Leadership Essay -- essays research papers

Leadership comes in many different forms but they all are heading toward the same goal; and that is to communicate with people. Some people are silent leaders and lead by example some are more vocal. Nevertheless, whatever type of leader you are, there are certain criteria that must be met. For example being a good role model, being dependable, being trust worthy, these are all things that a true leader must possess. However, all leaders have their strengths and weakness and these are a few areas in which men and woman striving to become leaders often have trouble dealing with. All to often leaders become over defensive and it beings to tear away at the seams of a cohesive unit. A little defensiveness is healthy self-protection...like your immune system. Excessive defensiveness will prevent you from learning from your mistakes after all, why do anything different, if all your mistakes are someone else's fault? Feeling angry because of changes imposed from above? Attack the stupidity of your bosses and you will feel better! This move can be self-defeating if it stops you from understanding their rationale and coming to terms with your own resistance to change. If you have healthy self-esteem, you should be able to admit your mistakes if you have low self-esteem you will either be too hard on yourself for even small mistakes, or you will overreact and defensively never admit them! When you anticipate the failure of one of your projects, do you start telling people why it will fail? You are setting up your defenses in advance so you will not have to create the m after the fact. Advance defensiveness can even facilitate failure. Some people will even sabotage their own projects, when they start to think they will fail, if they can do so in a way that ensures their getting off the hook. Recognizing and avoiding your own excessive defensiveness is not easy if you have developed a pattern of protecting a fragile self esteem in this way. However, you will not keep up with the demand in today's competitive market to learn faster if you do not confront this issue for yourself. Assertiveness - you may think you are assertive just because you rant and rave at times. Maybe you often give in to others, kidding yourself that you are just being reasonable. So how can you say "no" to your boss or others without incurring their wrath? Say "Yes, but"...... ...create a learning organization, first focus on creating a more entrepreneurial culture Fostering continuous employee development is complementary to a learning culture. However, an organization can learn in an entrepreneurial sense without a lot of employee development. You could have a fast learning organization that continually imported fresh talent with little emphasis on employee development. This is not to downplay the value of employee development - just to clearly separate it from organizational learning. Being a leader is never an easy task, and only a select few have the ability to lead. Not many people can take an organization, a team, or their local neighborhood and get them to work together toward a single goal. They have to be stern but at the same time sympathetic, they have to be able to delegate power without causing uproar. So many things go into being a leader that when everything is said and done, most people shy away from being a leader and feel as though they need to follow. However, that is the difference between a leader and a follower. When crunch time comes, the true leader will stand forward and guide his/her team, organization, or what have to victory.