How to be a good leader Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

How to be a good leader - Essay Example Much of history is recorded through the lives of famous leaders. Names such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Clara Barton, Mahatma Gandhi, Golda Meir, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela symbolize major eras of social upheaval that have had immense repercussions. Most young people today aspire to become leaders in school, athletics, entertainment, politics, industry, the military, medicine, or some other area of endeavor (Howell, 2005). The stakes for the leaders of our future are rising rapidly and daily. The demands on the role in both public and private sector, the attention from the media to the problems we face, and the increased complexity of the world with globalization and galloping technology make leadership infinitely more difficult. The game has changed -- dramatically. Strange new rules have appeared. The deck has been shuffled and jokers added. Never before have American business, education, medicine, social welfare, and government faced so many challenges. There is a mood out there that must be termed dyspeptic -perhaps even murderous -- toward institutional leaders. It's part of the American paranoid style. But it has been exacerbated by scandals, media attention, and questions about character. Uncertainties and complexities abound. There are too many ironies, polarities, confusions, contradictions, and ambivalences for any organization to understand fully. The only truly predictable thing right now is unpredictability. Most of us grew up in organizations that were dominated by the thoughts and actions of the Fords, Taylors, and Webers, the fathers of the classic bureaucratic system. Bureaucracy was a splendid social invention in the nineteenth century, as the ideal mechanism for harnessing the manpower and resources of the Industrial Revolution. Today many organizations are reconsidering the macho, control-and-command mentality that is intrinsic to that increasingly threadbare model. They are looking to leadership that is empowering, that invites participation, that is flexible and responsive to the realities of life (McShane, & Glinow, 1999). As we begin, we must raise several cautions about leadership. First of all, leadership can be a heady experience. Learning about it, pursuing it, and encouraging it can take one on a dangerous power trip. If the purpose of leadership is, as we posit in this book, to take a stand for what one believes and to bring it forth into reality, then leaders must have a check on their ambition. In the leaders we admire, ambition is always balanced with competence and integrity. This three-legged stool upon which true leadership sits -- ambition, competence, and integrity -- must remain in balance if the leader is to be a constructive force in the organization rather than a destructive achiever of her or his own ends. Effective leaders continually ask questions, probing all levels of the organization for information, testing their own perceptions, and rechecking the facts. They talk to their constituents. They want to know what is working and what is not. They keep an open mind for serendipity to bring them the knowledge they