Sources of Leadership
Leadership is a social influence technique that leverages the efforts of others to attain a goal. As a leader, my sources of leadership include, external, participative and self-leadership. My external leadership involves keeping the team protected from the external environment while also keeping the team connected to the external environment, and accounts for 45% of my leadership skills. Engaging in tasks such as networking to work cooperatively and obtain information, negotiating with top management for acknowledgement, assistance, and resources, and analyzing external indicants of effectiveness such as overall customer reviews are some of my external leadership sources.
Participative leadership, on the other hand, means listening to my staff and empowering them to participate in decision-making procedures. My sources of participative leadership accounts for 35% of my leadership skills. The participative leadership sources include; autocracy, that is I majorly welcome input from employees but maintain all of the decision-making power. Moreover, another source is employee empowerment through promotions and appraisals, and servant leadership.
Finally, self-leadership is the process of knowing yourself, recognizing your desired experiences, and purposefully directing yourself toward them. My self-leadership sources account for 20% of my leadership skills. Sources include focus of control and self-awareness. I believe that this is my weak-link to becoming the best leader, therefore, what I should change are emotional intelligence, self-efficacy, and self-management. By improving on my self-leadership, I am confident that I will become a better leader since leadership begins from self-efficacy and understanding that emotional intelligence is necessary when leading a team. I will strive, therefore, to hone my emotional intelligence skills, self-management, and self-efficacy skills to become better at self-leadership.
Authentic Leadership
Leadership is one of the most complicated and multifaceted processes. It has been thoroughly researched throughout the years and is now more important than ever in today’s fast-paced and more interconnected society. In their research, Benmira and Agboola (2021) describe leadership as an influencing process intended at goal attainment, emphasizing leadership as a process geared at influencing a specific set of individuals to reach a specified purpose. Authentic leadership, according to Bishop (2013), is focused with how a person perceives; that is, it focuses on actions that suggest that leaders are self-aware and control the self accordingly. To be more authentic with team members, authentic leaders analyze their own faults, talents, and values. Authentic leadership fosters positive self-development through increasing self-awareness and self-regulated positive actions in both leaders and associates.
Like authentic leadership, self-leadership entails an internally controlled decision, value alignment, and execution of the chosen action. The self-leadership model is built on the strengths-based capacity framework and is connected with experiences from implementing organizational interventions aimed at developing positive self-leadership. I believe self-leadership is similar to authentic leadership in that it involves an awareness of self in its uniqueness based on an individual’s one-of-a-kind personality combination. Self-leadership, like authentic leadership, is about the traits of the leaders.
Everyday Leadership
In his TED Talk speech, Everyday Leadership, Drew Dudley (2021) discusses the idea of everyday leadership and how even the smallest action may have a profound impact on a person or situation. He believes that through rethinking leadership, every one of us can become the genuine leaders we are meant to be. According to Dudley, leadership is not a feature of the few or the remarkable; it is a quality that we all share, and he seeks to help everyone uncover the leader within themselves. In this humorous TED Talk, Drew Dudley illustrates how we have all affected someone’s life – in a positive manner — and very frequently without recognizing we have done so. He compels us all to understand that leadership is the process of making others’ lives better.
Dudley opens his speech by asking, “How many of you are entirely comfortable calling yourself leaders?” Dudley (2012). He has repeatedly posed this question to crowds, and he has found that the majority of the audience does not raise their hands. We do not tend to acknowledge or speak about our good qualities as much as we would our bad. More often than not, we are humbler than we give ourselves credit for. We exhibit leadership qualities every time we engage in a common endeavor, however, we rarely consider ourselves to be leaders. Dudley asks us to appreciate the leadership capacities we have held and own them. Taking ownership of our good qualities, we embrace the fact that we are indeed good leaders.
Dudley discusses a lovable episode from his life that had a life-changing impact on the life of another to illustrate ‘everyday’ leadership. He emphasizes the value of redefining leadership to focus on “lollipop” moments, on how many of these we produce, appreciate, pay forward, and give praise for, as we have redefined leadership as transforming the world when there is no such thing as a world (Dudley, 2012).His objective is to transform each person’s perception of the world one at a time, so that they may grasp how much others care and what a tremendous agent of change it can be.
The video’s key takeaways are as follows: everybody has at one time been a leader, ‘lollipop’ moments make a world of difference, and altering just one person’s perspective on the world is an act of everyday leadership. These essential points call to me since, in theory, being a leader is just about altering someone’s life. True leadership emerges from ordinary acts of influencing one person’s perspective on life. I never quite understood that being a leader entails more than the accomplishment of a common goal. However, Dudley has opened my eyes to the reality that changing someone’s life is the first step at becoming a leader. Moreover, the moments that highlight our achievements in changing lives is all that matters in our journey to becoming better leaders.
Self-Leadership
To me, self-leadership means being capable of leading myself to achieve my personal and career goals and objectives while also contributing to the success of the company or organization for which I work. It entails having a strong grasp of who I am, where I want to go, and what I am capable of doing, as well as being able to regulate my emotions and actions in a way that leads me to success. Self-leadership is crucial because it enables me to meet my professional objectives and serve as an effective leader for others. Being able to lead by example is a quality in a leader.
Self-leadership, in my opinion, tries to uncover the purpose of a work or activity and to cultivate a high degree of interest, excitement, and satisfaction in that endeavor. Krampitz et al. (2021) investigated the link between self-leadership, self-efficacy, and performance and discovered that self-leadership influences how self-efficacy is viewed, which influences performance results. As a leader, using self-leadership should nurture desirable, successful habits while suppressing unwanted, ineffective behaviors. To become the finest leader in my field, I must practice self-leadership in my daily life in order to inspire favorable outcomes from my team members.
A great leader, in my opinion, is one who improves others around them. As a result, the adjustments I need to do to become the leader I want to be include: participating in honest, open dialogues with my colleagues, educating other employees rather than delivering orders, establishing clear employee objectives and expectations, and soliciting feedback on my leadership. To become the best leader possible, I must first be open to new ideas. Second, self-discipline is required to become a successful leader; hence, I will cultivate discipline in my professional (and personal) life in order to be an effective leader and to motivate others to be disciplined as well. People will assess my abilities to lead by the degree of discipline I demonstrate at work.
References
Benmira, S., & Agboola, M. (2021). Evolution of leadership theory. BMJ Leader, 2020.
Bishop, W., H. (2013). Defining the Authenticity in Authentic Leadership. The Journal of Values-Based Leadership, 6(1). Web.
Dudley, D. (2012). Everyday leadership [Video]. TED Talks. Web.
Krampitz, J., Seubert, C., Furtner, M., & Glaser, J. (2021). Self‐leadership: A meta‐analytic review of intervention effects on leaders’ capacities. Journal of Leadership Studies, 15(3), 21–39.