Summer 2018-2019 EL122: Leadership Characteristics Essay

This essay delves into the critical characteristics of effective leadership and their profound impact on organizational success. It explores the multifaceted nature of leadership, examining key attributes such as honesty, integrity, communication, emotional intelligence, strategic thinking, and the ability to inspire and empower others. The essay investigates how leaders can foster positive change, adapt to challenges, and drive teams towards achieving organizational objectives. It also highlights various leadership styles, including transformational, transactional, and democratic approaches, and their respective impacts on employee engagement and workplace satisfaction. The research emphasizes the importance of continuous learning, self-improvement, and feedback in honing leadership skills, ultimately contributing to a competitive and successful organizational environment. References are provided, adhering to Harvard referencing system.

This research brings out a discussion on leadership characteristics. The essay will be
broadened and revolved around a research question. The question can be “how leadership is
effective for the organisational success?”
This discussion and research continues to elaborate the aspects of leadership and its related
attributes (Priest, and Gass, 2017).Undoubtedly, leadership is effective for the success of the
company. Leader is obliged to performance well with the help of organisational effectiveness
through the hands of team members. Companies and their effective environment change
effectively where one of the main responsibilities of the leader can be initiating and
monitoring the necessary internal changes in order to adapt the changing situations. The
capacity of an leader to inculcate positive changes so that challenges will not stretch to other
activities of business (Priest, and Gass, 2017).
Leadership is one of the most functions of the management that will help to maximise the
effectiveness and achieve company’s objectives. Leadership is essential part of effective
management where a person has the potential to affect and finally drive the efforts of group
to achieve the organisational success. A great leader can contribute effectively to enable
others to achieve success (Grint, Jones, Holt, and Storey, 2016).Leadership is not
traditionally delegated through training in physicians, and medical schools where they have
skill set needed to excel leadership. For example- medicine needs proper critical analysis,
which are analogous to the requirement of effective leadership such as formulating
analysis,and ultimately generating action plans (Amanchukwu, Stanley, and Ololube,
2015).Leaders are responsible to transform their employees with the help of training in order
to achieve theprofit maximisation and operational efficiency of the organisation. Some of the
important characteristics of a leader are honesty, integrity, confidence, inspiring others,
passion and commitment, good communicator, efficient abilities of decision-making,
accountability, creativity, innovation, empathy, and empowerment (Frankel, and PGCMS,

2019).A leadership is helpful in planning the tactics in the organisation in order to become
competitive and successful. This tactics refer to specific steps, which the organisation will
achieve and execute the strategy.
The tactics may include development of team, multidisciplinary actions, and developing the
reputation. It provides advanced training for the team, publishing the achievements, praising
the effective outcomes, and demonstration of best quality metrics (Cashman, 2017). Apart
from cultivating a conductive environment, which is based on effective leaders who exhibit
specific attributes and skills in order to accomplish. Some of the talents while handling the
chaos is to excellent communication skills, emotional intelligence, understanding the
competitive landscape, empathy, strategic thinking, courageous. Communication ensures the
proper understanding and it is simple sending and receiving mails and messages.
Communication is commonly two-way communication and it is important for the leaders to
listen. Leaders attempt to practise active listening rather than being quite (Cashman, 2017). A
simple way to practise, speak and communicate. A leader can adapt effective way to become
proactive active listening in order to take mental notes when communicating and speaking.
Empathy and emotional success intelligence are some of the main leadership characteristics,
which are often overlooked. Leaders often regularly called upon to deal with the upsurging
challenges with the unpleasant situations including crucial conversation, conflict situations,
and annual performance reviews. Huge degree of emotional intelligence can enable the
leaders to deal with the situations effectively and abjectly that might avoid the underlying
issues. Emotional intelligence is related to skill and that can be developed to training,
coaching, and practises. Empathic leaders can sense how other can actually feel how effective
communicator and team builder he is and it is more likely to manage the change effectively
(Ricard, Klijn, Lewis, and Ysa, 2017).The most talented and effective individual with the
complementary areas of expertise that are quite more comfortable expressing the opinions

