Leadership in Crisis Situations

Leadership in Crisis Situations

Introduction

A leader is an individual who plays the role of leading others. A leader can be considered as the captain of the ship. He leads and guides his or her team members in order to proceed in the right direction. Effective performance of his task requires certain qualities that have to be present in that individual. If anyone has a desire, curiosity and will power to become an effective leader, no one can make him stop to become a good leader. Good leaders are made not born. They develop themselves through self study, trainings and experiences (Jago, 1982). In order to inspire your workers to greater levels of joint effort, certain facts must be kept in mind and implemented accordingly. A good leader never stops learning, studying, experiencing and raising his knowledge to hone his leadership skills. Leadership is basically a process in which a person guides, leads and provides assistance to a group of people. Moreover, it influences others to achieve an objective and helps the organization to make it more organized and coherent.

Leadership has an important and strong role in the society and affects all the aspects of day to day lives including critical situations. Leaders can be elected or formally appointed or either can emerge from within a group. A good leader must possess numerous qualities such as decisiveness, intelligence, comprehension, courage, knowledge, education, personality, strength, charisma, dedication and above all integrity. All the leaders possess different leadership styles and have different leadership traits; however five attributes have very strong correlation with the leadership. They are Dominance, Intelligence, Self-confidence, high energy level and task related knowledge. Leadership may also be defined as ability or a skill to motivate others or to influence them towards achievement of certain goals (Probert & James, 2011). A leader is the primary person who takes the decision, he has to consider the emergence of decision and taking it appropriately to avoid inconveniences and achieve success. Normally, decisions are made with in-depth analysis, thoughtful advice of experts and enough thinking. On the contrary, emergent or crisis situations such as disaster, unstable and disruptive conditions; the responsibility and job of leaders become much difficult and challenging. This paper will be discussing different characteristics of a leader then evaluating these characteristics how effectively one can manage in crisis situations.

Discussion

When do you develop a leadership plan?

It is done at the very beginning of any task going to start. If for any reason it has not been done, then the best time to do it is now (Bass, 1985). The later one is going to decide about the number of good leaders and their skills and expertise requirement, the later that person is going to achieve his targets and goals. An appropriate time is required to do effective decision making for a proper development of leadership plan.

One might think that it is just a waste of time and money sometimes it may be seemed impossible to get back from moment-to-moment crises that ...