You will come across different types of leaders who all have different ways of working. One leader may prefer to focus on meeting deadlines, whereas others focus on making their team’s wellbeing the priority. Then another leader will easily see the bigger pictures, while others stress on all the minor details. A lot of people will have strong opinions on which they feel is the better approach, but which do you prefer? Think about this as you continue to read through.
Effective leadership can easily be recognised when we see it for ourselves. Nonetheless, leadership can be a complex process and there are different ways in how effective leadership can be described. And there are general traits that we should agree are factors of effective leadership:
- Leaders who put in place a team hierarchy, either formal and structured or sometimes a bit more flexible.
- Leaders who work their team towards set goals through interpersonal influence and persuasion.
- Leadership which is built on a group and social phenomenon, where you cannot have a leader unless you have followers.
Effective Leaders Versus Successful Leaders
There is no set way to describe what makes an effective leader or a successful leader. Fred Luthans (1989) described effective managers as those with teams filled with happy and proactive people. He then described successful managers as those find it easy to get quickly promoted.
When a business is unable to find balance they may begin to panic and as a result hire a flashy leader who knows how to look good while networking and are looking for that quick promotion. But at the same time are actually quite incompetent when it comes to caring for the business itself and their objectives.
Instead, when considering a new candidate for a leadership position, the business should be looking at the candidate’s past experience which has demonstrated different roles and functions where they have gone above and beyond for the business, achieving targets and caring for their team. More businesses should look into this strategy as it can often guarantee exceptional business growth and better results.
Overall, when looking at the various cases and viewpoints, we can agree that in order to be a successful leader you must be an effective leader and vice versa!
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