Leading and Leadership - Essay Example

Leading and leadership The environment businesses operate in is changing rapidly in the modern business world. Globalization provided companies with new opportunities, but also with new challenges. In order to sustain competitive advantage organizations should make forecasts for the future. It is essential to understand what may happen tomorrow in order to be ready for that. Company leaders hold the responsibility for future of the company, thus they should have a strong vision. “The mission of the organization is crucial in determining your vision.

Your vision needs to coincide with the big picture. The term “vision” suggests a mental picture of what the future organization will look like” (Leading and leadership). What is more difficult is to make people trust your forecasts. This task is not easy, thus the main purpose of the article titled “Goals” is to explain to the leaders how to make people trust them. A leader must be energetic and beam positive emotions. The team should consider a leader to be a winner; no one would like to follow a looser.

It is essential to make people aware of where the company is going and what the main purposes are. The success can be reached only through teamwork, it is impossible to reach the goals alone. The leader should remember several rules: (a) it is essential to set realistic goals; (b) the goals should be directed on the improvements (c) people should take an active part in the process of setting purposes; (d) each goal should be achieved through a thorough plan. When the vision is developed, a leader should share it with a team and it is the task of a team to build a strategy that will help reach the goals (Hackman & Wageman, 2005).

In order to build a right vision, that it the most difficult task, it is recommended to use the principle of the economist Vilfredo Pareto, who encourages leaders to think not about the great number of effects, but to pay more attention to the small number of causes. “Some leaders fall into the time wasting trap of going after the 80 percent of items that only have a value of 20 percent of the total net worth. Your visions need to picture the 20 percent that will have the greatest impact on your organization” (Leading and leadership).

After the goals are already set, the next step is to make people achieve them. In order to make people do something, it is essential to inspire them. They should know what results they should have and what improvements their actions will bring. The leader should be passionate, involve employees in decision-making process and inspire them to use their full potential. It is important to remember that people will not do anything if they do not see the sense in it. Many leaders make a serious mistake setting goals themselves and then just distributing tasks among employees.

Such strategy usually brings very disappointing outcomes as people are not robots and in order to implement the tasks they should know why they are asked to act this or that way. ReferencesHackman, J. R., & Wageman, R. (2005). A Theory of Team Coaching. Academy of Management Review, 30(2)Leading and leadership. Retrieved 23 June, 2013 from http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/leader/leadled.html