Leadership Styles And Traits Of An Effective Leader

Discussion

Leadership can be understood as a quality possessed by individuals that can help them to lead and guide people or organizations (Northouse 2014). Leadership requires providing directions to people for their actions, implement strategic plans and is based on the personal philosophy, experiences and personality of the leader (Ebrahimi et al. 2015). An effective leader is able to act as a role model to others and help others to achieve their objectives and support professional or personal development among the people being led (Israel 2018). According to  DuBois et al. (2015), leaders should be charismatic, visionary, intelligent and well behaved and should have strong codes of ethics, morality and values as well as a strong vision for the future. Moreover, leadership skills also require an effective communication skill, situational awareness, problem solving, and critical thinking. These values not only foster improvement in professional abilities of the people but also help to develop an effective work culture and thus bring about an overall development in the organization (Mendoza et al. 2016; Yeh and Wang 2017).

Leadership can be classified into various types or styles based upon how a leader interacts with people and manage people. The main leadership styles are Autocratic Leadership, Democratic Leadership, Laissez-Faire Leadership, Transformational Leadership, Transactional Leadership, Situational Leadership, Paternalistic Leadership, Strategic Leadership and Beauracratic Leadership (Lim et al. 2016; Arain 2018)). The functions of a leader in these leadership styles can be overlapping, with each style aiming for different outcomes. A single leader can essentially exhibit different leadership style, based on the situation or leadership goals (Park et al. 2016; Esteves and Pereira Lopes 2017).

The aim of this study is to analyze the leadership style and leadership approaches of a leader I know personally; observing the leadership traits shown by the person, taking feedback from the person in order to learn from his/her experiences and relate those traits to relevant theories on leadership. Through such understanding, the study aims to develop and map an understanding on my personal professional journey to a leadership role and thus attain professional as well as personal growth.

In my personal experience, one of the strongest and most visionary leaders that I had the privilege to work with was the Vice President of the organization I worked with. Mr. Sebastian Harris started working in the organization with a small job role of an office clerk and moved up the hierarchy though his hard effort and professional competency. I believe that Mr. Harris possesses several important leadership qualities and traits that have enabled him to become an effective organizational leader and guide the organization towards significant success and growth as well as helping the employees to achieve their professional goals and objectives and success. Mr. Harris is a highly driven individual, very motivated, inspiring, intuitive, honest, hard working, intelligent, intellectual, patient, mature, empathetic, charismatic, enthusiastic, self-assured, and confident and a visionary person. He also a very determined person with very strong ethical and moral codes and manages the organization ethically and respectfully, which are important traits according to Baker et al. (2017). Moreover, he is also a very kindhearted and honest person that has helped him to gain trust and respect from all his employees and management. Such strong traits have helped the organization achieve significant success over the years, with the productivity of the company nearly doubling since he was promoted to the position of Vice President and the organization have achieved a high employee retention rates. The skilled and experienced employees respect Mr. Harris and his contribution towards their professional success and on several occasions rejected offers from other companies as they are happier under his leadership (Yang et al. 2018).

Not only he was extremely good at solving problems and managing conflicts, he was unbiased and made good decisions after thorough assessment of situations. After he was promoted to the managerial roles, he helped the departments under his management to exceed expectations and achieve high performance targets. In his professional life, Mr. Harris made several accomplishments, got awarded honorary degrees from top universities in Management and Psychology and is a figure everyone in the organization looks up to for guidance (Martin et al. 2018). Moreover, Mr. Harris is a highly motivated and energetic individual and never avoids any challenging situation, but rather tries to convert every challenge into an opportunity to learn. The strong vision of Mr. Harris have acted as a guiding light for the employees to follow and have also helped to improve communication within the organization thereby improving the interactions with the management and the staff. Through his focus on ethical codes and values of respect, accountability, responsibility and clarity, he was able to develop a positive work culture in the organization (Jaques 2017). The strong work culture has also helped to mitigate work-based conflicts between employees and instead developed team work and team coordination. These skills and aptitudes of Mr. Harris have helped him to be an effective leader who is respected by everyone in the organization. Due to such nature of Mr. Harris, I consider him to be my role model, and I feel that following his footsteps and guidance can help me achieve both professional as well as personal growth (Argyris 2017).

