Leadership In Practice

Table of Contents

Introduction. 3

Power and modern leadership practices. 3

Visionary leadership practices. 3

Transactional leadership practices. 4

Transformational leadership practices. 4

Democratic leadership practices. 5

Strategic leadership practice. 7

Power 8

Conflict 8

Negative impacts of conflicts. 9

Self reflective piece. 10

Conclusion. 10

Reference List 11

Introduction

Power is regarded as the ability of a person to manage and control various activities for other people. Leadership is considered as one’s ability to inspire people in following all the instructions effectively and meaning the execution of any project without usage of any kind of force. Conventionally, the belief was that leadership delivered power. However, there are many instances where power helps in developing leadership. Leadership relies on power. A good leader is one who can use power in proper situations. This essay focuses on analyzing important modern, power leadership practices like visionary practices of leadership, transactional, transformational leadership practices, and democratic leadership practices. 

Power and modern leadership practices

Visionary leadership practices

Visionary leadership practice is regarded as the leadership approach, which all leaders need to have. Leaders should have passions and important skill sets for recognizing it and the ability for interpreting all the daily tasks and requirements. It is also possible for achieving vision with the help of innovation, effective team support and efficiencies (Mascareño, Rietzschel and Wisse, 2020). Visionary leaders always endeavor to look forward into the future and have effective focus on the end objectives, which are considered impossible by others. Visionary leaders are found to view the world in different ways. They have the ability to see what others cannot see, find out the opportunities and potential when organizations go through drastic changes (Ani Marlia et al., 2020). Visionary leaders also have the power and ability to provide help to others to understand the vision. For the teams who work at the time of change or who are struggling to know their responsibility in a bigger vision, it becomes difficult to view that grand vision. In this time, all the visionary leaders need to bring teams and the enterprises together and direct them for achieving a common goal.  

A proper business case example of this leadership approach can be Henry Ford’s success. Ford rose to fame for pioneering the assembly line for automobiles and producing automobiles on a mass scale (Kearney et al., 2019). He started Ford Motor Co. with absolutely nothing. He proceeded to negotiate deals wisely with different supplies that permitted him to buy important motor parts on credit. After many years of diligent reinvestment, profits started coming back into the business. Afterwards, the motor company turned into an industrial giant with Ford being regarded as a business legend. 

Transactional leadership practices

Transactional approach of leadership is dependent on the method that entails effective controlling, organization and planning or specific responses of employees to import situations (Ossiannilsson, 2018). This approach is useful for creating rewards and consequences, which can be applied for every worker based on the decisions taken. The strengths of transactional leadership styles are promotion of motivation of employees, creating important objectives that can be achieved by everyone, application of important instructions for becoming successful, and reduction of costs for the enterprise and elimination of all kinds of confusions (Worley, 2018). Transactional leaders have the power for creating rewards and consequences for direct reporting. The objective of specific transactions is to develop the idea of getting rewards over the consequences. With the help of this, it became possible for staying productive. This is because employees who know what they do will be recognized. It can also act as a secondary motivation owing to people knowing all the leaders are looking at what they are doing. Transactional leaders also aim at developing short-term plans that help in developing long-term visions (Young et al., 2021). This aids people in experiencing level of success because of they can analyze the forward progress. This also decreases the demoralization risks in the regular members, and increases the level of confidence for individuals.

A perfect example of transactional leadership can be the success of Steve Jobs. The person was involved with development of products, marketing and business outreach efforts for Apple. He would often hold meetings with the product teams and ask them relevant questions regarding the work being done (Bilenko, 2021). He would not stop until everyone has an effective understanding of the expectations and the objectives that could be met.  

Transformational leadership practices

Transformational leadership is the leadership approach in which leaders always give encouragement, inspirations and motivations to the employees for innovating and creating changes that can be useful for helping the company in growing and shaping the success for future (Azizaha et al., 2020). This can be achieved by using examples at the executive level with the help of a good business culture sense, employee independence and ownership within the workplace. It becomes possible for transformational leaders to give the motivation required to the workforce without any micromanagement. They have their trust in trained staff for taking authority over important decisions in the jobs assigned (Wilson, 2020). It is also regarded as a style management that is specifically developed for providing employees the chance of being creative, looking into the future and getting important solutions to specific problems. 

