The Concept of Leadership - Assignment Example

The Value of Failure in Leadership

Introduction

Leadership presents the phenomenon of leading individuals, group of people, and organizations. The concept of leadership is categorized in three different theories including transactional, transformational, and contextual leadership (Northouse, 2010). Transactional leadership is appropriate for stable situations, where leaders function by standardized traits and attitudes and promote the compliance by employees and followers with the help of rewards and punishments. Transformational leadership style/theory explains the use of consistent collaboration of leaders with staff to implement a change (Sullivan & Decker, 2001). Leaders set examples for their followers by guiding the change and inspiring others to follow it in the long run. Finally, contextual leadership includes a continuous change in leadership styles and is applied in chaotic situations (Winkler, 2010). It is equally important for leaders to think of both sides of leadership that are success or failure. Most leaders try not to fail, and therefore, chooses to avoid risk taking and situations that they think might lead to a failure. However, it is essential for excellent leaders to expose the idea of failure to themselves and their teams in an organization. Leaders are not only responsible for their actions but equally responsible for the actions of their teams, and good leaders build up trust and communicate with their employees to overcome any hazardous situation (Northouse, 2010; Winkler, 2010).

The paper discusses the impact of failure on leaders and the positives they can extract to make their lives more effective and efficient as a leader. The main body explains the possible means to improve a career and vision of a leader after a failure, characteristics of transformational leaders, impact of failure on leadership effectiveness, and the best practices for leaders working in different positions.

Two ways to improve a Career and Vision of a Leader

In general, people have a tendency to attribute the success to themselves and their brilliance, whereas, they attribute failure to external factors including luck, market conditions, timing, other people, and the environment. The significant opportunities available for leaders are to confront the mistake/failure and try to learn from them and to trust oneself or their instincts to make favorable decisions.

Firstly, leaders must develop an instinct to identify their weaknesses and consider the failure as a lack of internal and external antecedents. They must determine the possibilities available to learn. The issues must be confronted, and leaders must also evaluate their actions to identify the possible learning. As a leader, you must ask others to provide you feedback and must utilize their skills to and feedback to improve in the future. Leaders must analyze and plan for future actions and must emphasize to avoid the actions that caused the current failure. Such and analysis and plan would help them to be successful in the future projects and tasks (Llopis, 2012; Good, 2015).

Secondly, leaders can utilize the learning from failures to share their future. The main advantages that can be gathered include the availability of choices either to become stronger and wiser or weak and unintelligent. Good leaders use the learning to become stronger and wiser. They take the challenge, learn quickly, and become fearless when taking their decisions, the use of fearless attitude before making decisions rely on the work and collaboration with the team members and creating trust. It also helps to develop the understanding of one’s guts and make more informed decisions based on the experiences gathered from failures (Good, 2015).

The analysis of failure provides the knowledge to the leaders that they were not far from a success and only minute changes are required in future. Leaders trust their instincts and can utilize the knowledge to avoid future mistakes. Evaluation of failure also provides a better understanding the resources and also to use them in the best possible manner. Leaders can develop an understanding that failures in life and career can help to build trust and hope that leads to better outcomes in future (Good, 2015; Llopis, 2012).

Characteristics of Transformational Leaders

According to Sullivan & Decker (2001), transformational leadership is a leadership style that focuses on developing and effecting a revolutionary change in a small firm or large organization by the vision of the organization (Sullivan & Decker, 2001). It helps to redefine people’s visions and missions, restructures the system of accomplishment, and renews the level of commitment with the aid of continuous collaboration and interactive simulation. It is essential to analyze the key characteristics of transformational leaders to visualize their importance in organizations. The components include admiration, engendering trust, loyalty, motivation, intellectual simulation, individualized consideration, and respect to and amongst the team members/followers (Shelton, 2007).

