- Published: October 12, 2022
- Updated: October 12, 2022
- Level: Secondary School
- Language: English
- Downloads: 46
Leadership: Since the last few decades, the body of literature concerning leadership has grown manifolds. People are becoming increasingly conscious to learn, comprehend and practice the potential traits of leadership in order to excel in a global competitive environment. Leadership is one skill modern business entrepreneurs need to master so as to deal with and effectively implement the change and innovation that is most asked for in modern day business. Leadership is necessarily utilization of skills, force and knowledge in order to bring about a change in the way, mood or orientation of a matter or set of matters. “ A leader is a person who has a vision, a drive and a commitment to achieve that vision, and the skills to make it happen” (Reh, 2010). Given the enormous demerits of the conventional practices worldwide that have resulted into unsustainable development, pollution and global warming, people require a change and leadership addresses their concern.
Very few people are actually accoutered with adequate knowledge of what leadership is, what to talk of the number of people who actually practice it! A vast majority of people confuse leadership with management. In fact, the former is an effort towards change, and the latter, towards sound administration of what already exists.
One of the biggest hurdles in the way of effective leadership is lack of trust among the followers. Owing to the political upsets that have affected the contemporary society all over the world, people have lost confidence in their leaders. Their lack of confidence declines their sincerity with their leaders and ultimately, this results in lack of compliance with the instructions and guidelines provided by the leaders. Followers’ lack of trust in their leaders has also got a severely negative influence on the economic stability and strength of a nation. For example, let’s look at this matter in the context of an organizational setup. When subordinates do not have confidence in their leader, they tend not to trust him/her. In such circumstances, when a leader passes on an instruction, the followers analyze the instruction with respect to all possible repercussions before acting according to it because they are not sure if the leader was watchful of all possible consequences that could be unfavorable for the followers in any way. The followers’ analysis of the leader’s instruction consumes time and the process experiences delays. All this time goes unproductive and the organization incurs additional administrative and management costs in the time that could otherwise be used to do beneficial work for the organization.
Taking this into consideration, a relationship between three key parameters of leadership, namely trust, speed and cost can be laid. Trust of the followers in the leader is directly proportional to the speed of operation and inversely proportional to the cost of operation. Owing to the great impact of trust on leadership, a leader should prioritize earning followers’ trust among his objectives. Followers’ trust is vital to the development of organizational trust, relationship trust, market trust and ultimately, the societal trust when the matter is looked at from a broader perspective.
References:
Reh, F. J. (2010). What Is A Leader. Retrieved from
http://management. about. com/od/leadership/a/whatisaleader. htm.