Understanding the Essence and the Purpose of Leadership Articles | Leadership

If you search Google for the term leadership, you’ll come up with more than a 100 million results. Leadership is a very popular topic. The real definition of the term leader means a person who leads. A leader is a guide and a conductor at the same time and he is a person who directs and maintains a commanding authority as well as an influence. Leadership is also part of the process of influencing the thoughts as well as the acts and the motivation of an individual or group with communication in order to achieve a certain vision or goal. Leaders bring about change in our daily lives during great periods as well as during trying ones.

This is also a philosophical question which you can take to heart. You should ask what leadership is and what purpose leadership has in a philosophy class and it is a guarantee that the resulting discussion will be quite electric.

Leaderships’ purpose is to inspire a certain person or people to accomplish a goal. The purpose of the leader is also to steer and motivate them towards the achievement of these goals for the benefit of everyone else. Leadership in this way is understood by the definition of the purpose that it serves.

According to Stephen Covey, effective leadership is about putting first things first and effective discipline is about carrying these things out.

Leadership can be found around us on a daily basis and to varying degrees. The choir as a group may lead church members to sing while the lead goose heads southwards for winter while others who join up form a V shape overhead and other geese join up. Other examples of leadership can be found with the football coach who calls a time out in order to discuss with his players or a president who holds an annual state of the union address in order to inform and solidify a nation at the same time.

Leading isn’t entirely about being in charge and neither is it equal to it. Leaders aren’t necessarily those in charge. True leadership is a combination and an application of different personal traits as well as knowledge, skills, talents, attitude and abilities. One component of leadership is delegation and a good leader knows the intricacies involved in selecting the right person for the required task.

We are all born with our varying degrees of intelligence and it takes a whole lot of training to develop this intelligence. Albert Einstein was famous for saying that: "We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles but no personality. It cannot lead; it can only serve." Great leaders tend to use and develop their intelligence in order to combine with their sense of self-awareness, influential skills, perception and appearance of honesty, integrity, and confidence in order to guide people towards their vision of a better outcome for the group in its entirety.

Leadership is required and demanded in life. In life where you have leader, you will also have followers. We need a vision along with direction and motivation in order to attain the goals which we wish to achieve.