LEADERS AND LEADERSHIP - Essay Example

Leaders and Leadership There are different types of leaders in any given environment. Different people have different characters and thus it is very difficult to summarize all of them into one group. It is for this reason that these leaders are divided into seven groups. The groups are commonly known as leadership styles and going through each of the styles assists in identifying the range of leadership virtues that I bear. Carrying out an analysis of the kind of leader from the reading, the first aspect of leadership to understand is that from a range of one to five I am a weak number two in relational leadership.

The type of leadership dimension is collaborative leadership. For this kind of leadership, I award myself three points out of the overall five. Many organizations or business people fail due to different reasons and one of them is that they do not have effective communication with the employees (Carless, Wearing, & Mann, 2000). The consequent of this is having a poorly organized organization. In the range of communicative leadership, I offer myself five points for I believe that communicating with employees is very vital for an organization.

A vital characteristic that any leader ought to bear is having a vision for the organization that he or she runs. The advantage of having vision is that the company has a sense of direction and consequently has a higher chance of performing better than other companies in the particular industry. Due to my high values with regard to visionary leadership, I offer myself five out of the entire five points. Systems leadership is a type of leadership where the leader is supposed to understand the various manners through which the systems in the particular organization run.

I do not find this type of leadership very critical and the reason is that I believe leaders have more important issues to focus on and can delegate the issue of systems to other department heads in the organization. It is because of this condescending reason to the leadership that I offer myself one point out of the five of them. Reflective leadership involves the leader thinking critically before taking any course. Many leaders fail to have this aspect and thus fail in their ventures. Failure is a factor that I do not like in an organization and thus the reason why I ensure that I am reflective in almost every course I take.

I thus give myself four out of the five points with regard to this type of leadership. Analytical leadership is a type of leadership that involves the leader or rather the person responsible reviewing critical details that support the running of the organization (Covello, 2009). This assists in identifying the areas that require improvement and understanding of the budget. Consequently, the leader cannot accumulate any losses in the organization. It is for this high analytical trait that has me offering myself five out of the five marks.

After calculating the average of all the marks, I get a mean mark of 3.5. From my view, this is generally low. The results show that my leadership style is average and average is unacceptable for a leader. Points that I should improve in are in reflective leadership and collaborative leadership. With the improvement of these, the changes witnessed in the organization are in that people will learn to work together and in total harmony. My fellow students have had different opinions with regard to this provided I have always shown exceptional leadership styles in co-curricular activities that we participate in.

References Carless, S. A., Wearing, A. J., & Mann, L. (2000). A short measure of transformational leadership. Journal of Business and Psychology, 14, 389-405. Covello, V. (2009). Risk Analysis in Theory and Practice. Chicago: Chicago University Press.