Leadership
Leadership is very critical in any team or business organization in the pursuit of the set goals. The type of leadership in an organization or a team determines the level of success. In organizations, leaders thus play a very important role as they form a link between the top management and the ordinary employees ensuring that a high level of coordination and collaboration is maintained providing a suitable direction to the organization. The impact created by a leader on the employees or the followers in a team affects their overall behavior and performance thereby influencing the growth and development of any organization or the team towards achieving better end results. Despite such important roles played by leadership skills, many people fail to utilize diverse leadership skills in different areas of leadership leading to failure of the set goals. In my academic life, I have had numerous experiences through which I have been able to practice my leadership skills. To an extent I have successfully implemented them but there are still areas which I require to improve on. This article aims to illustrate that to be a successful leader; a combination of various leadership skills is required. This is because though I have certain leadership strengths i.e. communication, team work, liaison and critical thinking skills which have made me successful to an extent, I require to improve on my time management and evaluation skills which negatively impact on my leadership.
Communication Skills
To start with, a high level of communication skills is very critical in establishing and maintaining relationships between a leader and members in a team. Communication plays a very important role in the decision making processes as it is through open communication that synergy is created among members of a team with different ideologies or perspectives (Gritzo et al. 46). As a team leader in various group assignments and in the community awareness club which I patronize, I have been working with people of diverse ages, diverse cultures and who have diverse perspectives. This requires me to use appropriate communication skills to ensure that a balance is established during the decision making processes in the teams. Such use of open channels of communication have enabled me develop mutual respect and trust in my team members who feels that they own the decisions we make towards the completion of the club's duties and also the group's assignments. Through use of diverse communication skills such as verbal, written and also visual demonstrations when presenting new ideas to my team members, I have realized that am effectively able to maintain their attention throughout the interaction process. I have always been engaging active listening which has been very critical particularly when we are faced with team conflicts. Through my active listening, I always ensure that the team members express all their issues since they feel they have someone who they can trust to provide answers to such individual problems. I normally attain this through maintaining an open posture when addressing their needs, maintaining eye contact and also by not interrupting them while they are speaking.
Teamwork and Liaison Skills
Secondly, effective leaders use teamwork and liaison skills to create influence and inspiration which is important in transforming the team members' behaviors for the success of the team. Teamwork and collaboration ensures that the team members are focused towards achieving the set strategic objectives as a team. Through collaboration, the team members think as one united team which is very critical in dealing with numerous challenges that come when the team members are divided rather than united. Through my ability to utilize liaison and team work skills, I have been able to establish a culture of collaboration where the team members in any group I lead works for the benefit of the entire team rather than self interest which may interfere with the attainment of the set team's objectives. I have ensured that conflicts are resolved to the interest of every member in the group creating a feeling of unity among the team members. Lack of team work and collaboration is mainly a challenge while adopting changes in the teams as such members fail to gain loyalty to the impacted changes hence creating a failure. This has not been a challenge in the groups I have been leading as the motivation and inspiration I create ensures that the team members have a high sense of loyalty. A good leader acts a source of inspiration and influence to the followers transforming their behaviors and capabilities to meet the set team goals (Beshears et al. 54). This is what I have been to my team members who are daily motivated taking their responsibilities and team roles with high level of commitment.
