Traits and Characteristics of a Leader
Leadership is considered to be the both research and use of practical skills to influence, lead and motivate the person to achieve his goals and objectives. It is also one of the most important contributing factors responsible for the growth and success of the company. The job of a leader is not an easy task, they have to be flexible and adaptive to cope with the ever-changing need of the situation. Values, character and ethics are the characteristics of a leader on which the leadership stands (Anatasia, 2017). The leader has clear head when it comes to what they want, what they value and understand the significance of ethical behavior in business conduct which eventually forms the value system of their leadership style. The leaders are always expected to showcase very high standard of values, ethics, character and belief in their behavior and leadership style in order to lead the organisation by motivating and influencing people.
This report will explore all the traits and characteristics of a leader and along with the ideas of beliefs, values and ethics in the style of leadership (A.Wright, 2011). This paper will further analyses the challenges and consequences of using those ideas in the everyday business granted.
The term leadership management focus mainly stresses on the communication skills, vision, intelligence, people skills, business acumen and even boldness. But none of these qualities are valid in the absence of functional leadership quality of a character. The good character is a reflection of trust and one of the prerequisites of leadership (Anon., 2011) . The trust is the factor which helps in building relationship with the people and in its absence, people may not follow the leader and eventually failing the very first principle of leadership. Hence, it is very important for the leader to showcase good character in their behavior so that they can win the trust, faith, love and respect of the people. During the initial days of leadership, good character identified a person who scored high on responsibility forgiveness and compassion. This implies that person who only speak truth partly can’t be trusted in normal situations and person who always finds someone to pass his blame on falls on the category of a bad leader. It is also observed that a person who has gained trust among his workers is a sign of a good character and these also the makes the person an epitome of trust.
Building Blocks for Strong Character in Leaders
Qualities of a trustworthy person:
- These types of people remain consistent in their behavior even at the time of crisis.
- These people are true and works with honesty and hence are trustworthy
- They remain true to their words stay by their promises and never fails to deliver.
- These people always believe in collaboration and focuses on common goods of the people rather than an individual; himself.
There have been several researches on this topic and have concluded that character is nurtured rather than being natural.
Building blocks for the development of strong character in leaders are:
- Values- The values in the simplest term is the values that a leader resonates month. For example- Compassion, harmony, caring / belonging, integrity, etc.
- Feeling of true Identity: By this we simply mean, an individual understanding about himself and his own belief.
- Integrity: It is by far the strongest building block of character in individual. Integrity is simply aligning an individual’s actions, thoughts and feelings with the values (Anon., 2013).
Hence from the above description states the significance of notion of strong and good character as the factor which contributes towards great leadership. It also highlights that for converting a character into trait requires proper implementation and creation of plans for the character value. Eventually the character in turn helps in building trust and which can help in establishing good relationship between followers and employees.
As per the above discussion, it is clear that character requires nurture instead of being in the inherent nature of individual. This is done by shaping the values, beliefs and ethical dimensions of an individual (Anon., 2016). The leaders of the past have shown greater level of ethical value and belief system in the particular organisation. The values in an individual is a deep rooted and social belief which form the main basis to assist the individual on his path on leadership. The objective of social value is to create a set of pre-defined standards which would serve as a guide to meet all the needs of the organisation and oneself. The kind of leaders who do not create a set of values for themselves takes the organisation and its followers towards misery. Hence, it can be said that values are the ideas or beliefs that guides and affects the choice of action for an individual.
Jack ma of Alibaba is known to be one of the greatest visionary of 21st century and he has standard values and belief system in his character which has greatly helped his organisation and him to taste success in very small period of time. Jack ma practices value of trust in his behavior i.e. the trust on his employees and has helped his organisation to become one of the leading e – commerce giant (Husain, 2018).
Another example which demonstrated similar kind of culmination of strong belief and value system in his behavior is the chief executive and founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. In reference to the recent incident of data theft by Cambridge Analytical and the role of Facebook in the influencing the result of US presidential election, the CEO showcased strong character (Trapp, 2018). He took the responsibility of the incident formed an action pan to make sure such kind of the incident does not repeat itself in the future. This showed the strong character reflection of integrity, responsibility in Zuckerberg. He faced the whole world and did not shy away from the responsibilities and neither feared the US attorneys and stood tall and believed that what was true is true, which gained a lot of appreciation, admiration and respect not only from his fellow co-workers or his employees but also from the Facebook user and other business leaders from all over the world.
