Preparing for Leadership - Article Example

Introduction: Preparing for Leadership In today's world, the people's concern is the feeling that they have less control of their domains. It makes them pressured in high positions of authority. So the challenge of leadership today is to stay focus in the midst of uncertainty which is worth suffering through changes and disorders with faith and creativity. Preparing for leadership will help organization to create a strong foundation and to mobilize good leadership. It is better to prepare the journey before hand than takes place after the destination has been chosen. It is necessary to prepare great leaders, who are better in dealing with the struggles and changes. These feelings of the people and his responsibility to work with them to begin creating a new vision in a work place, and helping them to understand the direction of the future are what drives these leaders to strive for the better. Successful leadership is to know where to stay focus. Technical & Adaptive Issue By Ronald A. Heifetz Different organizations are now facing challenges called adaptive challenges. Adaptive challenges from societies, customers, competition and even technologies are forcing them to strengthen their values, develop new strategies and learn new things and face the changes. This could be the toughest task for their leaders, that is, to mobilize their people for adaptive work Adaptive work is required when competition emerges and values are successful. According to Heifetz, adaptive challenges are seen in everyday life. There is adaptive challenge when there is difficulty in working operations, when teams cannot perform well, or when executives are complaining. Adaptive challenges or adaptive problems are systematically no ready solutions. It is critical to mobilize organization and adapting its behavior. Without such change, any company would fall. It is hard to provide strong leaders. Why? In order to make change happen they have to break long standing behavior, they have to provide leadership in form of solutions, and it is the locus of responsibility to solve the problem must rely to its people. Solution to adaptive challenges reside not in the executive body but in the collection of intelligence of employees, who needs to use one another as resources, across the boundaries and learn they way to find out solutions. Adaptive change is stressing out people on what's going through it. They need to take on new role, new relationship, new values, new behaviors and new approach to work. Employees for example should not take problems off shoulder. Leaders must protect their people from outside threats, and they have to allow them to feel the reality and to adapt. Leaders must disorient his people to develop new relationship. Leaders must draw the issues out, than quelling conflict. Leaders have to challenge than maintaining the norm. According to Heifetz, managers from around the world, offers six principles for leading adaptive work: ``getting on the balcony'', identifying the adaptive challenges, regulating distress, maintaining disciplined, giving back the work, and protecting the leadership. The Fifth Discipline By: Peter Senge According to Peter Senge's learning organizations help people expand their capacity. This is where people begin to recreate themselves as individuals and within the organization. In this case, survival learning or adaptive learning is important. To distinguish learning from traditional organizations, basic disciplines are important. Peter Senge viewed discipline as series of principles and integrating with others to provide vital dimension. Peter Senge identifies discipline into five categories: 1. System Thinking 2. Personal Mastery 3. Mental Models 4. Building Shared Vision 5. Team Learning Systems thinking – is the foundation of the learning organization It is the discipline that integrates the others. Systems theory is the ability to comprehend, address and to examined the relationship of the parts both incentives and integrating discipline. People learn from their own experience, but never directly experience the consequences. According to Peter Senge we tend to face the cause and effect of the problem, and when we are faced with the problems we're looking forward for the solutions. The key aspect of systems thinking is the extent which involves delay or interruption in the flow of influence, making the action gradually occur. It will take works to acquire the building blocks of system theory, and failure to understand systems thinking can lead us into cycles of blaming and self-defense. Personal mastery Personal mastery is the discipline of continuously illuminating, expanding personal vision, giving emphasis on energies, developing patience, and seeing reality. It goes in many aspects, beyond competence and skills involving spiritual growth. Sometimes language creates a misleading definiteness. Personal mastery is a discipline that entails developing personal vision, holding creative tension, recognizing structural tension and constraints own power. Mental Models The discipline of mental models is like turning the mirror inward, learning to unearth internal pictures of the world, including the ability to carry learning conversations balance and advocacy. People are open to think to influence others by exposing their own thinking. Entrenched mental models toward changes comes from system thinking, it means fostering