Nature and Scope of Leadership
Organizational growth depends on the leadership and management of senior people in the business. Leadership influences the employees’ attitude in the business and creates development in many organizations that utilize it properly. Max Kouene does not stick to any given form of leadership because the emerging issues in corporate leadership require different approaches. He also focuses on transformational leadership that focuses on improving the employees’ welfare. The leadership activity encompasses the senior officials’ ability to influence and guide other staff into reliably conducting business operations.
It is critical to provide clarity of purpose and motivate and guide employees to have operational focus and sheds light on the organizational direction. Leaders identify responsibilities and assign them to different employees to create effectively and motivate them to meet organizational goals. Leadership involves the use of important skills like listening, communication, critical thinking, and time management to control the activities within a business. Such skills enhance better relationships between the employees and management. Below is an analysis of answers given by Max Kouene, the chief executive officer (CEO) of McCain Foods that indicate the nature of leadership.
Benefits of Leadership
According to Max Kouene, the manager, leadership helps to identify the objectives and goals of the organization. A good leader identifies the organizational objectives and helps the employees to familiarize themselves with them to ensure that they achieve them within the targeted deadline. Identifying the objectives helps the leaders to create plans and implement them to meet the desired goals. Planning in an organization creates a sense of direction within the business and helps employees acknowledge their roles and responsibilities toward achieving organizational objectives. Furthermore, leaders direct employees on what to do and avoid in their daily operations. Understanding the organizational structure of a business enhances the propulsion of the business’s success. Businesses need to have sane leadership that acknowledges the importance of organizational goals and their contribution to the business’s success.
Another reason why leadership is essential for businesses is that the leaders manage to organize and delegate duties to different employees based on unique reasons. Leaders identify the strengths and weaknesses of specific employees, help them change their weaknesses, and utilize them to create opportunities for the business. After identifying the duties to be conducted, leaders select employees that may manage them well based on experience and skills. The leaders may also opt to assign the roles to people without these skills to help them gain experience in the activities. Leadership involves promoting employees’ skills and helping them to acquire new ones for their development. Leadership builds the employee’s knowledge and skills in different sectors (Seidman et al., 2019). Therefore, leadership plays a vital role in promoting talent and helping workers gain new skills and expound their contribution to organizational development. Besides promoting the achievement of the company’s objectives, it also focuses on developing employee welfare. Enhancing the development of employee welfare motivates employees to work extra hard and create business success.
Leaders create good relationships among employees and promote the employees’ behavior. Businesses encourage employees to relate with each other positively. Leaders identify the areas that cause conflict among employees and help them solve them. Leaders pay attention to creating a conducive environment for the employees. They mediate between the employees in conflict and help them remake a positive reunion among them. For example, if the problem arises from the division of labor, the leaders help solve the problem by assigning each employee specific roles to play in the business. Prudent conflict management activities by the managers help the business avoid some faults that arise due to wanting relationships among employees. Employee management and anger resolution among employees benefit the business by creating a supportive business surrounding through teamwork enhancement.
Leadership Skills
Some leadership skills identified and highlighted as essential for business development are proper listening, critical and independent thinking, excellent communication skills, and time management. The manager says that listening is an important skill every leader should have. Listening helps leaders to gains information and digest it before making decisions (Sharma et al., 2019). Proper listening skills aid in acknowledging the key areas in businesses and enhance the proper relationship between the management and stakeholders. Leaders should be keen on listening to what others comment about the business management to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats it faces. Leaders must also give others, especially their subordinates, opportunities to express themselves. They gain information about the employees’ fears and expectations, thus finding ways to create peace and embrace changes that promote peace within the business environment. Additionally, the leaders identify the areas that need transformation and understand the employees’ efforts.
Critical thinking helps leaders evaluate the information they gain from specific sources concerning the firm and their employees. After collecting the information, they analyze it and make conclusions that determine the course of action for the business. Critical thinking helps to identify the loopholes in operations and find possible solutions. Judgment relies on critical thinking and evaluation of the information obtained from various sources to find the most effective solutions to the problems. First, people identify the problem they face and then establish priorities (Zeike et al., 2019). After establishing the priorities, they base the decisions on a life plan and choose an overall strategy to face the problem. They then use the decisions properly and evaluate their decisions after the implementation. Critical thinking helps the business to create a better understanding of its responsibilities and creates a sense of direction. Leadership is a position that requires one to have critical thinking skills to ensure that the business makes appropriate decisions that propel it towards greater success.
