What is Leadership? – Hrspot

A Leader is someone who would be continuously imparting knowledge, mentoring, motivating, inspiring, and encouraging their team, and provides training and support from every perspective, in order to make their team more focused, dedicated, and encouraged towards their assigned job role. 

Leaders also encourage their teams to work with zeal, creativity, productivity, research, and development, etc. A leader is someone who would balance both the goals of the organisation and the goals of the employees, thereby providing complete satisfaction for employees and the organization. 

Leaders ensure that their team should work for the success, growth, productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness of the organisation. 

Leaders play a vital role in the decision-making and problem-solving activities in the organization and organizational culture. They get involved in every risk, uncertainties conflicts dispute, etc. in the organisation and provide solutions to the problems. Leaders take fast and quick action as and when required.

Leadership can be defined as the act of planning, managing, training, controlling, promoting, supporting, and directing both the employees and the organisation for the fulfillment of the success of the organisation. It translates the vision and mission of the organisation into reality. It is the ability to maintain very good interpersonal relations with their teams so that there is a very strong understanding and transparency among the team members. 

OBJECTIVES OF LEADERSHIP:

• Proving training and development, every assistance to the teams, whenever required. 
• Developing and building strong relations with the team and with the management.
• Continuously monitoring and supervising the team, so that the team can improve their performance, resulting in best performance. 
• Bringing the individual or the group of people towards a common goal, and the common goal is to attain the success, growth, productivity of the organisation. 
• Developing inter personal skills, social skills, behavioural skills, communication skills, confidence etc. of the team.
• Developing the adaptability of change, that may take place in the organisation so that the team can accept the changes and can work with the change process.
• Making the team to complete their work within the given time frame.
• Finding out more efficient processes that can be executed and implemented in the organisation.

ORGANISATION REQUIRES EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP FOR THE FOLLOWING REASONS:

• VISSION: Leadership help to develop a clear crystal vision for both the short term and the long term goals that can be achievable by the organisation. 

• COMMUNICATION: Leadership provides clear communication to their teams, in accordance with their assigned targets. Effective communication is required to promote the products and services of the company, aligning with the mission and vision of the organization.  
• DECISION- MAKING: It facilitates effective, prompt decisions of the leaders depending upon the strength and weakness of the company. 
• PASSION:  The growth of the organization takes place, when the leaders are passionate about the success, efficiency, effectiveness, mission, vision of the organisation.  Leadership facilitates courage, dedication, sincerity towards their team. 
• GUIDANCE: It provides continuous mentoring, training to the team for more and more improvement; it should be ensured that the team work efforts should be aligning with the goals of the organisation.
• COMMITMENT:  It provides commitment for the attainment of vision, mission, and success of the organisation. It encourages the team to figure out every possible ways to achieve both the long term and short term goals of the organization. 
• INTEGRITY: It attributes to integrity, truthfulness, fairness, regardless of any problems, disputes, conflicts, taking place in the organisation.
• CONFIDENCE: Develops the confidence of the team by hearing the problems, worries, concerns, thereby facilitating smooth work environment and bringing out the best productivity from the team. 
• MORALE: When the leaders are continuously encouraging their team with regard to their performance so that the outcome is the better result, then it automatically assures the confidence of the team to achieve the mission and vision of the organization. High Morale amongst the employees gives their best to achieve the mission and vision of the organization and they remain focused upon their work targets, thereby reducing the distractions. 
• GROWTH: Despite of the challenges, growth of the organization becomes easy to be attainable, when the leaders and their team is open minded and flexible. The organisation can develop and grow only with the efforts of the leaders and their team.
• COORDINATION: Leader coordinates both with the team and the management, in order to understand their needs, desires, and aspirations and to take every initiative to provide complete satisfaction to the team and the management, both in the positive and negative situation. 

QUALITIES OF A GOOD LEADER:

1. HONESTY AND INTEGRITY. Leaders are honest and follow the principle of integrity. 
2. INSPIRATION: Leaders inspire themselves and to their teams as well. 
3. COMMUNICATION: Leaders clearly communicate with the team about their assigned job roles and responsibilities that needs to be achieved within the given time frame. 
4. VISSION:  Leaders have the clear idea about how to achieve the vision of the organization and accordingly they provide every guidance for the attainment of the vision. 
5. INITIATIVE: Leaders take every initiative to see that their teams are performing well and the goals of the organization are also fulfilled. 
6. EMPATHY: There should be a feeling of empathy and emotions in the leaders, which would help them to develop a strong bonding with their teams, as a result of which, that would help him to address the problems, complaints, aspirations of the team members. 
7. INNOVATION: In enables to execute and implement creative ideas for the leaders, same time it gives freedom to the team to recommendations. Innovation allows the leaders to think differently and to avail the feedback from their team. 
8. ACTIVE LISTENING:  It helps to judge and analyse the strength and weakness of the employees. Active Listening is the sign of respect which indicates that the employees problems, viewpoints, opinions are been valued and are important for the company. Same time, it also helps the leaders to create and to build long lasting relationship with their team and with the management.
9. DELEGATION: Leaders are aware that they are not able to take care of all the tasks of the organization, so they delegate, distribute the tasks to the team, as per the key skills of the team members, so that ultimately the goals are being achieved both by the leader and by their team members.
10. PROBLEM-SOLVING: Leaders should possess the ability to 

Sort out the problems, disputes, and conflicts, immediately into the solution, as and when it is arising in the organization. They would not let the problem grow more. It helps to eliminate the barriers in the workforce in the organisation. It needs to be ensured that the problems need to be taken care of with fast and prompt strategies so that there is immediate solution to the problems.    

11. INTELLIGENCE: A leader should be intelligent enough to contribute their best efforts, for the success, productivity, and efficiency of the organisation. Must be intelligent to handle and manage all the crucial and difficult problems in the organisation. Same time they should have the ability of how to intelligently deal with their team members and get their work done within a time frame. Before taking any decision, the leaders should intelligently analysis the strength and weaknesses of the organization.

12. OPEN MINDEDNESS AND CREATIVITY: The leaders should be open to new ideas, opinions, perspectives, possibilities. They should have the ability of creativity and implement new strategies, if required.  They should be thinking beyond “Out Of the Box” so that they can figure out more possible ways for the success of the organisation and to execute certain change, if necessary, thereby encouraging the team to work with the change process. 

13. PATIENCE:  It facilitates that the organization takes time to grow, develop and to gradually produce better results. Accordingly, continuous improvements and patience lead to success of the organization.

14. FLEXIBILITY:  Leaders needs to be flexible enough to address to the change process and to make their team to work with the change modules and trends. Also, they need to cope up with very positive and negative situation , as and when it is taking place in the organization. 

TYPES OF LEADERSHIP:

1. AUTHENTIC LEADERSHIP: It focuses upon the authenticity, genuine attitude of the person towards their job role, who should not be acting in the manipulative way.
2.  AUTOCRATIC LEADERSHIP: Leaders having the ability of high authority and high level of power and so they take the decision independently, based upon their own intelligence, thoughts, willingness, without consulting with anyone.
3. LAISSEZ FAIRE LEADERSHIP:  In this type of leadership, leaders do not impose control upon their teams directly. A very minor supervision is required as the team is highly experienced.  Laissez Faire leaders fail to provide continuous feedback to their team, under his supervision. 
4. TRANSACTIONAL LEADERSHIP:  Under this process, the leaders should clarify the job roles of their team, would accomplish the requirements of the task and then would reward/ punish the team members based upon their performance.
5. BUREAUCRATIC LEADERSHIP: Under this type of leadership, leaders strictly follow to the organizational rules, regulations, terms and conditions, policies and procedures. Accordingly, they make their teams to follow the same. 
6. CHARISMATIC LEADERSHIP:  In this process, the leader sets the role model for their teams and drives the team to show high level of performance. These leaders are much committed to the organization both in the short run and in the long run. They have more faith in themselves, rather than their team. They are the inspiration for their team members.
7. PARTICIPATIVE LEADERSHIP: Participative leadership is also known as Democratic Leadership. Under this process, the leader consults with their team and takes their ideas, viewpoints, opinion, and suggestions, at the time of decision making. So, as and when ,any changes taking place in the organization, this kind of leadership helps the employees to accept the changes very easily , because the employees view points are being considered at the time of decision making process.
8. DIRECTIVE LEADERSHIP : In this process, the leaders gives the guidance to their team about what needs to be done, how to be done , scheduling the work calendar of the team members, thereby measuring the performance of the employees .
9. SUPPORTIVE LEADERSHIP : The leaders are giving their 100 % support to their team members, both officially and personally too. Leaders are friendly and approachable. They show care and concern for the wish, desire, need of their team members. 
10. 10. ACHIEVEMENT ORIENTED LEADERSHIP: Leaders encourages, motivates their team to achieve high and best performance by building the confidence of the team members. 

It is applicable for unstructured task, where the team member’s requirement for the achievement should be high.