One of the examples of transformational leadership can be Jeff Bezos of Amazon. Jeff Bezos always knew that for a business to become effective and successful, it is necessary to pay focus on the consumers. In spite of considerable reporter pushback, Bezos regarding what can be of the biggest online retailer of the world and how it can be delivered (Kwan, 2020) offer a daring vision. In different ways, Amazon can be used as a perfect transactional leadership model. With the development of many short-term objectives, it becomes possible for achieving things.

Another business case can be Microsoft or Bill Gates. He was responsible for revolutionizing the world with his Windows OS and the amalgamated software like Microsoft office suite that are used in personal computers. However, there were situations where it is favorable for Gates. He has to win over the US Government on some concerns of antitrust. At present, the software of the company is regarded as the cornerstones of effective practices of business and increasing opportunities. 

Democratic leadership practices 

In democratic practice of leadership, members of a group are often encouraged for sharing opinions and ideas. As a result, the group members feel largely engaged concern to the method. Creativity is rewarded and encouraged. This style of leadership balances the responsibility of decision-making among the leader and the group. In the words of Liggett (2020), democratic leaders primarily take part in discussions, however they ensures listening to the other view too. Nelson Mandela and Dwight Eisenhower are two of the most successful leaders of this category. Participative leadership or democratic leadership remains one leadership type which allows everybody’s equal participation concern to decision-making method. There seem various advantages of democratic style of leadership. It serves in solving numerous complicated issues, besides that, it remain a style which anybody can practice under any industry. Democratic leaders often receive diverse series of concepts and ideas. It increases job satisfaction and encourages honesty between workers. This style of leadership fosters respect and trust across the team. Certain benefits of infusing such leadership genre are enhanced staff productivity, creativity and innovation in workplace, diversifying ideas, enhancing job satisfaction, creating strong team and generating awareness regarding organization values.

Figure 1: Democratic style of leadership

(Source: Influenced by Liggett, 2020)

Shared leadership fosters inputs and employee engagement. Those are the two things which are essential for developing performance and employee morale. In the words of Raupu et al. (2021), mutual respect allows persons to collaborate efficiently as a group apart from developing fresh ideas. Therefore, group members are known to employ the utilization of innovative concepts in order to deliver desired outcomes of business. Democratic leaders often share the vision, progress, objective and mission of each company member. Therefore, each staff member under democratic leadership becomes aware of organization’s progress and vision. However, there are certain limitations of this leadership style. It leads to slow process of decision-making. It remains ineffective in crisis and it also shows lack in expertise. Since democratic leadership needs certain people’s input in decision-making method, so making a selection remain a time-consuming task which eventually leads to project delays. Leaders and people often misunderstood democratic as autocrats; therefore people might generate misconceptions concern to applying such style of leadership in organization culture.          

Strategic leadership practice  

There are various intellectual models and contributions which have addressed over practices of strategic leadership. There are six primary components of this: 

• Strategic direction: It signifies creating a prolong vision for strategic intent which demonstrates the individual views of influencing and encouraging leaders (Samimi et al., 2020). If the leader becomes capable of clarifying his individual view, he generates people’s support for strategic vision. 
• Investing talents and strategic capabilities: signifies primitively to core credibility toward the employability and resources of organization. It remains a source of their competitive benefit relative to its rivals. 
• Development of human capital: Human capital signifies to an individual group who possess knowledge and skills which contribute toward enhancing the business organization’s economic value. Individuals working within every organization represent capital resource which requires investment. 
• Promotion of organizational culture: Culture of organization remains a comprehensive idea of everything concerned to the life aspects in organization. It emphasizes on the behavioral and essential dimensions for attaining harmony state among action and thought. 
• Focus on ethics: Ethics implies the fundamental principles which approve the interaction method among organization on one hand and workers on the other hand. It focuses upon principles which approve the interaction method between concerned external parties and organization.     
• Implementing balanced oversight of organization: implies those measures which managers take for maintaining activities of organizations or causing transformations in pattern. Therefore, regulatory oversight attributes toward attaining adaptation to variables of environment. There are two types of regulatory control, strategic control and financial control.  

