Why we need the leaders?

In general, leadership relates the maneuvers to the international economic competition in business and nations. At the present, soft values are appearing to the market places, which may change the valuation of leadership.

Leadership needs the leaders. Dealing with change, inspiration, motivation and influence, there are similarities with the entrepreneur and leader. However, leader is not always a great entrepreneur, and vice versa.

To aquiring the leader position, there are as many motives as there are leaders. Motives shape and frame the motivation, which leads to vacuum the knowledge, act the way they act, and influence the stakeholders. Results are all about, and in the future, doing well by doing good.

Leader

Leader is the person, who likes to work in concert rather than isolation. They constantly challenge the processes, inspiring shared vision, enabling others to act, and modeling the way; run the show, show the road.

M. Higgs pointed out example of the contingency leadership model; “it was not the leaders style per se which led to effectiveness but rather the ability of the leader to adapt the style to the needs of the followers”

Change reflexity

The essential component of effective leadership is the ability to reflect on objectives, strategies and processes in a way that influences the attitudes and behavior of employees towards innovation and then planning and implementing change.

Reflexivity model, moving from reflection to planning and to action, lead often to innovative organizational climate, and with the proper vision, the more non-traditional practices to a greater extent of change in the organization.

 

Innovative leadership model

Handling acute or long term change, innovative leadership model is necessary.

Created by CEO, employees’ innovation creation and implementation are paramount process achieving competitive advantage instead of old days organizational size or strength of assets building. Innovative practices are the attractors of the competent people to the house and are also essential for make the business success. Innovations may occur easier when the operation environment is creative. Complexity of leader-building corporate culture is the balance of creativity versus standardization. T. Richards and S. Moger shows out the study of Swedish engineering, that standard as, for example ISO 9000, can be a constraint for creativity. In general, job standardization can be a hindrance of innovation.  

In a strong innovation climate, employees feel to be valued and also innovative behavior rewarded. However, employees need to be motivated towards innovative actions, especially in order to generate immediate solutions for up-coming problems. One research suggests that, for the stronger innovative climate, leader’s behavior to strengthen the relationship with the subordinates is essential. That is because of needs of dialogue. Employees may be too modest or unfamiliar to recognize and identify something innovative.

Influence

Critical thinking and questioning, proactive and transformal approaches, as well as tolerance of differences through the diversity are the learnable leader’s skills.

Continues re-visioning and re-synthesizing ideas and resources; collaborate and empowering will lead to the great influence trough all organization. Capitalize theirs uniqueness, selectively show the weaknesses, intuitive actions and empathy makes people want to lead by leaders.

Even the answers seems to be paid better than questioning, the difference between manager and true leader is not the knowledge of everything and making the decision of everything, but to bring together the available knowledge, create the prerequisites for the essential work and competence to delegate responsibilities to daily operations with the authority. For that, “helicopter sense” is required, and skills as listening, communication, educator and emotional may create the atmosphere as planned.

Delegate the responsibility with the authority is a skill which can be learned only through experiences. Leaders should carry the risks of given responsibility and be ready to jump to the fire instead of pride, if necessary.

In addition to influencing by deeds, leader needs strong communication skills to incorporate enough support for the change message. As J.P.  Kotter pointed out in his research, change managing needs guiding coalition of managers for support the change and minimum level on trust and communication.

Sir W. Churchill and Führer A. Hitler

Influence skills are built in, but need to a certain platform to come out. Adapting a vision and inspired people to embrace the change has been the master leader’s ability. As Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler has. Difference between Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler, luckily, was; when Adolf Hitler was a plan-leader with his own strong vision, Winston Churchill was a reactive situation leader with his own nation’s vision.

Winston Churchill’s ability to inspire with his words and behavior, his sincerity and listen skills to show interest other’s ideas led his way to the history, even though the people remember better his speeches and mind challenging with heart touching communication skills. In conclusion, influencing other people’s actions proactively seems to be the first thing to focus. Second is speaking and not-speaking relevantly, accurately and inspirationally. As the Leo Amery, cabinet minister of Winston Churchill has said; “No-one ever left his cabinet, meeting without feeling himself a braver man”.