Mr. Harris have also exhibited different types of leadership styles based upon the situation and using his keen situational awareness and critical thinking to effectively understand how to address the situation in the most effective manner. He generally uses a democratic leadership style where he shares the decision making process with the rest of the management team and also involves the views and ideas from the staff to inform the decisions. This style helps to increase the participation of all employees in the decision making process (Beerbohm 2015).  However, while guiding the management, he uses a Laissez-faire approach where he gives the power to the management to deal with situations according to their understanding, thus giving them more freedom to make key decisions (Wong and Giessner 2018). Mr. Harris has also utilized Transformational Leadership style to bring about a positive change in the work culture and organizational process in order to improve the productivity of the organization and improve employee retention rates (Zhu et al. 2016). Using this style, he was able to lead the organization towards a significant growth and success and also helped the employees to achieve professional development and growth. He also has a strong focus on creativity and innovation and supports innovations and creative thinking from his employees and shows strong support for people able to exhibit such abilities (Kremer et al. 2018).

Mr. Harris was an extremely helpful person when I approached him to educate me on his leadership style and share his learning experiences with me, which significantly helped me to understand the competencies, skills and traits of a good leader. His valuable insights also helped me understand how I can inculcate those same skills and abilities in my personal and professional repertoire and therefore helped me to develop my own leadership traits. His feedbacks were also very accurate and insightful on my own professional aptitude and helped me to identify my own strengths and weaknesses which is an important step towards professional growth.

Inspiring people to do their best: According to Mr. Harris, one of the biggest roles of a leader is to inspire people to give their best efforts by acting as their role models and guiding their way ahead. A true leader is one to whom others can look up to for guidance and their own behavior and aptitude makes them stand out from the others and thus helping them to lead the way. When he joined the organization, Mr. Harris was already very qualified, however, with his work, he continued his academic growth, and completed various degrees in management while he was working in the clerical role. He mentioned that he had a clear vision of his professional journey and how to achieve that and worked strategically and meticulously to attain success in his endeavors. His own professional success has helped other employees to be motivated to work towards their own progress. He is also a very hard worker and does not take shortcuts to achieve success, which have also inspired others to give their best effort to work in order to achieve the best results and success. Such concept was also supported by Al Dari et al. (2018)

Developing positive work culture: The strong values of honesty and integrity have helped to bring about a positive change in the work culture. It was mentioned to me that when he first started working as a manager, the organization lacked a positive work culture, and employees failed to show integrity and accountability of their actions. However, though his own personal values, he was able to develop a positive work culture, and develop the values of honesty, integrity and accountability in work. He also was able to incorporate the values of respect by developing a culturally diverse workplace and thus develop a positive workplace for everyone (Alvesson and Sveningsson 2015).

Delegating responsibilities and empowering employees: It was acknowledged by Mr. Harris that his success did not just rest upon his own abilities but was a result of the support of his colleagues and staff who took upon important responsibilities for taking various decisions related to the decision making process. Used a democratic leadership approach to involve the employees, collecting their valuable feedbacks on what can be done or things that have not been done well and then addressing such concerns to make decisi0ons for the organization. He also mentioned that he also gave freedom to management employees to exercise their skills and decision making process to take decisions independently. However, it was also informed that such a process was not very easy, as it resulted in wrong decisions being taken at times which later had to be revoked, but still provided an important learning opportunity for the management and thus helped to develop their competency (Zhu et al. 2016).

Encouraging productivity through rewards and recognition: Mr. Harris mentioned that he noticed that the employees were not properly motivated and encouraged through effective reward and recognition program and so after he was promoted to upper management, he incorporated strong programs to give rewards and recognitions to employees for productivity, code of conduct, support as well as for their own professional development. This helped to develop a healthy competition among the employees and thus helped not only to improve the productivity of the organization, but also helped to develop and maintain a strong working culture within the organization (Wong and Giessner 2018).

