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Can One Person Make a Difference?

The leadership challenge is essentially concerned with the extent to which a leader can influence the factors driving performance. Everyday we see articles with examples suggesting leaders can make a difference to the success of businesses. So what do we mean by the term ‘leader’?

Firstly leadership and management are two terms that are often confused so what is the difference between them? Two suggested definitions are:

Good leadership is about coping with change. Leaders establish direction by developing a vision of the future; they align people by communicating the vision and inspiring them to overcome hurdles.

Good management brings about order and consistency by drawing up formal plans, designing organisation structures and monitoring results against the plans.

As management positions come with some degree of formally designated authority, a person may assume a leadership role simply because of the position s/he holds. But not all leaders are managers; nor, for that matter are all managers leaders. Just because an organisation provides its managers with certain formal rights is no assurance that they will be able to lead effectively. Often the non-sanctioned leadership is often more important than formal influence. In other words, leaders can emerge from within a group as well as by formal appointment to lead a group.

There are many theories around what leadership is and what makes a good leader. Trait theories consider personal qualities and characteristics that differentiate leaders from non-leaders and behavioural theories propose that specific behaviours make this differentiation. Styles of leadership and their effectiveness have also been widely studied. An employee-orientated leader emphasises interpersonal relations, taking a personal interest in the needs of employees and accepting individual differences among them. A production-orientated leader emphasises technical or task aspects of the job. A leader who values experimentation, seeks new ideas and generates and implements change is a development-orientated leader. While these theories have identified consistent relationships between leadership behaviour and group performance they have not to a large degree considered the situational aspects that influence success or failure.  These aspects have been looked at in seeking to identify the contingency factors affecting leadership effectiveness.

Taking all this into account how do we ensure we have effective leaders in our businesses to establish strategic direction by developing a vision of the future; aligning people by communicating the vision and inspiring them to overcome hurdles to improve overall organisation performance?

Organisations spend billions of dollars on leadership training every year. So what are the benefits?: