9. Unlocking Leadership Excellence: The Essential Traits of Effective Strategic Leaders and Managers

Leadership and Management are different thing, and it shouldn’t be used interchangeably. Both imply a unique set of skills, characteristics and functions that share few similarities.

Figure 1

EFFECTIVE TRAITS OF A LEADER 

Trait theory exposes the idea that people are born with inherited traits. The Trait Theory of leadership is based on specific characteristics of many leaders. This method is mainly considered when predicting leadership effectiveness. Many theorists who study leadership traits have identified characteristics include physiological, demographic, personality, intellectual, task related, and social. As an effective leader in any organization, the leader should have ,

• the ability to adapt to changing situations, 
• engaged with social environment and activities, an ambitious individual who aim to achieve high, self-confident. 

Because a leader should be, 

• assertive, cooperative, decisive dependable. 
• should have the ability to dominate and take responsibility, 
• full of energy, 
• persistence, and tolerant of stress which are consider as traits. 
• should have the skills like creativity, intelligence, conceptually skilled, 
• fluent in verbal and writing, 
• very much knowledgeable, 
• organized, 
• persuasive and socially skilled. 

As per “Von Clausewitz” reference, he calls strategy, "a system of thought more than anything else". 

Every organization is functioning with that constraint, limited resources. Therefore, essentially the strategy is making choices on how the organization deploy their limited resources for competitive advantage. (Clausewitz, et al., 2001) 

Figure 2

While implementing the change the organization's leaders of top management level identify what is the decisive point. Generally in companies, the decisive point is a central idea that directs the entire organization towards winning the conflict. Therefore, most of time organizations ensure to complete for advantage, which is creating greater value for their customers that the competitors can do. Companies emphasize the fact that everything an organization, needs to do is to focus the whole of its resources and the minds and hearts of its employee on that decisive point, which underlying thing that drives success. 

Strategic leadership is the process of providing the direction and inspiration necessary create a sustain an organization. In companies, while implementing the new changes, leader should have the ultimate management responsibilities regarding new change and directly reports to board of directors and appoints relevant managers those who requires running the change in the organization. 

In an organizations, to become a good communicator, middle level managers understand the criticality of all employees, which mean they value that each employee driving for the company, the niche skills sets that they possess which are critical to the organization regular functioning. Once they understood, they ensured to categorize each employee working in the respective organization's department from highly critical to not so critical. This analysis is extremely important.

The change agent in companies who identifies key members from the organization called as change managers, and they are the front line messengers of the change but before they do that, the change leaders in companies convinced the managers of their vision of the change. Change manager team in any company also ensured that they had communication to each employee teams to understand their fears. This part is where the analysis of critical to not so critical employee comes in play. Because by having conversation to a very critical employees, the manager ensured with them that they have the place in the future of company along with the clear career development path. 

A role of an Agile leader is takes on board the concerns, the questions raised suggestions from team members. Agile leader is about bringing together the world of project management and change management leading to the realization of benefits. In an organization project management is concerned is a key driver and change management is important for agile organizations. 

Figure 3

In recent times many organizations across the world implemented a digital platform to carryout their work very efficiently. When an organization implemented the technological platform , they ensure to monitor employee’s contribution regular basis. Prepared online tutorial to use the online tools like Microsoft Teams, zoom applications for virtual meetings, provides online teaching training program using tool kit to ensure that the employees of their company received deeper and wider knowledge about the new change, and the important for a new change. 

Organizations also believe that agility needs to invest in a strong change management capability with co-creative collaborative sense where it can build buy-in, help employees to understand, and manages the capacity of change so that employees of the organization are not overwhelmed and understand that this is a small continuous adaptation. Therefore, building internal capability is essential and investing in good human centric in change management, building expectations within the organization  important as well. 

ADVANTAGES OF HAVING LEADERSHIP IN ORGANIZATION

Figure 4

A person can work together with more people if he/she’s in leadership position. If he/she in cross-functional leadership position it gives insights to be lots of different departments and functions. Creative and innovation are encouraged. Leaders value the process of generating new ideas and appreciate what each team members brings to the table. Deliberate encouragement of idea sharing leads to climate of innovation in the whole organization. People think of increasing productivity simplifying the process, reducing errors, solving customers need better, new products to build etc.

Collaboration creates robust solutions for complicated problems by utilizing multiple perspectives, experiences, attitudes, and idea the team can most often find healthy ideas with limited downsides by working together.

Employee engagement is high. The participate nature of leadership creates more positive environment where team members are included. They work together to achieve the organization’s goals and feel that their opinion matter which build trust and respect among the members which make the work environment even better.

Common goals lead to high accountability. A leader involves others in setting the goals and targets of the organization. If people are part of defining the goals, they will feel greater ownership of reaching those goals. This intense feeling of accountability in combination with high empowerment improves productivity. 

OBSTACLES OF LEADERSHIP

Figure 5

Resent may creep in a positive work environment needs all team members to be respected and valued. However, some team members ideas and opinions may consistently be better or get more attention than others which may leads to some people believing that they aren’t valued leading to resentment and bitterness.

Collaborative decision – making is a time consuming. Deferring decisions to the team may cause unnecessary delays that increases the problem worsen the consequences or reduce productivity. A good leaders will know when to use collaborative decision making and when to use a quicker approach with fewer individuals or no discussion at all.

Team members can lose trust. After period of leadership team members expect participate leadership and might even consider it mandatory. Therefore, they become confused when the leader makes quick decisions without their input which can lead to uncertainty about when to expect participation.

REFERENCES:

Dotdash publishing family, 2020. What Is Leadership. [Online] Available at: https://www.thebalancesmb.com/leadership-definition-2948275 [Accessed 2021].

Clausewitz, C. v., Ghyczy, T. v., Oetinger, B. v. & Bassford, C., 2001. Clausewitz on strategy : inspiration and insight from a master strategist. English ed. New York: Wiley, Cop.

Schein, E. H., 2010. Organizational culture and leadership. Chichester: John Wiley, Distributor.

Schein, E. H., 2017. Organizational Culture and Leadership. 5th ed. s.l.:Hoboken, New Jersey Wiley.

Johnson, E. H. M., 2018. Leadership : A communication perspective. Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press.

Julia Balogun, V. H. H. S. G., 2016. Exploring Strategic Change. Harlow: Pearson Education.