“A leader is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead; not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.” – Nelson Mandela
In business, having a leader at the front is as much important as someone following the leaders. For a very long, it was accepted that leadership is something that only managers and top corporate professionals can display. But, with time, this notion has completely changed. Today, anyone can become a leader, or at least make an attempt at leadership. In this article, we will tell you how to become an influential personality in your current role and function.
But, first, let’s understand how people perceive leadership and what it actually is.
In traditional business-centric MBA schools, leadership is mostly taught as an extension of one’s personality that can be strategically embellished with managerial concepts, communication skills, and tactical approaches. But, in reality, there is so much more to leading a team of people which can only be learned in a structured leadership training course. For example, there are many different styles of leadership that account for all the successes that an organization might want to attribute. Now, each leadership style oozes out of situational awareness and the personality traits of the leader, and these should be more or less consistent over a period of time to label them as leadership qualities. In a normal world, people have perceptions and biases, and these also allow them to perceive a manager as a great leader or not a great one based on the level of trust and amount of influence they share with each other.
So, how is leadership defined in the real sense?
According to the leading psychologists from around the world, leadership is defined as an attributable trait in organizing, directing, controlling, motivating, coordinating, and influencing a group of people and their efforts to identify a set of targets and achieve these targets as a direct outcome of the common goal. Now, these can be achieved through two leadership strategies. These are;
- Transactional leadership
- Transformation leadership
Here are some of the popular leadership theories that everyone should know while dealing with people in groups.
Attribution theory
Attribution theory of leadership is the result of how people normally like to fit in personalities to their own understanding of a situation and their view of a person’s behavior in response to that situation. The judgment is highly subjective as the same person can view the behavior of people he knows or likes as more acceptable in comparison to what strangers do. So, people are likely to choose leaders based on their degree of likeness and acceptability in social norms. Many psychologists have tried to explain this theory based on the “cause and effect” principles.
These attributes could be:
- Dispositional attribution which means that the person’s behavior is an outcome of their internal traits (or experiences) in response to a situation (external force)— it squarely allows people to pass a judgment based on the person’s behavior and responses without looking into the external forces of influence on characteristics.
- Situational attribution refers to leadership qualities that emerge in response to environmental or external forces.
Using these two attributions, one can understand the importance of leadership theories and their progression into the core MBA curriculum as part of leadership training and management. This is taught as part of the correspondent inference, proposed as an extension of Jones and Davis’s theory.
Leader categorization theory or LCT
LCT is a very popular strategy theory that has placed immense importance on the way top management grooms someone as a workplace leader. LCT takes into account the emotional and cognitive intelligence of the person before setting them or promoting them as a formal leader of a group. This helps to break the preconceived biases that colleagues and team members might have against the chosen leader.
It is a proven fact that people fear becoming leaders or choosing someone they know as a leader.
Why do organizations have such a hard time finding good leaders? It can be explained through leadership training and tactics that state new leaders are always forced to take the hard path when it comes to organizing a team. While they could be analyzing the behavior of their team members before organizing and delegating work, it also works the same way for the leaders. By taking leadership training, is not the only style of managing changes but you also become more self confident.