Critical Thinking Skills
Thirdly, critical thinking skills are very crucial for leaders as they enable leaders to adopt appropriate strategies to deal with the challenges they may face. Leadership involves dealing with changing work conditions and also changing nature of employees. As the leaders are undergoing through their daily supervisory and leadership tasks in an organization or a team, they must ensure that appropriate strategies which are customized to deal with the new evolving nature of the work or team member's relationships are used. This means that critical thinking skills are important for the leaders to assess each situation and develop appropriate mechanisms to solve the unique challenge. Such strategic problem solving involves the ability of the leader to aggressively conceptualize, apply, analyze, synthesize as well as assess the information that has been collected through experience as well as through observation to guide them in delivering solutions to the problem. Critical thinking makes the leader confident, flexible and gains a high level of discretion while making judgments in matters pertaining to the employees or other work related issues. Critical thinking thus enables a leader to avoid making impartial judgments which may have numerous negative implications on the morale of the team members. Before taking the decisions, critical thinking skills ensures that the leader is able to apply intellectual criticism; enabling the leader to combine both research as well as previously gained knowledge. Through adequate consideration of the past, present and the future direction which the leader wants the team members or the organization to go into, the leader ensures that sustainable decisions are reached at. Such leaders possessing high critical thinking skills ensures that diverse approaches to a problem or a challenge are developed rather than relying on regular problem solving approaches which may be inadequate in solving different kinds of problems in a team.
Time Management and Evaluation Skills
Though the case, leaders fail due to lack of evaluation and time management skills despite the good strategic objectives and teamwork skills they may have. This has been my major area of weakness due to my poor time management and evaluation skills. Though we have been strategically planning and developing various short term and long term goals in the community awareness club, the failure to regularly evaluate these goals and timely develop contingency plans has many times led to a failure in achieving the set objectives. We have many times found that our developed community projects are behind schedule and even go uncompleted at the end of the planned time frame. Regular evaluation ensures that leaders detect any mistakes at the initial stages of projects enabling them to develop timely solutions which eliminate any inflated costs and time wastage which lead to failure of projects (Certo 35). Time management skills enable the leader to avoid unnecessary stress that comes along with meeting deadlines enabling the leader to comfortably handle numerous tasks. In addition, time management skills ensure that the leader has fewer mistakes thereby eliminating the time wasted in carrying reworks and correcting such mistakes. This has been my challenge as a leader making me stressed while handling the diverse responsibilities which I have in the community awareness club as a leader. Many are the times I am forced to work overnight to meet the short deadlines which interferes with my psychological health. The lack of time management skills has many times distracted my focus on the integral activities of the club as a leader denying me a sense of achievement. Thus, I will need to improve on my time management and evaluation skills which I will do through regular practice while leading different teams in the course of my study. This will ensure that am able to deal with the possible stress which comes along with the short deadlines. Secondly, I will be more focused ensuring that I meet the daily targets in the course of my leadership responsibilities. It is through the time management skills I will avoid the conflicts that are evident among the club members due to their failure to meet deadlines. The adoption of time management skills as a leader will also increase my sense of achievement and also increase my ability to influence my team members as I will serve as an example to them; modeling the actual time management behaviors I require them to adopt.
Conclusion
In conclusion, for leaders to be effective in their leadership, they must learn to use different leadership skills to influence the relationships they have with their followers. High level of communication and collaboration are very important not only while handling the team conflicts but also while setting the strategic objectives to be achieved by the team members. Thus, leaders must ensure they develop open communication channels, engage their followers in active listening and also cater for the cultural diversities which have at times limited the communication in teams. In addition, a high level of time management and evaluation skills is required to ensure that the objectives set are regularly evaluated and mistakes identified as early as possible and addressed accordingly. Being a leader is more than acting as supervisors but creating a position of influence and inspiration to followers to attain the set goals.
Work cited
Beshears, John, and Francesca Gino. "Leaders as decision architects." Harvard Business Review
93.5 (2015): 52-62.
Certo, Samuel C. Supervision and evaluation: Concepts and skill-building. McGraw-Hill
Education, 2018. Print. p. 35. https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/49525935/editions?editionsView=true"referer=di
Gritzo, Louis, Alan Fusfeld, and Dan Carpenter. "Success Factors in R"D Leadership:
Leadership Skills and Attributes for R"D Managers Analysis of data from a large-scale survey reveal the behaviors, skills, and attributes that distinguish successful R"D leaders." Research-Technology Management 60.4 (2017): 43-52.
