Think Outside The Box

The increasing importance of leadership training for leaders has been recognized by those at the forefront of leadership. Leadership is an important and crucial variable that leads to enhanced management capacity, as well as organizational performance (Sudhakar, 2013). There are numerous big named professionals hosting seminars and providing training to potential leaders as limited cost. As there are also those same people providing training within the astronomical cost range to provide what benefit. People want to be blown away and hear something they have never heard before and learn how to think outside the box. See processes and principles deployed that really alter the way people think and act within the organization. Impacting growth and performance all at the same time through simple task that leaders can complete. The skills that demonstrated the greatest change were those pertaining to thinking outside the box and process improvement (Ginzburg et al., 2018). Leadership plays a crucial role in the two factors believed to be employee satisfaction – utilizing employee skills and teamwork – developing and sustaining effective leaders for the government of the 21st century is clearly fundamental (Sudharak, 2013).

Timothy Dolan described “Leadership” as slippery, which in most cases causes people to take a step back and reevaluate things. Some are prone to make decisions that just appease themselves meanwhile others look with a wider perspective and take on the overall group feeling. There is no one-size-fits all holy grail for determining a leader though one would not know this given the claims by popular books that continue to grow in volume (Dolan, 20201). What I liked about Dolan’s book is the use of key terms and elements that prevalent today through leadership. Dolan (2018) expresses five keen powers that can be clearly displayed by leaders causing morale to buffer, splits in working relationships, and sides to chosen. Although recent discussions of followership attempts to develop behavioral typologies, understand how followers influence leaders, and highlights the characteristics that make for good, bad, and indifferent followers, follower-centric theory and research itself have primarily dealt with the likely precursor to these activities—information processing (Brown, 2018). Let’s be honest, there are some who thrive off the constant turmoil they can cause by manipulating the minds of people to get what they want or think they deserve. As they will go to great lengths to make their dreams come true at any cost. Effective leaders create positive organizational cultures, strengthen motivation, clarify mission and organizational objectives, and steer organizations to more productive and high performing outcomes (Sudharak, 2013).

Those powers are according to Dolan (2021) are:

Coercive Power – This power involves the usage of threats to make people do as one desires.

Reward Power – Using rewards and perks to influence people, although it poses other implications because not all promises can be fulfilled due to other people being involved.

Legitimate Power – Translates to the position one holds, lower positions hold less power and higher positions hold more.

Expert Power – This power is personal and associated with the individual and their expertise or skills which brings more credibility and respect.

Referent Power – This power translates to movie stars and other celebrities as they have a huge following and use their power to influence people in other ways.

As Dolan (2021) mentioned, the new perspective on leadership looks to the capacity of a leader to utterly change the organizations entire culture. Let’s take the likes of leaders such as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, or better yet Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk. Each of these individuals had the ability, skills, and influence to change their respective times. Organizational and societal transformation involves paradigm shift, but in practice may often be better described as quantum accretion and diffusion from many indeterminate sources that lead to a tipping point (Dolan, 2021).

Despite the disproportional predominance of leader-centric leadership research, which emphasizes the systematic variance in the influence process due to leader characteristics, far less attention has been devoted to followers (Brown, 2018). What exactly is it that followers want from leaders? Truth, openness, respect, integrity, and fairness are all valid elements. Most of which heavily relates to why followers behave in exotic ways at times or determine that leaders are untruthful, selfish and possessive. If one understands why followers behave as they do, a necessary first step is in understanding their thought processes (Brown, 2018). Do not treat human beings as possessions or easily replaceable assets. There is always a social cost when human beings are reduced to the level of commodities (Sudharak, 2013). Also, leaders must have the desired of credentials and competencies necessary to do the desired job and merge the personnel together toward a desired goal. Specific skills, specialized knowledge demands and attributes that are considered to be important in performing tasks to the required standards underpin competencies (Sudharak, 2013).

Leadership must be more about the people versus gaining the authority and power that one secretly seeks. Leaders must think outside the box in each aspect of their duties to find creative ways to not only keep the ship moving in the right direction, but also appreciate employees who have given their life to the profession. Thinking outside the box can pose some severe benefits if done properly and given the desired attention. Remaining stuck in the ways of the similar effective systems can cost you years of advancement along with good qualified candidates seeking employment elsewhere. I encourage you to step outside of your comfort zone and think outside the box and see how it can benefit you. Get away from the good ole boy system and back room handshake deals, and move toward a progressive way of life where previous history, qualifications, skills and training mean more. The potential to miss out on something great could be lost, so think outside the box.   

References:

Brown, D. J. (2018). In the minds of followers: Follower-centric approaches to leadership. In J. Antonakis & D. V. Day (Eds.), The nature of leadership (pp. 82–108). Sage Publications, Inc.

DOLAN, T. E. (2021). THE EVOLUTION OF LEADERSHIP THEORIES. Leadership for the Future: Lessons from the Past, Current Approaches, and Future Insights, 2.

Ginzburg, S. B., Deutsch, S., Bellissimo, J., Elkowitz, D. E., Stern, J. N., & Lucito, R. (2018). Integration of leadership training into a problem/case-based learning program for first-and second-year medical students. Advances in medical education and practice, 9, 221.

Sudhakar, D. (2013). QUALITY OF LEADERSHIP IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR COMPANY’SCHALLENGES AND ITS STRATEGIES. International Journal of Multidisciplinary Educational Research. Editorial Board, 128.