Introduction
Leadership is a very important skill which is not possessed by all; hardly very few people are blessed with this skill. Being a leader is not easy; it poses many challenges and the person who overcomes these challenges make a successful leader. A leader instills confidence and provides motivation to the employees, motivation is an extremely important factor and motivation can easily transform an employee within no time, ones the transformation of the employee takes place, the goals of the company would become much easier to achieve. This is why motivation is considered to be one of the most important factors and all most all the companies look for new methods to motivate the employees and to bring out the best out of them. This paper will focus upon the three most difficult challenges which the leaders have to face in order to be called successful leaders and how successful leaders face those challenges.
“A simple definition of leadership is that leadership is the art of motivating a group of people to act towards achieving a common goal. Put even more simply, the leader is the inspiration and director of the action. He or she is the person in the group that possesses the combination of personality and skills that make others want to follow his or her direction.” (Leadership, 3 January 2008). I firmly believe in this definition of leadership because I feel this is the aptest definition of leadership.
Discussion
“Nothing matters more in winning than getting the right people on the field. Differentiation helps you do that.” (Welch Way, 3 January 2009). One of the biggest challenges faced by the leaders these days is getting the right people for the job, any job can be completed by anybody but the point is how efficiently a person can do a job? Leadership is all about perfection and any wrong decisions taken can prove very fatal. For instance a leader hires a person, who he believes is the right man/woman for the organization but the work of that employee proves otherwise, the organization can suffer because of the same and the loss occurred because of that wrong decision of the leader will always remain irrecoverable. It is very difficult these days to find the right people, who can commit their future to the organization but leaders are expected to have the quality of differentiation, a leader who possesses this quality can never go wrong in the process of selecting the right people for the organization. The quality of differentiation is very difficult to instill in a leader, this is something which should come naturally to the leader, no educational institution teaches this quality and it cannot be learnt anywhere and it is purely dependent on instincts. A leader should always differentiate the right people from the wrong people in order to succeed in his/her endeavors. This is one of the biggest challenges which the leaders these days face, if a leader is born with this quality then major pitfalls in leadership can be avoided without facing much difficulty.
There are ethical problems which the leaders face; these problems arise when the employees forget the ethics which should never be forgotten, ethics in other words are values which an employee is expected to stick to in any circumstance. In financial institutions ethical problems arise because the employees may involve themselves in various scams and other undesirable activities, solely done for the purpose of money. Such problems can be treated by having a code of ethics, one ethical standard should be followed by everyone and there should not be double standards, meaning that the code of ethics should not treat employees of different position unequally, all the people working under the leader should be treated equally and the code of ethics should be followed.
“To meet the many demands of performing their functions, managers assume multiple roles. A role is an organized set of behaviors. Henry Mintzberg has identified ten roles common to the work of all managers. The ten roles are divided into three groups: interpersonal, informational, and decisional. The informational roles link all managerial work together. The interpersonal roles ensure that information is provided. The decisional roles make significant use of the information. The performance of managerial roles and the requirements of these roles can be played at different times by the same manager and to different degrees depending on the level and function of management. The ten roles are described individually, but they form an integrated whole.” (Henry Mintzberg, 3 January 2009). Another big challenge which the leaders of today face is the daunting task of decision making. Decision making is the most challenging task for any leader. One wrong decision can change many things around in an organization and those changes will surely be for the worse of the organization on the other hand one good decision can help the organization in more ways than one. Decision making is a very delicate process, numerous things have to be kept in mind, a leader just cannot go on making wrong decisions because that would result in disaster, even one wrong decision can be disastrous for any organization so considering all these things it becomes imperative that leaders analyze the situation and make their decisions wisely, if a leader analyzes a situation, naturally he/she will be able to make right decisions so analyzing the situation is a must for any leader to avoid taking hasty decisions.
Conclusion
When all the above things are considered, a conclusion is drawn that leadership is a very big challenge but the leaders have to be equipped with the suitable skills to handle the problems and the leaders who succeed in handling an organization efficiently have all the needed ingredients in them. These are just not handful ingredients, it takes a lot to be a successful leader and only people of the highest caliber can lake it at the top.
References
Henry Mintzberg, The Nature of Managerial Work, Harper & Row, 1973.
Leadership. In About.com. Web.
Straight from the Gut. In Welsh Way.