Having what it takes to show leadership depends on your context. Are you in charge of a large number of people or none at all? To influence people, can rely on factual evidence and technical knowledge or do you need to appeal to human values or rights?
There is also your definition of leadership to consider. The popular view says that being a leader means taking charge of a group and directing it toward an objective. To get chosen for such a role, you need to have leadership presence, credibility, character and fairly strong influencing skills. To win the support of diverse stakeholders, a vision and good relationship building skills also help. But, fundamentally, you must have something to say, an idea that you think will improve the lot of your followers or that they will want to do anyway. For example, you might be successful in leading people to improve your community even if there is no immediate benefit to your followers. Leadership skills involve the process of getting people on board, but you must have great content to promote as well. As they say, content is king. Without a compelling idea to advocate, you will have to be extraordinarily persuasive to get anyone to listen to you.
Another view of leadership makes it independent of being in a formal role over the people you want to influence. Take Martin Luther King for example. As a result of his leading a demonstration against segregation on buses, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. Most theories of leadership focus on how he led his followers on the street. But you could turn this around and say that they helped him show leadership to the U.S. government and the population at large. Anyway, he certainly had a leadership impact on the U.S. government without being a manager in any part of the government. You could say that he showed leadership from the side-lines or bottom-up. This example illustrates how it is possible to show leadership to people who don?t report to you and, equally importantly, how leadership can have nothing to do with managing the implementation of your proposal. This is also the case when you convince your boss to do something different. She might want to implement your idea through someone else, leaving you to get on with other duties. In this case, your leadership comes to an end, like that of Martin Luther King, when your target audience buys your idea.
What both views of leadership share is that you need to have a new idea to promote, even if only a small scale change in a simple procedure at work. Then, you need to have the courage to challenge the status quo, to speak up and be heard. As far as style is concerned, this is very situational. If you are in a very factual domain like high tech, engineering or medicine, you may be able to lead others by presenting hard evidence with quiet conviction or even in quite an assertive way. Your audience might not care if you don?t have a grand vision or an inspirational communication style. In politics or at senior levels in an organization there are not many clear cut right and wrong answers. Here you need to be more inspiring and visionary if you want to convince people to buy your idea. If you are a front line employee trying to convince your colleagues to try a new way of serving customers, you don?t need to be an orator on the scale of Martin Luther King if you can simply demonstrate how your idea works and is better than whatever they are doing. A lot of leadership is simply by example where there is no requirement for a lofty vision or a compelling personality in order to show leadership.
Style considerations are, therefore, entirely situational. It depends on what is required to move your target audience. Being in charge of others is not necessary to show leadership either. Hence the only universal requirements are to have something worth saying and the courage to speak up. This means wanting strongly enough to differentiate yourself, to change your world or make your mark, that you are willing to risk group disapproval by questioning its practices. It?s about being a bit of a rebel but not so much that you are seen as an oddball or eccentric. 相关的主题文章:
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