Showing empathy towards others: Empathy was an important trait as per the opinion of Mr. Harris. According to him, it is vital to see the human side of things and not just the professional one, as different employees might come across different challenging situations that can affect their ability to work. Showing empathy while working with employees not only helps to gain their trust but also understand their perspective and understand how they can be managed or overcome. While trying to increase the productivity of the organization, Mr. Harris had to take individual meeting with every employee, which was time consuming process, but provided him with valuable insight on how to improve and support better productivity from them. He also involved them to develop personalized professional growth plans for each employee that can help them to increase their skills and competencies. He also implemented training [programs for employees in need of help (Martin et al. 2018).

The discussion with Mr. Harris was very informative for me and helped me to learn several important traits of leadership, the challenges a leader might face and how they can be converted into a learning experience. The concepts I was able to learn from Mr. Harris could also be related to various leadership theories that were learnt during my academic discourse thereby helping to reinforce knowledge with professional practice. It has been suggested by Northouse  (2014), that leaders should have the ability to mentor as well as inspire people and to do so,  the skills and abilities of the leaders should be above and beyond the skills of the employees (DuBois et al. 2015). A leader who is successful and competent having several accomplishments tends to gain the respect of the people as they look towards the leader for guidance. The higher skills and abilities also help the leader to mentor others towards their professional growth (Esteves and Pereira Lopes 2017). Such view was also supported by Mr. Harris, who has been significantly successful and more skilled at his work than anyone else in the organization.

Mendoza et al. (2016) also pointed out that a leader can play an important role in the development of the work culture in the organization which essentially can determine the success of the organization. A leader can lay or develop the important foundations of work culture based on strong moral, ethical and professional codes that can guide others and their work (Martin et al. 2018). Moreover, a leader can also help to act as a role model through their own behavior and code of conduct which others can follow and implement in their own lives thereby fostering both professional as well as personal development (Yang et al. 2018). Such abilities have also helped Mr. Harris to improve the work culture in the organization and thus improve the performance and productivity. A positive work culture was also supported by the development of work policies that ensured respect, safety, clarity, accountability and responsiveness to work and employee responsibilities at every level of the organization (Wong and Giessner 2018). It was also added that leadership styles such as democratic and Laissez-Faire leadership was vital to improve participation of the employees in the overall organizational development, which have also been supported by various authors (Zhu et al. 2016; Wong and Giessner 2018) 

The significance of showing appreciation towards performance and productivity have been supported by many authors, stating that the appreciation helps to encourage the employees to maintain the good work  as well as help them understand the best practice guidelines (Gu et al. 2015; Alvesson and Sveningsson 2015). Such suggestion was keenly followed by Mr. Harris who implemented effective reward and recognition programs that encouraged the employees not only for their productivity and performance, but also for their professional conduct, ability to help and assist others, their participation in team work and their overall contributions to the workplace. Rewards were both in the form of monetary benefits as well as the opportunity to acquire more responsibilities and thus achieve better professional success (Hsieh and Wang 2015). According to Mr. Harris, these traits and behavior were the main reasons that helped him to achieve professional success and helped him to become an effective leader. The feedback also helped me understand that by focusing on such abilities, I would be able to develop my competency to become a good leader someday.

Mr. Harris also suggested few diagnostic tools such as The Self Confidence Test, Team Leadership Skills Test and Emotional Intelligence test that one can use to assess their own leadership skills and identify their strengths and weaknesses which can be helpful to develop a personal development plan (Martin-Raugh et al. 2016; Fiori et al. 2014). Additionally, he also highlighted the importance of self reflective practices, and SMART goal development which can help to strategically approach and achieve professional as well as personal goals in a more efficient manner. Such strategies have also been supported by Bjerke and Renger (2017).

Conclusion:

Leadership is an important quality that can help an individual to lead and guide people and organization towards a particular goal or vision. A good leader therefore must not only be a visionary, but should have the ability to gain trust, confidence and respect of people so they would look up to the leader for guidance. Different traits are therefore needed to become an effective leader, which can help them to achieve their goals.  Mr. Harris, who happens to be my role model, has been an ideal leader, exhibiting the important leadership qualities that helped him to gain trust and respect from his employees and helped him to guide and motivate people towards success. His feedbacks and personal insights were very helpful for me to understand how I can develop such values in my professional repertoire and achieve professional growth.

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