Influential leaders should also get equipped with proper communication skills. Communication is vital for everyone since it allows an effective flow of information. Communication helps leaders collect information from different sources, translate it, and give feedback. They must have proper skills for the communication cycle to be effective and to enhance the proper understanding of each other. Communication facilitates the betterment of the relationship between the employees and their managers, the managers and employees’ rights leadership, the company and competitors, and other stakeholders. Leaders must display a great understanding and perception of the laws of communication (Seidman et al., 2019). They should give others chances to express themselves and demand their rights. Concurrently, they should also represent their organization effectively by expressing the information about the organization without communication constraints. The leaders should eliminate any communication barriers that they project to alter information flow in the long run. Proper communication enhances following instructions to the end and propels the meeting of organizational goals. Thus, they should be positive image builders and brand ambassadors for the business by possessing quality skills while relaying information in and out of the organization.
Besides adopting proper communication etiquette, leaders should be cautious about time management and work hand in hand with other employees to ensure that the management experiences proper time management. Managers may execute time management by placing time schedules and timetables to illustrate the flow of duties. With proper scheduling, the workers know where they are supposed to be and when they should be there. Enforcing these time management policies creates a conducive working environment since there is a flow of order and specifications of timelines. The programs enhance the flow of duties and information since the workers are in the right places as the leader assigns them. The workers meet the work deadlines through proper time management activities that enhance their effectiveness in following the projected business.
Challenges Encountered in Leadership
However, leaders face some common challenges in their daily working environment. These challenges include time wastage, difficulty in managing key stakeholders, employee unwillingness to cooperate, and difficulties in honing activities (Oc, 2018). Leaders waste much time trying to perfect the ability of some employees to conduct operations. Leaders always target influencing the employees to manage their power to do some activities. They spend much time focusing on an individual, yet they may assign the duty to someone else who can manage the work smoothly and quickly. Time management is one of the qualities that leaders should possess. Nonetheless, focusing on one individual often consumes more time than generalizing or assigning the work to others. The time management problem faced in leadership is also difficult to control since prioritizing the main goal other than employee improvement is unbalanced.
Another problem in leadership is the unwillingness of some employees to participate in skill-improving activities. Leaders focus on improving the employees’ welfare to meet the organizational objectives. Enhancing the employees’ welfare and expounding their skills help the business to improve its products and services quality. Product quality depends on many factors, among them the employees’ know-how. Therefore, expanding the workers’ knowledge guarantees the production of high-quality goods and services. However, some employees may be unwilling to participate in these events that improve their skills. They may escape these functions and miss counseling sessions hence deeming the company’s will to equip them with the latest skills in their industry. The managers thus find it a hard task in ensuring that leadership succeeds in such an organization. Employees should always be ready to follow their leaders’ advice on activities that may boost their skills and motivation in delivering the best ideas that may attract better pay.
Besides time management constraints and employee unwillingness to promote their skills, another challenge encountered in leadership that the manager identifies is ineffectiveness in managing the stakeholders. In some incidences, the stakeholders need instinctive communication for specific business actions. Yet, leaders want to take time to collect information, analyze it, and determine whether it is reliable, after which they communicate with the stakeholders (Oc, 2018). This leads to confrontations between the management and stakeholders due to unreliable, slow responses. Moreover, the leaders have to critically think and evaluate the best ways to communicate to the stakeholders to avoid or lower disappointments. Taking time in the critical decision-making process results in some stakeholders’ lack of patience, leading to heated arguments. The discomfort created by the urgency of information among stakeholders may be inappropriate and poses a huge challenge for the leaders in the firm. Leaders face many challenges in controlling the stakeholders within the business leading to misunderstandings and escalation of strikes.
How Leaders Solve the Challenges they Encounter in Leadership
Leaders may solve the challenges they face through setting personal and organizational goals, delegating the work to different people, maximizing the unique value, getting role clarity, and strengthening team alignment and collaboration among different workers. Creatin personal goals in line with the organizational goals help the employees to identify their contribution to the strengthening activities within the organization. It also helps them acknowledge their role in contributing to the organizational goals and objectives. Leaders create a positive impression among workers by helping them to acknowledge they can work and still improve on their skills and know-how hence maximizing their unique value.
Conversely, leaders may encourage the installment of proper communication channels that improve the clarity of a specific message. The communication channel should be easily accessible to the consumers to ease accessing important information for their development. Role clarity creates an informed understanding of one’s duty towards relaying reliable output. The business leaders should also strengthen teamwork and collaboration among subordinates to have uniformity in production to improve the relations within the firm. This motivates employees to share ideas and understand each other’s weaknesses, empowering themselves and eliminating chances of failure.
