troubles in the world from personal conflicts to wars between nations. Finally, I choose Relationship theories (also known as “Transformational theories”) focus upon the connections formed between leaders and followers. Transformational leaders know how to motivate people by helping group members step forward. These leaders are focused on the performance of group members, but also want each person to fulfill his or her potential. Leaders with this style often have high ethical and moral standards.

Work cited 1)James Ray: why leadership is important for business. Retrieved July 13. 10 from http://www. articlesnatch. com/Article/Why-Leadership-Is-Important-For-Business-Success/938731 2) Ancient Eastern philosophy. Retrieved Jul. 13. 10 from http://www. spaceandmotion. com/buddhism-hinduism-taoism-confucianism. htm 3) Robert K. Greenleaf: 12 manage the executive fastrack. Retrieved Jul. 13. 10 from http://www. 12manage. com/methods_greenleaf_servant_leadership. html

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