openness, involving distribution of business seeking fr more responsibly, more widely coordinated and controlled organization. Building shared vision Many leaders have personal vision but never get translated because of lack of discipline for translating vision. There is a need to build shared vision to harmonize focus and exert coordinated efforts towards attainment of the shared vision. Shared vision spread because of reinforcing process, increased clarity, enthusiasm and commitment. Team Learning Building team learning through personal mastery and shared vision is not enough people need to act together, if they do so members will grow more rapidly than could have been occurred. Team learning starts with dialogue, it means allowing the group to discover insights involving learning to recognize the patterns of inter action. Reason on the Difficulty of Leadership Experts or authorities can solve our challenges and problems in life, they are technical challenges, but the problems that require leadership are called adaptive challenges. The solutions lie on the people. Sometimes we prefer to treat adaptive problems as technical ones because we can solve the problem with out risk taking, changing or losing up anything. Technical problems resides in the head, it requires us to be logical and intellectual to resolve it. Adaptive challenges can be resolve by changing people's value, beliefs, habits, ways of working or ways of life. Most people would rather have the person in authority to solve the problems, because they want to be protected from disorienting and meeting new challenges. Sometimes leadership becomes dangerous. Why? We get confused leadership with authority, we look to people in high position and sometimes blame for the lack of leadership. But leadership don't depend on position. We often challenge authorization from leadership and if we do it we meet resistance. It is unnecessary to people if we question their values, beliefs or habits, but there are tactics for survival and success of leadership. There are five essentials aspects of political thinking to exercise adaptive leadership, they are: 1. Partners with others. These partners, however, may sometimes push their ideas which may get in conflict with yours. At other times, ideas of partners may put your ideas on the side, or in extreme instances, in a bad light. It will take time connecting with them doing draw back but it will reassure your competence. Partners can be strengthens their initiatives. Increase the probability to succeed your both ideas. 2. Keep the Opposition Close-work as closely with your opponents as you do. Keeping our opposition close from peoples whose perspective needs to understand. 3. Acknowledge Their Loss-ask people in adaptive change. Ask them to choose between two values from espoused and their actual behavior. That's why you need to respect and acknowledge the loss that people suffer. 4. Learn to accept casualties. People who have hard time accepting change become casualties. It is for the leader to give them up or work with these casualties. This is a big challenge. The capacity to accept realities is a good virtue. 5. Accept responsibility. This is your part to the situation at hand for the betterment of your cause. Do not blame others. When you are too quick blaming others you are miss diagnosing the situation. Conclusion Leadership is a subjective thing. To obtain great leadership, leaders at first must possess the qualities of a good leader and try to incorporate it with the rest of the team. Leaders must lead an example. Leaders must apply their leadership attributes from values, ethics, knowledge and skills. Great leaders are innovative and confident in decision making. Good leaders are made not born. Anybody who have the desire and willpower, you can become a good and effective leader. It can be develop through a never ending process of self-education and experience, training. How to turn Weakness leadership into strong leadership? ``A diamond with a flaw is better than a common stone that is perfect.'' (Chinese proverb) The common stone that is perfect refers to a person who is not recognized for any superior characteristics. This person has low self-esteem, becoming bully or an arrogant boor. But there are few diamonds among us. Each person is a potential diamond, but only if the observer is looking for diamonds not a common stone. The strength that each person has treasures that most of us don't have. Each person has to envy that strength only if they do aware of it, and it wouldn't happen if that person has not worked hard enough to develop that skill. We don't need to consider weakness of a person to appreciate that person's strength and ability. Consider the strength and weakness will pale in comparison wit most people. How to learn the strength? Strength and talents are not genetic sometimes, that's how hard work made extraordinary skill and became natural talent. Thus, we can practice those skills of a great leader if we want to have the strengths and be a better leader than other people. The flaws in the human diamonds come with the person. What we need to do is to polish the shiny parts until others notice it. Then for our strengths we have to share it and recognize other's strength for they too may grow. The great lesson of leadership is that ``We gain strength as individuals by raising others to our own level not by pushing them under our feet.'' Read More