What Makes Leadership an Important Part of the Organisation?
Leadership is a critical aspect of organisational success that determines the outcome of strategies, planning and implementation phases, inherent processes and other vital corporate setups. The changing times call for new and innovative methods for leading and managing people. Organisational leaders are the drivers of change that bring in new ideas, visions, thinking patterns and transform corporational structures as per their long term planning.
The modern world of digital transformation has led to fast paced changes and additional inputs offered through novel technologies that act as the ideal breeding grounds for setting up advanced leadership practices that can help both organisations and their employees. The main crux of management and leadership lies in taking workers on board to achieve objectives set by the corporation.
Leadership: Understanding its Subtleties
“A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better.”
The above quote by Jim Rohn highlights the need for leaders to create a positive and substantial work culture that assists growth in their capacities and take corporations forward. With the rapid fluctuations happening in markets these days, senior executives need to hire and bring on board capable individuals that get the job done. Furthermore, with the complexities and challenges of leading a significant group of employees, talent recruiters need to assess potential leaders against different parameters carefully.
The strategic leadership program offered by elite universities makes learners capable of leading future projects and teams. One of these programs is the IIM strategic management course, which is instrumental in teaching about its key features and the evolution of this sector through the ages. These programs have been designed with close inspection of industry experts to render the knowledge about its quintessential aspects through its course modules and application in real world environments.
What are the Features of Leadership?
Before understanding the basic building blocks of steps that constitute strategic management and leadership processes, it’s essential to get familiarised with its features and core qualities. Leadership is a field that requires working extensively with people and convincing them for achieving objectives through consistent efforts and vision-based thinking. Leaders need to bind and unite employees together for performing tasks and coming out triumphant in times of stress and despair.
A credible strategic leadership program describes the different feature of the leadership domain through the following list:-
- Ability to Influence Others
Leaders need to possess strong personality traits and influence others with their actions, speech and work ethic. Moreover, leaders must ensure that their behaviour affects others to perform their tasks with enthusiasm and attrition for achieving a common shared objective.
- Attaining Common Organisational Goals
The sole purpose of leadership is to guide and manoeuvre people in the right direction while working towards goals set up by the companies. In addition, leaders need to double up as mentors to encourage and motivate their core group members for performing specific tasks and make them feel at ease while dealing with challenges.
- Developing an Eternal Process
Leadership is an eternal process that needs continuous refinements, ideas and inputs for bettering its outcome. Strategic and other leaders must manage duties throughout the deployment of leadership strategies. A successful and able leader guides their employees every time they face difficulty and regularly push them to work out of their skins to complete the tasks and objectives.
- Taking the Group Together
Leadership is a people-centric role, and the value of team culture, togetherness and unity must be displayed at all times. Leaders need to devise models that lead to active communication and interaction between themselves and their team members.
The features mentioned above are amongst the most sought after for companies, and hence the learnings from IIM strategic management program will come in handy while building on these protocols. Moving on, aspiring leaders need to understand the evolution of this domain throughout the decades.
Discussing the Evolution of Leadership through the Ages
Leadership is a varied field with different constituents relating to certain employees and people employed in the task force. What may work with baby boomers might not work with millennials and gen z and vice-versa. The reasons for the same being changes in working styles, thinking patterns, societal norms and changes in culture. Having done some groundwork through a strategic leadership program, professionals need to understand this sector from the following viewpoints:-
- Working with Different Generations
The current workplace presents itself as a varied environment with different generations working alongside each other. The generations include baby boomers- those born between 1946 to 1964, millennials- those between 1981 and early 1990s and Gen Z- those born after 1997 and early 2000s.
With such a diversified landscape, the leadership styles tend to be different and spaced out from others.
- Looking over the Leadership Styles
Studies have shown that relaxed leadership styles such as transformational types work well for baby boomers as it requires working with employees who possess patience and are laborious. These individuals follow traditional practices and work better in hierarchical systems.
On the other hand, Gen Z love working by themselves and hence work better with transactional leadership styles that provide a crystal clear set of objectives to employees and require less management and authority over people.
- Leadership for Millennials
Millennials are the rare breed of generations defined by specific historical events and look for ways to balance both work and life together. The belief systems have been such that those born between 1981 and the year 2000 prefer quick and fast solutions for problems and require leadership styles that involve great planning and implementation. Therefore, strategic leadership is best suited for working with millennials.
The points mentioned above describe the different generations and their leadership styles prevalent today. Therefore, the IIM strategic management program has been formulated by keeping these various aspects in mind.
Leading Through Different Generations
The article above showcases the need for different leadership styles across generations for creating a positive work culture. A strategic leadership program will render the concepts and knowledge that is required for acing this domain. The IIM strategic management program clarifies the major aspects of leadership and management silos.