(Yahaya, and Ebrahim, 2016). It is the obligation of a leader to express the opinions. It is an
obligation of a leader when not to dominate the conversation in order to ensure how actually
team members and finally challenging them and handling different business
situations(Robertson, 2016).These difficult situations are often required where effective
leaders trusts the team, challenges, and further allow them to handle difficult state. When
difficult decisions are needed, team and its leader will need high degree of emotional courage
and challenges in order to make right decision at the right time. Courage is another skill in a
leader that can be developed only overtime (Covin, and Slevin, 2017). Leadership skills have
been growing like progressive fashion. A person individually works in technical areas and
differentiates with the help of technical expertise, innovation and expertise (Shapiro, and
Stefkovich, 2016). A person will get financial, quantitative skills, and relative operational
knowledge, which are relevant to the role. A senior leader will need to grab the
macroeconomic trends and competitive environment that affect the coping up the procedure
and upcoming regulatory changes (Saleem, 2015).Apart from this, a strategic leader can
regularly keep constant eyes on market competition (Garrow, 2015). Positioning the company
in order to gain success in a changing environment with the fast moving competitors that
always remained one of the major responsibilities of a senior strategic leader. Learning,
skills, improvements and practising the leadership skills where skill can be improved and
learned (Frohlich, and Oppenheimer, 2015).The knowledge-based components include
accounting, finance, HR, and other core departments can be easily attained in online, class,
and with the self-directed learning. Several challenges lead to the development of the
personal characteristics, which are necessary for the effective leadership. Feedback remains a
major tool in the creation and development of certain attributes. It is sometimes less effective
with the form of feedback that is an annual performance reviews (Renz, and Herman,
2016).Most of the effective method are often structured by the 360-degreeanalysis that can

provide the opportunity for frank and honest feedback through coaching by using the
establishment and finally execute individual development plans (DuBrin, 2015). Leadership
is relatively much more art as it one of the art. A common mistake for the leaders is to get
involvement into the regular operational problems by taking an eye on ball and potentially
missing the new opportunities and emerging threats for the organisation (DuBrin, 2015).
Some of the leadership styles followed by leaders are democratic leadership, autocratic
leadership, transformational leadership, charismatic leadership and transactional leadership.
Transformational leadership is very similar to coaching style as it focuses on concise and
clear communication (Covin, and Slevin, 2017). This leader has been driven by commitments
and organisational objectives. A transactional leader focuses on performance where a
manager establishes incentive system in the form of monetary rewards for success with the
actions for the failure. A democratic leader is the combination of laissez faire and autocratic
style of leadership (Cashman, 2017). This leader asks for more input and finally considers
feedback from the team while making a decision. This leader has been credited with the
fostering the higher level of employee engagement and the workplace satisfaction. This
leadership has been driven participation and discussion (Cashman, 2017).

References
Amanchukwu, R.N., Stanley, G.J. and Ololube, N.P., 2015. A review of leadership theories,
principles and styles and their relevance to educational management. Management, 5(1),
pp.6-14.
Cashman, K., 2017. Leadership from the inside out: Becoming a leader for life.Berrett-
Koehler Publishers.
Covin, J.G. and Slevin, D.P., 2017. The entrepreneurial imperatives of strategic
leadership. Strategic entrepreneurship: Creating a new mindset, pp.307-327.
DuBrin, A.J., 2015. Leadership: Research findings, practice, and skills. Nelson Education.
Frankel, A. and PGCMS, R., 2019. What leadership styles should senior nurses
develop?. Hospital, 6, p.08.
Frohlich, N. and Oppenheimer, J.A., 2015. Political leadership and collective goods (Vol.
1298). Princeton University Press.
Garrow, D.J., 2015. Bearing the cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the southern Christian
leadership conference. Open Road Media.
Grint, K., Jones, O.S., Holt, C. and Storey, J., 2016. What is leadership. The Routledge
companion to leadership, p.3.
Priest, S. and Gass, M., 2017. Effective Leadership in Adventure Programming, 3E. Human
Kinetics.
Renz, D.O. and Herman, R.D. eds., 2016. The Jossey-Bass handbook of nonprofit leadership
and management. John Wiley & Sons.

Ricard, L.M., Klijn, E.H., Lewis, J.M. and Ysa, T., 2017. Assessing public leadership styles
for innovation: A comparison of Copenhagen, Rotterdam and Barcelona. Public Management
Review, 19(2), pp.134-156.
Robertson, J., 2016. Coaching leadership: Building educational leadership capacity through
partnership. New Zealand Council for Educational Research. PO Box 3237, Wellington 6140
New Zealand.
Saleem, H., 2015. The impact of leadership styles on job satisfaction and mediating role of
perceived organizational politics. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 172, pp.563-569.
Shapiro, J.P. and Stefkovich, J.A., 2016. Ethical leadership and decision making in
education: Applying theoretical perspectives to complex dilemmas.Routledge.
Yahaya, R. and Ebrahim, F., 2016. Leadership styles and organizational commitment:
literature review. Journal of Management Development, 35(2), pp.190-216.