Leadership Philosophy: Principles, Practices, and Application

This essay explores the student's personal leadership philosophy, emphasizing participatory and democratic leadership styles. It contrasts these with autocratic and delegative approaches, highlighting the importance of qualities like communication, empathy, and accountability. The paper outlines key leadership principles such as ambition, ethical conduct, teamwork, and continuous improvement. Furthermore, it analyzes a case study involving Uber, focusing on leadership failures related to ethical breaches, sexual harassment, and gender discrimination. The essay proposes solutions based on the student's leadership philosophy, advocating for equality, employee safety, and robust ethical guidelines to foster a positive and productive work environment, ensuring the well-being of all employees and the overall success of the organization.

Running head: PHILOSOPHY OF LEADERSHIP
PHILOSOPHY OF LEADERSHIP
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1PHILOSOPHY OF LEADERSHIP
Leadership is a skill that shows the capability of a person to lead an organization or a
group of people. Everyone does not possess a leadership quality. Leadership is an important
part in an organization. It is a process that influences people in order to accomplish all the
aims and objectives and is directed to the organization to make it coherent and cohesive.
Every organization needs a leader who guides the employees or teams and creates a zeal
among them that helps in improving the performance of the employees to bring positive
outcomes to the company. Effective leadership management skills help the organization to
grow and establish a good position in the market. This paper analyzes and states the
application of philosophy in an issue of an organization.
Leadership is a quality that helps the organizations in many ways. Leadership
qualities are differentiated in many ways like Autocratic Leadership that shows the
dominance of the leaders over the employees under them. Here they dictate and give the work
to other people (Hassan, Asad and Hoshino 2016). The other one is the Participatory and the
democratic leadership. Here the leaders participate in the work and also consider different
views of the employees. However the final decision is taken by the leader after considering
all the view points of his employees (Ejimabo 2015). Another type of leadership is the
Delegative leadership. Here the leader gives an opportunity to the employees to make
decisions. The leader if not satisfied with the decision then he changes and sticks to the
decision he wants to take (Iqbal, Anwar and Haider 2015). Every individual has different
leadership styles like these. My leadership style would be the Participatory or the Democratic
leadership. I believe that a leader is not like an authoritarian ruler. According to me a leader
is someone who will not just make decisions and distribute work but will participate and
contribute to the work. A leader should make the work environment positive and see to the
needs of the employees. I would like to be a part of my team or the organization and work
accordingly. I would want people working under me to be open to me so that they can share

2PHILOSOPHY OF LEADERSHIP
any problems they are facing to do a certain work and not think me to be unapproachable.
Many employees are petrified of their leaders because of the dominant approach they use to
manage works. I do not want in my case. I want people under me to feel wanted and come up
with ideas and strategies they think that will work for the company. This will help the
employees to think that even they are an essential part of the organization and if their
recommendations are taken to consideration they will put in more hard work for the benefits
of the organization. There are certain leadership qualities I want to possess so that I can carry
out this leadership style efficiently. Apart from being honest, confident, committed towards
the work and be a good decision maker I want to be a good communicator so that I can put
across the messages and the works that is to be done easily and efficiently . (Tremaine 2016).
I would like to be accountable and have empathy. The leadership style I want to follow that is
the Participatory or Democratic style is a sign of strength and not weakness. This leadership
style makes employees respect the leader and support the leader to bring beneficial outcomes.
Leaders not only should have a leadership style but also maintain some leadership principles.
There are many leadership principles that are necessary and need to be followed by the
leader. The principles are ambition that means the leader should have a clear vision for the
positive future of the organization, should have purpose and clarity in what he exactly wants
to attain. Leaders should take proper measures to ensure efficient work flow. Setting high
standards is necessary due to the competitive market. Take effective business decisions for
the positive outcome of an organization. Set proper behavioral code and make sure business
ethics are maintained. Build a positive relationship with the employees and stakeholders. The
leader should be resilient; he should ensure the work flow in spite of negative shocks.
Leaders should take feedback seriously in order to enhance their performance and look into
the matter. Teamwork is another principle that Leaders need to follow. Improvement is
another principle that Leaders should take care of. All these principles are very important and

3PHILOSOPHY OF LEADERSHIP
each has its own importance. I would not want to violate any of the leadership principles and
most importantly the ethics and teamwork. Teamwork is essential in bringing profits to the
organization (Arnold 2018). If a leader cannot take care of the team that means he or she is
harming the business and the reputation of an organization. The other one is ethics.
According to me ethics is very important specially these days with growing problems related
to misconduct, theft and many more. If ethics are maintained in an organization then there
will be efficient workflow and positive outcomes that will benefit the organization.
Leadership qualities, principles and approach are not always constant. These differ
from people to people on the basis of their attitude, their mindset and their behavior. Personal
beliefs often impact the leadership approach of a leader. I have different beliefs that will
show the way I handle a team. I believe in equality irrespective of someone’s caste, creed,
sex and religion. This may reflect in my approach as I would only provide work on the basis
of their talent and merit. I would not discriminate between a male employee and a women
employee. I would want people work together without any discrimination as well. Equality
ensures a positive working environment. The other one I would ensure would be the ethics.
Employees are one of the key resources of an organization if they are not happy and then it
will affect the productivity. The other thing that will reflect my leadership is approach that I
will take measures to ensure women feel safe in the work environment as there are many
cases of sexual harassment. I do not promote this kind of behavior thus will ensure this does
not happen under my leadership.
Earlier when I use to work for a company as a team leader I saw that I could not
maintain an attitude that a senior has. I always had a friendly bond with all my juniors. I
would assign them the work and I had the concept that if it is my team then we should do a
great job. I would work to help them too. From this experience I realized that I possess a
participatory and democratic leadership quality.

4PHILOSOPHY OF LEADERSHIP
In this paper I am going to talk about the cultural issues that has stemmed up in the
company Uber because of the inefficiency of the leader that has impacted the reputation of
Uber. The key leadership issue was not being able to establish business codes and ethics
efficiently among the employees.
A lady named Susan Fowler who worked at the big organization Uber was sexually harassed
by her manager. This issue came to notice after a blog written by her about the sexual
harassment and the discrimination in the workplace of Uber. In the post she mentioned how
her manager propositioned her for sex. The other thing she mentioned in the blog post that
the women were promised to get a leather jacket but later were not given. The reason for not
getting one was there were not many women in Uber to justify in placing an order (Solon
2019). This showed the casual sexism that was existing in the company. After the news broke
out this story became trending. Every news channel covered the news. After Fowler’s
allegations against the company Uber was affected badly. People came up with hash tags that
said ban Uber and delete Uber and many went on to delete the app. This had a major impact
on the business. The sales of Uber had gone down due to the rage of people against the
company for not being safe for women. This piece of news garnered negative publicity thus
built a bad reputation for Uber. A bad reputation of a company has negative impacts that not
only lead to poor sales of the company but also impacts the hiring costs and a crisis of
employee retention.
The problem that happened in Uber could have been completely avoidable if the
leader would have been efficient and managed the employees properly. This situation shows
that the leaders were not only aware but not very interested as well. A leader should be aware
of the situations that are happening in the organization. The leader has failed to establish
proper business codes and work ethics in the organization that had led to this disaster. The
leader himself has not followed the business codes and the work ethics. If I had to be the

5PHILOSOPHY OF LEADERSHIP
leader of the organization the first thing I would make sure that there was equality in the
organization and the next would be safety for not only women but also men in the
organization. I would lay out proper work ethics and ensure they were followed by the
employees. I would ensure there would be strict punishment if any of the rules were violated,
ensure maximum penalty and if the matter was serious would make sure the employee was
terminated. The leadership philosophy I have is that a leader should be friendly with his or
her team so that people can come up with their problems without any hesitation. If I was the
leader I would make sure the victim could have approached me in the first place rather than
writing a blog. I would ensure that matter would have been handled efficiently, investigate
the matter without any bias, get people from outside to investigate the matter and later
terminate the employee who was at fault. I would resolve the matter within the organization
so that employees had faith in me. According to me these issues should not occur in a healthy
organization. Occurrence of issues like this show the unhealthy work atmosphere of
employees that shows in their output.
The other issue in the company that was noticed was the discrimination between male
employees and female employees. Female employees were promised to get leather jackets
later which were not received due to the lack of female employees. Equality has become a
major issue and I would not want the reputation of my company to go down because of any
discrimination that is happening in the company. I would ensure that women also got their
leather jackets that they were promised. Little issues like this indicate the discrimination that
exist in the workplace. I would make sure that men and women would be treated the same
and both get equal opportunities and facilities in the company. These situations result in
unhappy and unsatisfied employees. Unhappy employees mean no productivity thus leading
to poor sales and low growth.

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The company had faced backlash from people across the globe and made a bad
reputation because of the situations and issues that occurred and the way they were dealt.
This was a situation that could be dealt with care and resolved within the organization. I
would have made effective business codes and ethics and implement in such a way that
people would not have the audacity to misbehave in such a reputed organization that has a
name in the international market. The leadership style I would follow and the approach I
would take would help people in an organization to work effectively without any misconduct
and pave way for a good reputation.
Leadership is a quality that people are born with. It comes to them from within. A
good leader is someone who people look up to and want to be like. A good leader is someone
who makes sure there is efficient workflow among the employees and the functioning of the
organization is maintained that paves way for the organization’s success and achieves the
goals that are set by the organization. In this paper it has been seen that how inefficient
leaders can ruin the organization’s reputation in the market that later affect the business and
the sales of a company. However, a good leader tackles all the problems residing in an
organization and ensures everything in an organization is working in a flow that leads to the
success of an organization as a whole.

7PHILOSOPHY OF LEADERSHIP
Reference
Arnold, C.M., 2018. Leadership Philosophy and Action Plan. Solon, O. (2019). Uber fires
more than 20 employees after sexual harassment investigation. [online] the Guardian.
Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/06/uber-fires-employees-
sexual-harassment-investigation [Accessed 8 Apr. 2019].
Ejimabo, N.O., 2015. The influence of decision making in organizational leadership and
management activities. Journal of Entrepreneurship and Organization Management, 4(2),
pp.1-13.
Hassan, H., Asad, S. and Hoshino, Y., 2016. Determinants of leadership style in big five
personality dimensions. universal journal of management, 4(4), pp.161-179.
Iqbal, N., Anwar, S. and Haider, N., 2015. Effect of leadership style on employee
performance. Arabian Journal of Business and Management Review, 5(5), pp.1-6.
Tremaine, R.L., 2016. The high flying leadership qualities: What matters the most. Defense
Acquisition University West Region San Diego United States