Trends Topics in Leadership
Change is inevitable, and many leaders acknowledge the fact and are determined to ensure that they benefit the business growth and expansion when changes occur. The modernization of leadership structures in businesses is the changes taking place in leadership. Flattening organization structures, increasing the need to develop self and others, striving for gender balance, adopting the blended approach of management and leadership development, and training millennials are the trending issues in business leadership. Many businesses accommodate these trends in their leadership to ensure that they achieve their goals and objectives at a higher rate. The businesses encourage these changes to take over the market and gain competitive advantages against their competitors. Competitive advantages originate from the type of leadership that the companies use in their operation. Leaders in firms are the key determinants of the business outlook and prosperity hence have to make decisions based on the modern trends in their field of operation.
First, the most notable trend in the business world is incorporating management skills in leadership. Management in leadership is possible since leaders focus on meeting the organizational objective while supporting the development of employee welfare (Islam et al., 2019). Another method that supports management in leadership is the incorporation of corporate social responsibilities Development of such a strategy influences the business success since solving the issues concerning measures bot the economical and societal value that it contributes. Leaders appropriately use managerial skills to maximize the rate of business success. Management in leadership attaches economic value to any decision that the leaders make and ensures that both parties benefit. The management in leadership approach maintains employees by equipping them with more knowledge and understanding of how they can use their skills to exploit the economic opportunities surrounding them.
Another trending issue in the leadership world is the need to increase self and others. Leaders ensure that they also have the knowledge to conduct most of the activities in their organizations. As the leaders emphasize other workers adding value to their skills, they also ensure that they can do what they are recommending to others. Leading as an example helps create trustworthiness between the leaders and their subordinates. Businesses gain value since many workers follow example of their leaders. Leadership is vital for business development, and all authorities must ensure that they work in liaison with their employees to enhance their connection and develop better ways of gaining knowledge and trust. Firm leaders should engage in the activity they recommend to their employees to create unity and motivate the workers to engage in value addition activities.
Gender balance in many organizations globally is a trending issue that even leaders are concerned about. The governments have installed gender balance laws to guide businesses in making decisions that are considerate about gender. Leaders also have to take caution against gender biases since it may affect the business negatively by tainting a bad brand image that reduces profits since people are not interested in associating with brands that are bare poor reputation. Therefore, they have to support the employment and education of all interested members without displaying gender biases. Leaders should encourage all employees to engage in external workshops to increase their knowledge and understanding. Leaders are a public image and should thus adhere to all government rules on maintaining gender balance in all business-related activities.
Leadership in the modern world entails training millennials to create an understanding of different fields of business. Millennials relate with many cases of lack of hard work and spending much of their time on social media platforms. An increase in technological development discourages many of them from undertaking careers that demand a lot of effort. Thus, leaders are taking up the role of training many millennials to engage in these activities, such as plumbing. Leadership focuses on improving the self and others. Encouraging millennials to engage in these activities demanding much effort input is among the major trending issues in leadership. Many organizations are also engaging in a flattened organizational structure where the management reduces employment levels to a two or three-level structure. The strategy has reduced the number of leadership positions since most people are educated and often lie in the same employment category.
Conclusion
Leadership is the skill of directing people into increasing their knowledge about a specific skill. It involves giving a step-to-step guide on how they can become better. Leadership encourages many people to engage in these activities while attaining organizational goals. Leadership is a practical skill and focuses on developing people working in an organization by helping them identify responsibilities and assigning some to each of them. It is vital to have leadership in an organization since it helps plan and implement ideas. It also facilitates organization and delegation of duties to different workers and motivates them to work strongly to achieve their plans and the firm’s objectives. Modern trends in leadership influence major decision-making processes that affect the business. Leadership increases the need to develop the self and others. Other business actions adopt a blended approach to leadership and management development. Some of the challenges encountered in leadership are failure to hone effectiveness, developing employees, focusing on a single individual, and failure to manage stakeholders.
References
Islam, R., Osman, N., Othman, M. F., & Raihan, M. A. (2019). Impact of global leadership behaviors on performance of multinational companies. Humanities & Social Sciences Reviews, 7(3), 661-670. Web.
Oc, B. (2018). Contextual leadership: A systematic review of how contextual factors shape leadership and its outcomes. The Leadership Quarterly, 29(1), 218-235. Web.
Seidman, G., Pascal, L., & McDonough, J. (2020). What benefits do healthcare organisations receive from leadership and management development programmes? A systematic review of the evidence. BMJ Leader, leader-2019. Web.
Sharma, A., Agrawal, R., & Khandelwal, U. (2019). Developing ethical leadership for business organizations: A conceptual model of its antecedents and consequences. Leadership & Organization Development Journal.
Zeike, S., Bradbury, K., Lindert, L., & Pfaff, H. (2019). Digital leadership skills and associations with psychological well-being. International journal of environmental research and public health, 16(14), 2628. Web.