Leadership

Review on the article "Discovering Your Authentic Leadership" Organizations are social units with specific purposes. The basic elements of organizations have remained the same over the years. Several disciplines provide the knowledge and the means to understand organizations. However, it is appropriate to look at organizations integrally in multi-disciplinary perspective. Three viewpoints have emerged, over the years in successive stages, each seeking to provide a window on the others. They are the classical, the neoclassical and the modern viewpoints. Within the classical approach, three streams stand out: bureaucracy, administrative theory and principles of scientific management. It is important to note that with the passage of time, the viewpoints have been changed or modified, but not replaced as such. Each major contribution brought new knowledge, awareness, tools and techniques to understand the organizations better. Thus, today we are richer than ever before in terms of our knowledge about approaches to understand organizations. All the same, more knowledge meant reckoning with more complex variables to comprehend the complexities of human organizations. There is, as yet, no general, unified, universal theory as such. Organizations being diverse and complex in more senses than one, it is difficult, if not meaningless to be too general or too specific about them. Organizations depend on individuals to achieve organizational objectives. Successful organizations pay adequate attention to their human resource development functions. The values of openness, trust, mutuality, collaboration, and enthusiasm within the system should be recognized by every member of the organization. If implemented properly, integrated HRD systems can contribute significantly to positive cultural changes, increased productivity, and excellence in organizations. Managers get things done through people. Understanding why people behave the way they do plays an important role in a managers effectiveness. Self awareness and knowing yourself is critical for leaders. Past studies could not provide a clear profile for an ideal leader. The great leaders in the past have been identified as great change masters as most of them adapted themselves to the conditions of their societies, religious or social beliefs, and political and financial situations of their regions and formed the suitable approaches and led the mass to achieve the organizational goals in the required fashion. Authentic Leadership in my opinion is the activity of influencing people to strive willingly for mutual objectives, without sacrificing values of the society at the large. In any enterprise, the will-to-do of the employees is triggered by leadership, and Luke-worm desires for achievements are transformed into a burning passion for successful accomplishments by the skillful use of leadership. In other way, I feel, the authentic leadership means not to say ‘go on’ but ‘come on’. Leadership styles are many and varied, e.g. personal and impersonal, formal and informal, laissez faire, autocratic, negative, etc, each style is having a few characteristics distinguishing one from other -In real life one will hardly come across any particular style as mentioned. The successful leaders might have practiced a blend of different leadership styles depending upon the time, situation, and followers’ disposition. There are two principal theories of leadership: (1) Trait theory and (2) Situation theory. As per the Trait theory, a successful leader is supposed to have the following traits: good personality, capacity to read other’s mind, ability to make quick decisions, courage, persuasion, intelligence, reliability, imagination, etc. The study of the lives of all successful leaders mentioned in the article “Discovering your authentic leadership” reveals that they possessed most of these traits to a great degree. Though these traits are important for an authentic leadership, it is always related to a particular situation. A person may be proved very successful in one situation due to some traits but the reverse in another situation. Thus the situational theory contends that there is no one best style of leadership universally applicable for all situations. All these successful leaders, mentioned in the article are classic examples of leaders emerged out of situations to which they have been subjected. The main motivation, I derive from this article is “the authentic leaders stay grounded and spend some time with their families and friends, practicing spiritual and physical activities to have active, positive, and balanced thinking; and to involve in community service with true spirit and honesty to sustain their authenticity”.