Leaders and Leadership
Do you believe that leadership is intangible? Learnt? Inherited? Then what exactly is it? Do you have that charisma for leadership or not? Are you born with leadership or not?
What are the features of leadership? Can the leadership be analyzed, articulated, and coached.
Is leadership dependent on charisma? What about if I ever had a bad day, week, and months, do I still retain that charisma? It might have disappeared!
Say it is a gifted, or a power of indefinable origin, do you think many people believe it in that way?
Evidently, leadership is too important to leave on such precarious ground.
So with that said, we have to be acknowledged with the features of leadership that can be understood, taught and to be exposed to clear and coherent features that serve as the conscious frame of a leader’s self-image and self-knowledge in a set of beliefs, traits, and skills that leader can rely on when needed.
In any Community leadership is not a solitary event. Leaders are only leaders within the community in which they live and lead. They confer with those around them. They must understand and attend to the dynamics of their community.
Leaders pull together disparate elements—people, ideas, material— and co-operatively shape them into a coherent, functioning, and directed whole. Those leaders who by their own doing attain the heights of prominence, having followers, accomplishing at large, leading in their community, and creating the identity and effective functioning of their group.
Leaders must know how to lead others by presenting ideas and directions and those following will blend what they hear with their own interpretations. So leaders cannot assume they have been heard in the way they want to be without testing the community to find out how what listeners have already heard is in an alignment with what the leaders said.
The leaders are only as good or great as the community being led. This does not apply to dictators or political manipulators for whom the idea of leadership is irrelevant.
The essential feature of leaders is their sensitivity to the shifting dynamics of the group that result in achieving a desired outcome avoiding chaos are about to occur.
James Bond
To that end, I totally understand your summary. To implement it, you’d have to be king of the World. The reality is that any transformation is going to have to come from successful classrooms working with one eye on new tools and energy, all the while keeping the other eye on the target.
Cherry Walker
Thanks for your thought filled post. I agree about higher education and have found the same things at both institutions where I taught
James Bond
Action research is a reflective process that classically is not transferable among individuals or groups. In fact it is not really like research at all except for the fact that it does indeed apply (and may only apply) to the person (or group) who is actioning it. What works for one group of people will not necessarily work for another group.