INTEGRITY

Integrity the Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality

Integrity the Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality

Introduction

Leadership theory is contributed in several contexts with arrays of meaning. Leadership is the empirical power. Leadership is organizing a group of people and motivating achieving a common goal. Sometimes the terms management and leadership overlap each other. Management is a position, and it could only be achieving positions in an organization. Leaders have the behavioral traits that could be performed without any position. Both the leadership and management require communication skills, collaborative skills, and supportive behavior. Management has some boundaries in the organization, and while leaders enhance their skills at their best without any boundaries. Leadership process took position in several phases of organizations, and professional can persuade leadership in organizations (Kotter, 1996). Number of researches has focused on exploring the dynamics of leadership, what comprises of leadership etc. Similarly, like different authors Henry Cloud a clinical psychologist has published a book titled “integrity the courage to meet the demands of reality”, describing mainly the role of integrity in defining the leadership skills in a person (Cloud, 2009). This study in this connection will analyze the following questions:

What is the connection between book and leadership?

What are some of the areas of leadership the authors did not address?

What are key take away to apply to leadership situations?

What is the connection between book and leadership?

Leadership concept and its presentation by Henry Cloud

Leadership is a concept used in many different contexts with an array of meanings. Accordingly, there is a lack of common understanding as to what leadership is and what constitutes good leadership. In fact, a Google search of leadership definition leads to more than 22 million results. In everyday language, the word leadership is used in a variety of ways, resulting in a myriad of quite different understandings of the same word. A few examples follow:

Position or rank: “The leadership of the organization is made up of six members.”

Status or market share: “The organization has leadership in the industry.”

Direction: “She provided leadership for the initiative.”

Skill or capacity: “He demonstrates strong leadership.”

Activity: “The group engaged in leadership.”

On contrary to these definitions, Cloud has discussed leadership on the basis of integrity. According to Henry Cloud the integrity of a person determines its leadership abilities and its ratio of success in leading. This definition to some extent is the excerpts of various leadership theories, which defines traits of leaders. Trait theories have made according to leaders personal traits, effectiveness, and response to situations. Although there are many traits that make up a strong leader; however, some prominent ones have to be distinguished from the less prominent ones (Cloud, 2009). The most important quality that a leader must possess is to have exceptional communication as well as persuasion skills. To achieve exceptional communication skills it is however important for leaders to have completeness which ultimately interpreted as integrity. However, what the book was missing is the proper alignment of integrity with ...