Impact of Values and Ethics on Leadership
The leadership is a way of establishing relationship between people and which by the way is also the ability to inspire someone and is one of the major characteristics of effective leadership (Cavazotte & Moreno, 2013). There is a very important role of ethics in defining and shaping the characters of a leader. The ethics is not only limited to doing the righteous thing rather its also the inherent nature of individual and how to act according to situation or circumstances. For example; if doing certain things which is no right ethically but it will derive greater good for the society or community then such instances can either be criticized or appreciated. This can be further explained by the biography of Steve jobs. Steve jobs, founder of Apple Inc. is not only one of the most inspiring and charismatic leader of his time but also was one of the controversial leaders of that time. During his tenure he did couple of things which we ethically wrong, for example: the imitation of infrastructure of the Microsoft windows in order to develop the platform of IOS. The limitation of infrastructure of the xerox for the creation of mouse. Although these instances were not correct but it revolutionized the artificial intelligence and brought unique user interface through the introduction of Mac, iPhone, etc. He came up with the most innovative ideas which challenged the giants like Microsoft and Google. This changed the paradigm of the personal computer market. Hence, such exception in ethics prevails in the organizational ecosystem. Thus, the use of ethical leadership should not be for stopping or preventing people from doing wrong things but it should b used to influence people to do the right things.
The leadership theories from decades has been the source to numerous research studies Although it has been there much before the introduction of globalization and liberalization in corporate world (Crossan, et al., 2012). However, this has evolved from previous theories to the modern theories as per the changing scenario of the world. There has been great research on the leadership theories in last 100 years. There are number of leadership theories which have used to define and create better understanding and analysis of various leadership style.
All the existing leadership style focuses on the values, characters, ethics and belief of a person:
The trait theory of leadership mainly focuses on the personality traits and various characteristics that are linked to some other successful leadership under various situations. This theory is suggestive and states that leader in general have traits which separates them from other leaders. There are certain traits which are classified as the traits that a successful or effective leader have. These traits can be classified by analyzing the behavior or character of leader (Cherry, 2018). The traits like integrity, empathy, respect, good decision making, ethical understanding, etc. are categorized as the traits of an effective or successful leader.
Various Leadership Theories
The behavioral theory analyzes the habits and behavior of the leader and what they do in common to inspire or get support from their followers.
The autocratic leaders are the kind of leaders who do not involve other persons in decision making and take decisions on their own. Moreover, the suggestion from the other team members does not influence the decision of the leader or decision being made. This type of leaders has strong characters and prefer to believe in themselves instead of involving others in decision making process (Leonard, 2018). They believe they are the only one or their decision is the best as per the situation. Thus, these leaders have strong reflection of boldness, confident, assertiveness, supremacy in their character.
This type of leadership is best suited for small and medium scale organization. In this, the leader takes the input from his team members or the advisors and based on their advices a collective decision is taken (Rometty, 2016). This style of leadership is for the organizations which have small number of people or have less span of control. This leadership style demonstrates the characteristics of respect and trust towards others.
This type of leadership style gives the workers or the employees of the company the power in making and exercising their own decision. This style is best suited when the employee should be capable and motivated towards the common objectives of the company. The style of leadership has higher chances of failing, if the leader is lazy or distracted towards other activities rather than the organization’s benefit (Ingram, 2018). The leaders have trust and belief on their employees which make them rely on them at the cost of the company. This is not practiced or used in many parts of the world because of its uncertain and unrealistic approach.
This theory was introduced on the ideology that the leadership style is flexible and leaders need to adapt themselves according to changing circumstances to ensure the success of their business (Bell, et al., 2014). This leadership style gives enough choices to the leaders to decide which leadership style best fit the scenario and a style is picked which is more relevant to the situation. The Fiedler contingency model and path goal theory are the most popular and significant contingency theories. The leaders of this style are characterized by their flexibility and adaptation.
