Leadership is the art of managing people

2024 Author: Howard Calhoun | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 10:16

The main function of leadership is to encourage people to work with full dedication, purposefulness and maximum efficiency. This is not just managing a group of people by giving out tasks and instructions, but deep insight into the intricacies of the work performed by the team and its ultimate goal. Leadership can involve different levels, styles and approaches to both people and work.

There is a lot of discussion about whether leadership and management are the same, as well as leadership and management.

Let's consider this issue from different angles and define the main task of leadership.

Executive or manager?

In modern practice, it is customary to use the concept of "manager", which with its English, and even deeper Latin roots goes to the word "manus" - hand. It is obvious that the origin of the word is associated with a position that gave a person the right to give orders with the help of his hands. This captures the very essence of leadership as issuing orders and valuable instructions.

Undoubtedly, a real manager is a professional leader who is able to manage people. An effective manager is able to lead equally productively as a department inbank, and the same department in the supermarket. He quickly understands the intricacies of the case and finds an approach to the staff. A manager may not know the work that his subordinates do, but manage them effectively. As a working method, he can of course use the practice of "putting himself in the shoes of a subordinate" in order to better understand the basics of the case.

Traditional understanding of leadership

The traditional and perhaps the most correct understanding of leadership can be described in several functional directions.

Here are some main directions.

• Leadership is leadership that sets an example and encourages staff to work at a high level. And this is not about stimulating with threats, but about fair and thoughtful leadership.
• Leadership is about working with structure, and the leader's task is to create and maintain such a structure where everyone knows their role, area of work and purpose. It is also the ability to make decisions that will contribute to the most effective progress towards success.
• Management is a process of interaction between superiors and employees, it connects and closes the chain of rewards and goal achievement. Building a team that can effectively communicate both with each other and with superiors.
• Leadership is the ability to nurture people and intelligently delegate authority.

Leadership is a matter of style?

Since leadership is working with people using a certain power and influence, they shareseveral styles of such influence:

• authoritarian style;
• democratic style;
• hands-off style.

Let's look at these styles in more detail, as well as their positive and negative sides.

Authoritarian style

Authoritarianism involves the concentration of all power in the hands of one person. This is an overwhelming, overtly domineering type of leadership that focuses on the decisions of one person who does not take advice from his subordinates. This style is tough enough to keep people in a tight rein.

Pros: the ability to make decisions quickly, but only with sufficient experience and information from the manager.

Cons: lack of incentive for the development of subordinates.

Democratic

Democracy is management, where authority is delegated to several levels, and subordinates are not just performers, but also active participants in the decision-making process. It assumes less pressure on staff, confidence in their own self-organization and purposefulness.

Pros: in the condition of qualified personnel, it stimulates the achievement of goals, innovations and career growth.

Cons: It often happens that staff cannot make quick decisions or behave insufficiently responsibly.

There are other leadership styles, such as "hands-off" style, which encouragesall the creative potential of subordinates through their complete independence. In terms of popularity, the first style of leadership is used less and less, while democratic and others like it respond to the needs of the staff and correspond to the modern way of thinking.

Can leadership be taught?

If we talk about the academic discipline that should prepare a person for the position of a leader, then this is management. Leadership is also decision-making, for which you need to have a solid knowledge base. Management is a synthesis of knowledge from different areas: economics and finance, psychology and sociology, law, etc. Completely new methods and schemes for managing people have been developed.

But speaking openly, leadership is only a theory in management, but in practice the leader should be:

• psychologist;
• leader;
• analyst;
• sociologist;
• economist;
• etc

But theory and practice are two different things, and many theories are fruitless for solving practical problems of managing people. After all, leadership is relationships with people, the use of experience in various fields of knowledge, personal qualities and the presence of an incentive. All of the above is a product of life experience and contact with the reality of a business or other activity, but not theory.

A true leader is able to organize a successful team using all of the above qualities.

Are all managers equally good?

Bnowadays, for the sake of fashion trends or to give importance to individual positions, everyone can be called a manager - from a product arranger to the head of a department.

Moreover, many university graduates receive a certificate with the coveted phrase “manager…”, but have neither a theoretical basis for managing people, nor practical foundations. They are just receptacles of a set of knowledge that in most cases are not even taught how to apply them.