Leaders Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Leaders - Essay Example This creates motivation within the person and so does he leads a society, a business or a nation. Many times in our lives we interact with people whom others call as 'born leaders'. Such people are so influencing that instead of digging deep into their lives for understanding their source, we are simply impressed by their personality traits. Leadership is not simply made; it is created and developed individually with certain characteristics we would talk about later by giving examples. The debate is not simply concerned about whether leadership is born or created but also with the notion that we all analyse leadership skills in wrong phase, rather than analysing the skills in our leaders, we analyse our leaders and under specify their leading behaviours and styles. This is the main reason why most of us remain in a chaos to answer 'leadership born or made'. The question is perplexing, the answer simple. There has always remained a tendency to treat 'leadership' as a complete cure to the problem or simple 'cure'. Whether complete or simple, cure is cure. The phrase 'born leaders' is made to stand for all the qualities that are desirable in a top team or responsible post-holder-for example 'clarity of vision', 'a performance focus', 'flexibility', 'innovation' and 'winning commitment' etc. First of all, leaders never born, they are created by the circumstances, situations and consequences which provide opportunity to other hidden qualities to emerge and show off. Se condly, in the light of above phrase, if all of the leadership qualities are not present in us, at least some of them reside deep in our personalities. In reality, most of the research has made little detailed examination of the concept of leadership. That is why leadership is simply asserted and its nature assumed. Are Leaders born with Leadership skills Agility to take decisions along with pulling the entire team, no doubt does not require qualification, certificate or degree but still it would be wrong to say that a person is born with such qualities, because if we suppose for a while that one is born with decision making qualities, we do not mean that such person is blessed with such gifts but that the person has been groomed and brought up so well that he has learned how to make use of his decision making power and utilize his abilities. If we analyse leadership in terms of 'grooming' or 'development', we would see examples before us of the leaders that were not ever groomed or those who never had the opportunity of acquiring regular leadership development classes. Adolph Hitler, Mahathir Muhammad, Mahatma Gandhi, etc are among such leaders which are considered as 'born leaders' but they never acquired any formal leadership training. This means that what pulls out a good leader from us the circumstances later comes the knowledge and expertise. Leadership in the eyes of Socrates Socrates clearly taught what it takes to be a leader is the professional or technical competence, that means professionalism or knowledge is the prerequisite for holding a position of leadership responsibility. (Adair, 2002, p. 11) This also refers to the notion that capabilities like professionalism or knowledge are not born with a man, but are learned through experience and hard work. With leadership comes authority to take decisions. Socrates believes that among the three main forms of authorities i.e., the authority of position, the authority of