LEADERSHIP SKILLS

Leadership Skills

Leadership Skills

Introduction

The aim of this essay is to describe an actual event, which I have experienced in the course of my daily work, to reflect on the role of a leader and how I can act to support those for whom I may responsible develop their skills, and work with greater efficiency. This essay starts with some preliminary discussions about the concept of leadership and how it is relates to the management. In part two, I will briefly present and discuss an event which concerns one of the nurses who was working in my unit. The essay ends with a brief reflection on this event.

Initial Reflections over Leadership and Management

One of the main responsibilities of a team leader is to create an environment which allows, and supports team members to realize and develop their abilities and skills and to realize their potentials. This should be, at the same time, help to maximize the resources, and the organizational efficiency. This requires leadership, which uses Martin Chemers' definition, “it is the process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task” (Chemers, 1997:5). It is about the ability of one person (the leader) to set down a number of new, but interconnected, and coherently thought out, approaches, directions or visions, which a group can follow in order to achieve typical organization goals. This means that a leader should be a role model, that is to say he or she should be the first to lead in the directions which he/she expects his or her team to be heading (North house, 2009). It is also, as mentioned above, about enhancing the organizational efficacy and increasing resources. As Ken Ogbonnia explains “effective leadership is the ability to integrate, and maximize available resources within the internal and external environment for the attainment of organizational or societal goals.”

This very brief overview indicates that there are different theories of leadership and these theories distinguish themselves from each other by emphasizing various specific aspects of leadership: some emphasize the role model, others point out the importance of reward structures, while others resources and efficacy (for an over view of various theories see Robbins and Judge 2007; Yolk 2006). Also, one can criticize each of these for omitting different aspects. Also, leadership as a concept has been criticized by critical thinkers such as Chomsky (1999) for encouraging a culture of subordination and producing people who need to be told what they need to do. Too much emphasis on systems efficacy and rationalization can also increases dehumanization as discussed in classical and modern social theory. We must therefore, not forget that at the end of the day we are dealing with human beings, whose integrity and autonomy should be recognized and respected.

In the following paragraphs, I will follow an understanding of a leader which brings together elements out of various theories and is also sensitive to the critique of ...