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A remembrance to those who gave all

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Leadership is a convoluted oft debated word. It includes those who make things happen, those whom history remembers, and those whom history forgets. However, leadership is immeasurably valuable. It inspires, it creates change, and it has much to do with every part of our lives. While history may forget those who kept the ship steady, their fight was nonetheless valiant. These leaders are the ones who provide for our families, raise children, and give all they have for others. However, history typically only remembers those who stood up for something, those who did not care about the consequences, and those who were willing to give all up for their cause. Whether or not these are the leaders we can all be is debatable. After all, if we were all out fighting for what we believed in and never conforming in any way, would anything get accomplished? However, there is certainly a time and place for this type of leadership. For my last blog post, I will highlight some of the movers
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Hofstede’s Dimensions of Culture

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This week in Leadership we discussed two very interesting areas—gender and culture—and how they relate to leadership. For this week’s blog post I will focus on culture and how it is related to leadership. Culture Culture describes “learned beliefs, values, rules, norms, symbols, and traditions that are common to a group of people” (Northouse, 2016, p.428). every person has their own culture. We get culture from our religions, nations, regions, states, hometowns, genders, races, and even our individual families have their own culture. Culture permeates every decision we make and almost everything we do—from how we speak, what we eat, and even how we perceive individuals. It all comes back to culture. So, it is important for leaders (and followers too) to understand differences in culture and how this will affect the workplace or any environment. “Of all the research on [the] dimensions of culture,” Hofstede’s is likely the most cited (Northouse, 2016, p. 431). Geert H. Hofstede
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The Downside of Teams

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                This week in Leadership we discussed ethical leadership and team leadership. The importance of ethical leadership in any environment cannot be understated. It is vital that our leaders behave morally. If they don’t, what reason do their followers have to do so? Scandal after scandal—Enron, Abu Ghraib, Martin Shkreli (AKA Pharma Bro)—has proven this. Every workplace and organization should be confident in the character of employees before hiring them. Will these people uphold the vision you have for the company? Will they make the work environment pleasant? Are they concerned with humanity and the plight of others, or are they merely concerned with making a profit? I believe we have entered a more ethics-concerned time period in recent years. However, still, so many companies and people are drug to unethical lows by greed. I hope through ethics education, research, and training a day may come when companies that behave well are higher esteemed than those that merely mak
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Eight Archetypes of Leadership

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This week in Leadership we discussed the adaptive and psychodynamic approaches to leadership. Adaptive leadership describes how a leader helps his followers adapt to change and solve problems. Psychodynamic leadership points out the importance of seeing beyond actions alone and understanding that humans are complex beings with many motivations and conflicts at play in any one instance. Individuals and organizations respond differently to different types of leaders. Likewise, some situations call for different kinds of leaders. Within our text for this chapter, an assessment involving the eight archetypes of leadership was presented. Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries presents these archetypes in a discussion of them in a 2013 Harvard Business Review article “The Eight Archetypes of Leadership”. You can find the article here: https://hbr.org/2013/12/the-eight-archetypes-of-leadership . According to this article, the eight archetypes of leadership are as follows: 1.        Th
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What if the founding fathers had been half-hearted?

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This week in Leadership we discussed three additional leadership theories: transformational leadership, authentic leadership, and servant leadership. As usual, I identified with one approach in particular—this week it was the authentic leadership approach. Per Google, authentic means “of undisputed origin, genuine”. Unsurprisingly, authentic leadership simply addresses a leader that understands himself and his abilities. But perhaps most important is the fact that the authentic leader never wavers from his ideals, beliefs or purpose. Additionally, he is completely transparent with his followers. I knew I wanted to discuss this approach in the week’s post. However, it was not until I heard my preacher’s lesson this morning that I was truly inspired.  My preacher discussed the dedication of the founding fathers and he said one amazing thing—what if the founding fathers had been half-hearted? What if they only partly believed in the cause? What if the professed beliefs that were
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James Oglethorpe: A True Trailblazer

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James Oglethorpe Picture source:  http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/government-politics/james-oglethorpe-1696-1785 This week in Leadership we discussed two leadership theories—the path-goal theory and the leader-member exchange theory. This week I was most impressed with the path-goal theory so it will be the focus of this week’s post. The path-goal theory focuses on the follower's motivations and suggests that good leaders adjust their style to what motivates their followers. According to this theory, leaders may demonstrate directive leadership, supportive leadership, participative leadership, or achievement oriented leadership. The style of leadership used depends on the follower and the situation. For example, in the instance of a new project with a new employee, leaders would likely behave in a more directive manner. Most notably the leader in the path-goal theory does four main things for followers: he defines the goal, clarifies the path, removes any obstacles
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The Behavioral and Situational Approaches to Leadership

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This week’s discussion covered two other approaches in leadership theory—the behavioral and situational approach. Each of these approaches considers the leader’s behavior across two main dimensions—task and relationship behaviors. Consider this diagram from our text that depicts the behavioral approach: Picture source: Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and practice (7 th edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publishers. P. 76 The Behavioral Approach Figure 4.1 depicts the behavioral approach to leadership. As you can tell the two dimensions considered are the concern for people or relationship behaviors and concern for results or task behaviors. This diagram does a great job of portraying the approach. I especially like the names given to each type of leader. Beginning in the top left we have “country club management”. These types of managers are almost wholly concerned with relationship behaviors. They are interested in being the follower’s friend and likely making
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