How to Be an Effective Leader Essay

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Aligning with the interests and concerns of one’s people is part of what helps to make a leader effective, as Calhoun and Damm (2015) point out. The other part of what makes a leader effective is vision and ability—and the two go together, just like a theory and experiment go together. The analogy is useful because, as Chait, Ryan and Taylor (2004) note, theory leads to practice; therefore, vision is to ability as theory is to practice, and both support effective leadership so long as they are rooted in a framework that helps achieve the desired goal of the organization, group, entity or community. Leadership is about leading—and leading means providing followers with both the vision of what needs to be accomplished and the ability to make that accomplishment possible. There are many different ways a leader can approach the objective: leadership styles are myriad. However, leadership must be grounded in a sense of being there to serve something that is greater than oneself because the goal must be something outside of oneself, otherwise there is no need to strive and work for it. So leadership is, in this sense, about humbling oneself enough to realize there is something greater that needs to be accomplished. To this degree, leaders like Pete Frates, Pope Francis, Beatrice Mtetwa, Bill and Melinda Gates and Sir Ganesh Dutt are all examples of people who are great leaders: they all have applied that vision and that ability towards the end goal of helping others (and themselves) to achieve that special something that is higher, that calls to them to reach out.

Leadership principles that I possess that would make me a great leader are my devotion to transparency, honesty, ethics and virtuous habits.

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I think the bedrock of fundamental leadership is truly in virtue ethics, because these are principles that elevate one towards achieving the ideals—the one, the good, the true, the beautiful—that the ancient philosophers used to uphold as the things worth pursuing in life. When these principles are ignored or set aside, unethical behavior can creep in—which is exactly what happened in the case of Enron. That is to be avoided at all costs, and to do so we must remember observe the guidelines that keep people focused on doing what is best and right, and as far as I can tell the best guidelines are embodied in the Golden Rule and in the virtue ethics advocated by thinkers like Aristotle.

When it comes to skills to help put these principles in play, my knowledge and my emotional and social intelligence skills (the ability to read and understand emotions and provide the support needed to help others advance towards the desired goal is a very useful skill for leaders) have served me well.

My self-assessment at SkillsYouNeed.com showed that I have 5 fairly well-developed leadership styles: 1) coercive, 2) pace-setter, 3) visionary, 4) democratic and 5)….....

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