Dr. Larry Ross, Ph.D
Professor of Business Administration
Florida Southern College
There is a wide array of leadership concepts, theories, and perspectives available to the individual seeking to become better-informed on the subject. There is no one way, nor one authoritative text that can present a definitive overview of leadership. While there is a commonly-accepted model of the leadership process, there are several ways to model leadership in practice as a means to gain an understanding of how different models can produce similar – or quite different – results. What do you need to know (or learn) about leadership? Consider the following key topics:
Followers, or groups of followers, make-up an important dimension of leadership. For without followers, there may be no need for leadership. The most common form of contemporary followers today is known as a team. Leading teams, motivating and achieving synergy from a team are topics that can lead to more effective leadership results.
The topic of power and its variants is essential in the context of leadership and how the deployment of power can influence the behavior of the followers and deliver expected results. Reward power, power of coercion, referent power, expert power and personal power are some of the tools available to the leader.
How important are values to the development of effective leaders? Why is it critical to operate as an ethical leader with the highest set of standards? What defines ethical leadership and what must an effective and ethical leader know in order to practice ethical leadership? How does the increasingly global environment affect the deployment of leadership abilities? In particular, how does context change and in turn require that leadership change to meet the different needs of a multicultural society? Can leaders adapt and expand their abilities to lead across cultures?
One of the most important areas for the deployment of effective leadership, an area where the stakes are the highest and the dynamic the most uncertain is in the leadership of change. Understanding the change process, types of change, and why followers are naturally resistant to change can facilitate the leadership development process in advance of implementing change. The quest for innovation demands that change be institutionalized throughout an organization. The leader’s role is to simultaneously deal with the immediate challenges of change and the more long term issues of sustaining a culture of change that allows the organization to thrive.
As we become more aware of the lessons of leadership and we better understand how to be more effective leaders, can we develop viable substitutes for leadership as we know it? This may be the ultimate challenge facing leaders today. The use of books on leadership to develop a widespread awareness of leadership concepts may allow today’s follower to become tomorrow’s leader.
I encourage you to contemplate your role as a leader and a follower. I encourage you to consider how these roles can be in conflict or in harmony and how role ambiguity can generate unnecessary conflict. Role certainty, however, can be linked to successful outcomes. You should learn about the roles of both the leader and the follower, depending upon the situational context.
