Leadership Style in Modern Conditions - Essay Example

The leadership style and leadership initiatives become major propellants for gaining effective leverage against business rivals. Jack Welsh and Russell Simmons are two important leaders whose leadership has significantly impacted business across the world.

Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, is renowned for his exemplary leadership quality and his innovative approach in the cutthroat business. He reinforces the concept of value-based leadership that promotes and facilitates continuous learning and focuses on a participative leadership style that encourages collective decision and mutual trust building to improve and improvise outcomes (Welsh, 2005). Simmons on the other hand relies primarily on charismatic leadership that is focused on exploiting the potential of black youth through hip-hop culture that may not apply to people across the board. His leadership style is based on inflaming the emotions of the target audience and thereby influencing their decision-making.

McShane defines a leader as ‘one who has vision, perseverance, and the capacity to inspire others' (2003). Welsh’s leadership addresses organizational leadership and exhorts them to adopt dynamic strategies to meet the challenges of the changing times. The leadership is focused on the knowledge and skills of the employees and exploits them to achieve organizational goals. Strong communication skills and an intrinsic understanding of human nature become vital factors that inspire change towards the better. Cross-cultural understanding and relationship building are strong ingredients of Welsh’s leadership. Simmons’ leadership has emerged from a sense or concept of inequity, racism and self-empowerment of African Americans. He has exploited the cultural dynamics of Hip Hop phenomenon of the black community to address their myriad problems.

Welsh encourages creativity and innovative practices that give a unique perspective to the participatory approach of management and students. The motivating factor of leadership facilitates adaptability to changing equations, which occur due to the rapidly changing environment of emerging new patterns in various organizational processes. It has another very important attribute of recognizing the wide scope of emerging opportunities. The empirical relationship between leaders and emerging changes is critical for a given situation and therefore, good leadership demands a better-informed leader who is capable of taking initiative and at the same time, he is also able to inculcate confidence in his followers to move forward. Simmons promotes self-empowerment as the main tool for optimizing performance and says that there are no failures, only quitters (Simmons, 2007).

One can, therefore, conclude that Welsh’s leadership style is universal in its application and addresses the business strategies of organizational leadership. But, Russell Simmon's leadership is confined to addressing the problems of black communities and bringing them to the political centre stage.