Failure driven leaders

One interesting leaders’ dilemma is attitude accepting failures. It is easier to get paid also next week if you keep the supervisor or the board of corporation happy. Risk avoiding may not lead to shareholders favor, on the otherhand, it may lead to the promotion.

Leadership literature quite often stress out the importance of failures as methods to learn. One classical example is The System Failure Methods which looks back to already occurred failures or organized ones for look forward to potential failures. Logical, but does it really matters in the business life? Do we have time to study failures, or even do the failures? Can we learn enough from mistakes? What if we concentrate to follow the trail of success?

Turbulent environment

Globalization and technological improvements have made business environment wide and open, hectic and bounder less. It is at some level also contingent and uncertain. There is systematic risk and unsystematic risk to the leader’s concern. Systematic risk, such as business cycles and so forth, is hard to predict. It needs strong situational processes to handle. Unsystematic risks are industry specials and can be handled by visioning, preplanning and innovations.

To handle turbulent environment better, cultural knowhow is a valuable skill. Learn from the book is one thing, experience is everything.

Management Process

As J.P. Kotter argue in his Leading Change study, first error what management has done is “not establishing a great enough sense of urgency”.

Very often happens that in top management team, there are too many risk minimizor and current system operator than transformative leaders incorporating essential change.

Leaders are not doing the things alone. Creating coalition powerful enough for guiding,  developing easy-to-communicate future picture, empowering to act on  that vision with the short-term wins, and anchoring changes in the corporate culture by daily practices are the key tests of the leaders progressing the contract for long term business survives.

Making business results through managing-by-execution is becoming key competence for the business leaders. Two ways action plan for the daily human resource management processes are needed. First, contingent rewarding, and second, management-by-exception. In the other words, recognition when goals are achieved and immediate corrective action against poor performance.

Feedback is essential. Positive or involving negative or corrective comments it improves performance.

Goal settings

In a multicultural environment, setting goals for the organization need educated leadership skills for the great performance. According the G. Hofstede’s study Chinese values honor, reputation, society and long term results, Americans growth, short term profit and power while in Latin America, Brazil, France as well as Australia values are family interests and personal wealth.

Entrepreneurial performance

Entrepreneurial approach to operate seems to lead higher performance than more-conservative style because of proactive processes, new business opportunity searching and constant product developing and introducing.

Rindova et all. incorporate assumption that fundamental progress of entrepreneurship is wealth creation. They also refer H.E. Aldrich’s study define four main entrepreneurial approaches such as creation of the new organization, high growth and wealth creating businesses, Schumpeterian tradition which relates entrepreneurship to innovation and creation of new products, methods or  markets, and the last,  Kirzner’s model which stress the recognition and corporate profitable opportunities.

Based on these above mentioned studies, there are many similarities in entrepreneurial performance and leadership.

Creativity

In general, innovation and entrepreneurship require a market economy, economic freedom, where individuals who are able to innovate ideas for business use for theirs own benefits  (for example C.W.L Hill 2009).

However, as Z. Yongming refers K.Yang’s book Entrepreneurship In China (2007),China has been able to reach sustained high rates of economic growth even lack cultural attributes, strong leadership or good policies or links to the global economy and in-hospital political and social environment. The reason is energetic and creative entrepreneurship; entrepreneurs succeeded because they did what is not prohibited instead of waiting for official permission.

Family companies in Asia abound, but are rare in western countries when in China, villages, army and police have established own business platform. Entrepreneurial level differs country by country.  G. Hofstede argues that culture explain the difference in countries rather than any economic variable.

Conclusion

Reactive and proactive skills, transformation, communication, interpersonal sensitivity and intuition growth from the experiences are essential competencies for the present leaders.

Accepted vision, focusing and discipline will give the enormous results reinforced by reflexity and entrepreneurial performance.

Leadership dream is to built creative and innovative multicultural organization and reach long term results. It is worth of hard working and sacrifice enough. But it does not interest everyone, which needs the organization’s recognition already in the selection process and also during the tenure of the person.

Leadership at present is change and influence based phenomenon. We know what happened today, but it is tomorrow we care about.

That is why we need Leaders. Show the road, lead the show.