Leadership behavior and development

Friday, January 27th, 2012 at 3:01 pm

Leadership behaviors and development of leadership style and skills will ultimately be based on a persons behavior. Leadership is the art of mobilizing others toward shared aspirations. These traits can create a virtuous cycle for the management, employees, clients, stakeholders, and others. Leadership is about behavior first, skills second. A leader relies on management skills too, but more so on qualities such as integrity, honesty, humility, courage, commitment, sincerity, passion, confidence, positivity, wisdom, determination, compassion, sensitivity, and a degree of personal charisma.

A job can be performed with different styles. Leadership is often more about serving than leading. Your best solutions lie in the needs and wishes of the followers. There are many journals about leadership; look out for them, they can teach you a lot. The findings from these articles and leadership development will justify your time spent on research.
Many articles appear in the press and trade journals, this research project identified the following seven leadership skills as most critical for success, now and in the future: Leading people: directing and motivating people. First, these competencies are areas where we find people continually getting themselves into trouble and secondly, most of the nine competencies listed have a direct and even causal effect on the seven competencies that the participants found to be insufficient to meet future leadership requirements.
If leading is about anything, it is about relationships. Learning how the nine “unimportant” competencies impact and drive the seven “important” competencies will help to fill the large gap now and for decades to come. All the skills like relationship building, compassion, self-awareness, etc. all boil down to perhaps the single most important leadership skill there is: communication.
For those of us in the field of leadership and management development to continue to write, influence, speak, and coach to penetrate the business leader’s psyche in a way that will demonstrate meaningful awareness and thereby reflect tangible organizational change. Diversity in skill is a reward to those leaders that embrace the work needed to both accomplish your goals and encourage those similar lessons in others. Ethical leaders call for morals, fairness, caring, sharing, no false promises or unreasonable demands on others, etc. I have a policy of distributing free abridged versions of my books on leadership, ethics, teamwork, motivation, women, bullying and sexual harassment, trade unions, etc. While these subjects are easy to explain, they are not so easy to practice.
Some people are born naturally to lead more than others. Those who want to be a leader can develop this ability. And many qualities of effective leaders, like confidence and charisma, continue to grow from experience in the leadership role. Some leaders can adapt and use different leading styles for given situations. People new to this kind of position (and supervision and management) often feel under pressure to lead in a particularly dominant way. Dominant leadership is rarely appropriate however, especially for mature teams. Tough, overly dominant bearing people give teams a lot to push against and resist. Leaders of course need to be able to make tough decisions when required, but most importantly leaders should concentrate on enabling the team to thrive, which is actually a ‘serving’ role, not the dominant ‘leading’ role commonly associated with leadership. Today ethical leaders are more important than ever. This coincides with massively increased awareness and interest among people everywhere in corporate responsibility and the many related concepts, such as Fair Trade, sustainability, social and community responsibility.
Today there is huge awareness of, and interest in, more modern leadership methods. The radio discussion highlighted the need for effective modern leaders to have emotional strength and sensitivity, far beyond traditional ideas of more limited autocratic leadership styles. Incidentally as a quick case-study, the BBC illustrates an important aspect of leadership, namely philosophy.

Andrew Gallop: Expert article writer: Entrepreneur: You can succeed with articles on leadership skills. Our personal development depends on continues training. There are more articles, videos, lots of free stuff. Books and audio books at, http://www.leadershipskillsbooks.com