This leadership style is practiced by the modern-day leaders of the world. This is the contemporary style of leadership in which the leaders take the feedback and suggestions from their subordinates to identify the issue and changes that need to be incorporated in the organisation. These leaders create a vision for the company and have the ability to translate the same into the organisation. The leaders following this have the ability to transform the organisation on the basis their relationship with the employees, to inspire, influence their vision. The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos practice this leadership style and is characterized by passion, empathy, change agent, relationship builder, visionary and reliability.
Conclusion
This style of leadership is based on influence and power and these leaders believe that people do work only for rewards and no other reason. These leaders’ belief in rewarding the workers or employees for their good work and punishing them for the bad work. This style focuses on building and developing of jobs on the basis of the rewards (Luthans, 2011). The characteristic of this leadership style is being passionate towards work, being practical and having strong dedication towards the job.
The multinational American company, Enron which operated its business in commodities, energy and services is an example of bad and unethical leadership which eventually made the company insolvent. The CEO of the company, Jeffrey Skilling formed a team of executives who made themselves involved in unfair trade by inflating the financial figures of the company (Clifford, 2107). The leader made his executives to hide the actual loss and debt of the company and only showed the positive figures on the financial reports. This made them earn huge profits by inflating the share prices by poor financial reporting. The profit was earned before anyone could realize the unethical wrong doing and later made the shareholders to lose millions. This instance showed the unethical behavior by keeping self-interest over others and is also an example of destructive leadership. These types of leaders do not have any ethical and moral obligation towards their followers and often demonstrates bad behavior.
Similarly, another leader Jack Welch who with his transformation and participative leadership style took the company to greater heights of success. This only happened because of the leader articulation towards his vision, passion towards work and on a mission of sustained growth of General Electric. He believed that at times when the company fails to handles the pressure to be in the competition tends to indulge in unethical ethics, value and character in the long run can produce much better results for the people and the society (Pirouz, 2017) .
Similar to Jack Welch, Bill gates of Microsoft believed that to be sustainable in the longer run the leader has to follow strong professional conduct and character favorable to both people and the society. Bill Gates in his entire career never indulged in unethical behavior even at the time of spat with Apple, he continued with his work by taking moral grounds. Thus, a true leader is one whose leadership style reflects in his character.
The development in leadership came in early 19th and 20th century in the western world and is now based on the behavior of the leaders in the present-day context (Clifford, 2107). These types of leaders are characterized by the modern values, character, traits, sympathies and stick to what is significant. At times, the leader tends to bypass the ethical consideration in leadership and act according to what is good for the society. The co-founder of Apple Inc., Steve Jobs was a kind of leader of modern world. He had all the traits and character of a contemporary leader and using the same he took Apple to greater heights of success. The leader of the modern world has added responsibility of competing with contemporaries by focusing on sustained innovation. Thus, the role of these modern leader is by far more challenging and demanding in present context to the old leaders.
On the other hand, critical management follows the early stage of leadership. It states that, the modern-day leadership style is full of problems and challenges which affects the decision-making process in critical situations. It evolved from the study of classical Greek, medieval and modern social scientific ideas. These are the key characteristics of leadership in the past and present. But, the modern leaders have transformed critical management into present day leadership style where the leaders use modern day traits, character and values for the success of the organisation.
Conclusion
From the above paper it is evident that the leadership style has evolved from the last couple of decades and has adopted the traits and shapes of present day society. In current context, the leaders need to be flexible and adaptive according to the changing needs of the society. The leader strength is tested on the type of behavior and character he demonstrates at critical stage. The good leader bails out his people and organisation at critical stage by the virtue of its strong ethical, social conduct and by showcasing strong character values. The beliefs and values of a leader differentiate him from the other leaders. The leader who follow transformational style of leadership have a character which is a reflection of his vision, respect, belief and trust towards is workers and stands firm pillars of sustained growth. This is the reason it is considered as one of the most effective leadership style.
Thus, it is apparent that strong character, values, confidence and belief are the traits of a successful leader and is prerequisite of effectiveness and efficiency of leadership ability.
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