For instance, Facebook had offered social network with better experience for user. In the words of Mubarak and Yusoff (2019), the unique focus of Facebook lies upon relationship management which enticed users to visit much often. Facebook rapidly dominated MySpace through generating online quality services which leads to positive experience of user. Facebook Company became an enterprise of about $100 in eight years since its leader had demarcated a strategy which leveraged people’s desire to remain connected and maintain associations.   

Power

Power remains the credibility of one in compelling others to performing something unwillingly or willingly.   

Rewards power: It signifies the credibility to fulfill or reward the interest of some one’s. It might be well understood by an instance where a leader contains power for rewarding other in form of promotion, pa and time off.

Coercive Power: It defines the credibility to punish somebody. Such power form is needed for maintaining perfect discipline and work flow in work place and organisation. Evidences for manager’s coercive power are demotion, fine, over time, whereby strikes remaijn a leading instance of employees coercive power.

Expert power: This demonstrates the credibility of one in influencing others based upon own skills of interpersonal that indulge thoughts, knowledge and expertise. This serves an individual to develop actual image for gaining good power.

Power of referent: This implies the person’s image or interpersonal relationship between the people. It might be originated in form of love, respect along with affection. Such power type primarily generates slowly and serves in portraying the image in other’s front.

Conflict

Conflict remains the state where two varied view point can say or clashes as opposition of stage. Moreover, conflict or organization is viewed differently through certain organizational theories. Few say that conflict remains irrelevant in organization and it must be abolished with control and compliance. In the words of Azizaha et al. (2020), others primarily say that conflict remain a normal aspect of the life of an organization. According to traditional theory, conflicts are poor which are caused due to trouble maker and it requires to be subdued. On the contrary, contemporary theory claims that conflict among hmans are unavoided. They might emerge as natural transformation result which remains beneficial to organisation, when handled effectively. It serves in generating latest concepts which results to innovation that might assist the company to operate in an effective fashion.

Negative impacts of conflicts

Diminishing the output: Because of conflict, output might get affected. Moreover, conflict might misbalance work culture which results to organizational work loss in addition to this. It might occur that conflict in organisation remains an individual fight, and the approaches taken through parties might not follow organization’s best interest. 

Obstructions in process of decision making: Conflict poses an obstruction when a decision is taken. Two or greater parties might contain disagreement due to certain causes.

Enhancement in violent conflict possibilities: The conflict might destruct the organization when it is not resolved or not kept. When not resolved timely, the circumstance might be violent and this conflict might lay down total organization.

Power, conflict and politics when properly carried in organization make work culture healthy which results to enhance in the organization’s productivity. In the view of Liggett (2020), they need to be practiced controllably that serves to balance or maintain the situation of work. When manager handles such things effectively, it can promote positive transformations in organization’s growth. By information flow and managing, he could make the culture competitive that can result to large work productivity and serves in developing organization indefinitely.    

Self reflective piece  

In my practice of coaching, I often see some women who remain reticent regarding their ambition. It took a long time for me to accept that I am a leader too. It was due to the fact that I have operated under traditional leadership definitions. Leadership remains contextual and complex. Our situations greatly influence upon our identity and leadership qualities. For understanding the complexity, we all will get benefitted from spending certain reflective time concerning our beliefs, actions and backgrounds. Such reflection might serve us in embracing ourselves as effective leaders apart from refining our skill set. I focus on analyzing my actions and experiences to develop my leadership skills and style. I try to work more on my past mistakes and failures, and I emphasize over figuring out various ways to negate such mistakes in the times to come. I personally believe on reflective leadership since it remains necessary for developing a relationship-centric organization. This is featured through three significant skills that are self awareness, flexible response and careful observation. Fortunately, I have adopted all these three qualities. Moreover, careful observation signifies that leaders remain skilled toward deciphering the implication of what they hear and sees.   

Conclusion 

Based on the above observation, it can be concluded that leadership remains crucial for effective societal and organizational functioning along with success. Leaders develop enthusiasm and commitment among followers for attaining targets. Thus, leadership can be achieved via interaction between follower, environment and leader. After all, leadership serves to be an integral aspect of the life of human. Moreover, leaders seem evident in schools, in families, in churches, in workplaces and in own life. Leaders should be bold; however, they should have a good sense of judgment. They need to be capable of communicating efficiently and they should be credible of empathy. For these causes, leaders are significant to organizations who can deliberately bring transformation in culture of organization.