Leadership: The True Virtue
by Tom Johns
History abounds with examples of great leaders who displayed their qualities of leadership especially in times of crisis. There was Winston Churchill during the London Blitz, Mahatma Gandhi during India’s freedom struggle, John F Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis, Margaret Thatcher during the miner’s strike, Mikhail Gorbachev’s break with communism and the cold war, etc. In these turning points, leadership made a crucial difference in modern history. It is the same in case of leadership in organizations. Leadership is central to the survival and success of groups and organizations. To lead is to guide, conduct, direct, precede. Leadership implies existence of followers and commonality of interest between the leader and his followers. The main function of leadership is to induce all subordinates or followers to contribute to organized goals in accordance with their maximum capability. Management and leadership are not synonyms. Leadership focuses on human interactions and on “influencing others” whereas management is concerned with procedures, results and the process of getting things done. A person emerges as a leader but a manager is always appointed to his position. Even though this position gives him the authority to achieve the goals/objectives of the organization, this power does not make him a leader. William D Hitt interestingly distinguishes a leader from a manager in this statement:Managers do things right while leaders do the right things. A good manager is the right choice to maintain a department at state A and a leader is required if it has to be successfully moved from state A to state B (21).Effective leadership is not only about the personal attributes of the leader in terms of his charisma, traits or qualities. In this context Peter F. Drucker has stated: Leaders who work most effectively, never say "I." They think "we"; they think "team." They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but "we" gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done (56). An effective leader does not perceive leadership as some sort of a rank and privilege. He knows that he is not indispensable to the system, because he has created a system with human energies and human vision. Therefore Wright has observed: “The leader is a change agent or a transformational leader. He persuades the people to rise above their own self-interest for the sake of the team, organization or larger polity. He raises their level of awareness, their level of consciousness about the significance and value of designated outcomes, and ways of reaching them” (qtd. in Doyle
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