Effective Leadership

 

The business landscape is ever-swelling and in a state of constant flux. The pace of change between the 20th and the 21st century is mind-boggling. The game of business is nail-biting with ever-increasing competition.  You cannot use yesterday’s methods today to stay in business tomorrow. Therefore, inventiveness and innovativeness are two key factors essential for business growth and sustainability. That said, it is not just necessary to remember but absolutely essential to be ever conscious of the fact that business is done for the people by the people and people behavior is dominated by overwhelming factors and to decipher such complex behavior is challenging.  Hence, effective leadership is a sine qua non for sustainable business development.

The primacy of effective leadership is an unquestionable necessity because leaders motivate and lead people towards achieving organizational goals by building a strong and positive environment. To contend that one is a good leader, just because there is a following of one hundred ducks, is an obfuscating belief. The metrics to true and effective leadership is the number of happy faces that perseveres to achieve the organizational goal.

This leads us to two important questions: How is it possible to satisfy every demand of every individual? How is it possible to make everyone happy all the time? It is absolutely true that it is not possible to satisfy every individual all the time. However, the leaders will be purblind if they believe that it is not possible to make everyone happy all the time. To be empathetic and to motivate is a small function of leadership role. The art of leading presupposes a Leadership role, and the art demands situational styles that encompass both the organizational goal and the aspirations of the workforce. So to say, leadership role necessitates infrequent use of autocratic approach, more frequent use of democratic approach: coaching and supporting styles and punctilious in being laissez-faire. 

Having seen what makes an out-and-out leader, it is essential to believe that a leader can get influenced by personal motives, values and beliefs and this can be catastrophic. It is a prerequisite for a leader to evolve continuously because people dynamics in an organization is unceasing. If a leader is incongruous to this challenge it may present a whirlpool of conflict which may be insurmountable at times. Hence, it is necessary that a leader is totally compos mentis.  This puts the leader on the path of a change, transformation and consequent evolution.

Another characteristic trait that a leader should demonstrate is dependability. Both, the management and the workforce should find the leader highly dependable. Leadership training, books on leadership, stories of successful leaders may be good in the learning process.  But, this doesn’t help one become dependable. The leader’s dependability quotient will touch the pinnacle if the organizational goals are met while ensuring that the workforce is not disgruntled at all times.  

Organizations should never flounder for want of a leader-in-line. This brings to yet another important task in front of an effective leader: a leader must identify and create leaders-in-line. It is a perfunctory belief that leader-in-line will compete with the leader. The key to organizational growth and success of a leader depends appreciably on this factor. More the leaders-in-line means success for the organization and the leader. This also means more happy faces looking up to the leader for satisfying their aspirations.

To put in a capsule, it may be said that a leader is the ‘atlas’ supporting the head and the body of the organization. The leader ought to be strong, resilient, and dependable; persistently evolving and help the organization grow while keeping the morale of the workforce high.

                                                                                                Mysore Ravi, Hyderabad, IN

 

This is not an academic work on leadership. There are many valuable books and research documents on this. This work presents authors views on effective leadership.