Firstly, Inspirational motivation is the key to success for any transformational leader as it helps the leader to inspire the followers towards new ideas and work. It includes providing a clear future perspective, shared vision and adding meaning to the work, high standards to accomplish goals, and collaborate and engage with followers. Such leaders help their teams and followers to build trust and inspire them to work more effectively and efficiently to overcome the failures of the past. Individual consideration is also a major characteristic of transformational leaders as he/she signifies the importance of the individual and considers the person as a whole. It helps to identify individual talents, weaknesses, and strengths of a person and provide assistance to overcome the weaknesses and to convert them into personal strengths. Activities like listening to the followers, words of thanks and praise, recognition, congratulation, fair workload distribution, and career counseling are essential to increase motivation. Finally, Intellectual simulation also plays a vital role to lift the morale of followers/team members (Bertocci, 2009).

Transformational leaders try to raise awareness about issues, problems and also try to develop internal capabilities of individuals to resolve the issues. Such leaders develop an environment where people can critically examine their norms, beliefs, and other traditions, individuals share their knowledge, support idea generation processes, and empower the followers to take part in the overall processes. The characteristics allow leaders to allow self-assessments to individuals so that they can learn from their mistakes and can help others to avoid mistakes in future (Shelton, 2007; Bertocci, 2009).

Impact of Failure on Leadership Effectiveness

In my opinion, failures are not fatal. Failures are wake-up calls for individuals with opportunities to succeed in the future. I believe that opportunities can be the true inspirations for future success and leaders must believe in second chances. A person who has faced a failure is more concerned with not repeating the mistakes and can become a more successful person in future. They develop a lens to see the broader opportunities available for them that can lift their morale and success. By taking the example of a child learning to ride a bicycle, he/she is scared of the activity but tries after all the failures and learns from them. At last, he/she learns to ride and is equally happy on the failures that allowed them to increase the sense of opportunities (Llopis, 2012).

Failures also build trust, respect, and unity. If people working in teams take their responsibilities, seriously have the opportunity to unite on same objectives. They can achieve millions of things if they work in collaboration and teams. In the real world, many departmental failures help them to be more creative and wiser, and they accomplish things that they believed were impossible (Llopis, 2012).

Best Practices for leaders

Leadership is not majorly linked with the personality of individuals but also expresses the importance of behavior, attitude, and skills. According to analysts and other professionals, the five most effective and influential practices of leaders are as follows.

Leaders are people who set out standards and principles for others to follow. Good leaders treat individuals based on their personal experiences, and they set examples for others to pursue and set achievable objectives to motivate their followers to reach the final objective. Inspiration also plays a vital role and good leaders invade the future and allow others to become a part of it. They put and breathe life into their followers and combine the vision with others with similar people. Leaders must also possess the ability to challenge the overall processes. They put their one hundred percent for change. It requires talent and risk-taking capabilities and leaders that are eager to take the risk are more prone to success in future (Lowney, 2010). They are equally interested in learning from their good and bad experiences. They empower others to contribute to the processes and continue to collaborate and build spirited teams. They believe that mutual respect and collaboration is the key to extraordinary efforts. They ensure that working conditions support respect, trust, and human dignity. Good leaders also take good care of their team members and employees. They recognize the efforts of others with the help of rewards and praises. They believe that leaders can only achieve their objective if the team members or employees are satisfied with the efforts and the rewards (Conger & Riggio, 2012).

Impact of failure on Risk taking and other Decision making Behaviors

The pain of losses is much higher than the satisfaction from gains in the past. Management, leaders, and other supporting people give their one hundred percent to the projects and activities and failing in such activities can be devastating. The morale of individuals goes down, they pull back, avoid risks in future, and provide justification and excuses for what they did wrong. A person never wants to feel disregarded, and therefore, it is obvious that a failure causes a person to start blaming others for the unwanted results. Individuals pull back from taking risks and innovate to be safe with other projects, but it is not the right way. Failures must be considered as a source of inspiration and opportunity for the future. Failures are the main cause of learning and to become a stronger individual in the long run. Such learning can allow leaders to be more inspirational and effective for organizations and other activities.