Leadership Styles And Their Impacts: An Essay On Effective Leadership.

Democratic Leadership

Discuss about the Leadership Styles and their Impacts. 

Leadership is the art of a leader setting direction and rules for others to follow in order to achieve certain goals. Different kinds of leaders have different styles of leading people depending on the skills they have towards their duty or their character (Kippenberger, 2002). In this case democratic leadership will be considered to be the best style of leadership that can work best while leading a group of people.

Democratic leadership is a participative style of leadership where all the group members are involved in decision making towards attaining certain goals. In this case all the members are included in determining the course of actions to be taken in decision making. Democratic style of leadership makes every member of the group feel in place and embraced by the whole team (Sadler, 2003). The style can be considered best in the sense that everyone in the group will be given a chance to air out their views and thus there will be no ideas that will be locked out.

First it’s a very open and friendly style of leading a group of people. Thoughts are shared freely in between the group and are discussed about openly. Discussions flow freely where everyone in the group is given a chance to share their views (Tracy, 2014). The style ensures that the decision making will not rely on one person and hence there is no room for making mistakes.

Secondly in this kind of leadership encourage individuals to point out their ideas, and this helps to ensure that the decision arrived at is best conceivable decision. In such a case it is possible to bring the best ideas from knowledgeable and skilled team members or a group of people. The style ensures that it will be easy for the group to face tough and difficult situations.

Finally, the democratic style of leadership gives the group the chance to learn from one another and also understand each other’s strong and weak points. All this reasons will help the leader of the group to come up with the best results during any decision making situation. As a leader when this method is used it brings the best outcome from the members of the group (Osborne, 2008). Moreover, all the ideas of the group members will be incorporated thus assure the best outcome in the decision making process.

Reasons for Choosing this Style of Leadership

After using the democratic leadership while leading the group in an organization to achieve certain goals all plans of the group were achieved. As a leader the obligations were to take the organization’s different projects into another level.  Every member of the group was able to give their ideas to the group and then the different ideas were discussed, whereby the best ideas were selected. While guiding the company’s projects into new directions, there is none of the group members that had been involved and mistakes increased as well as the challenges, but all the same as leader the most important thing here was to meet those challenges. On the other hand, as a leader good leadership skill should have been implemented so as to encourage the group members on the way forward.

In the case at hand, every member of the group was supposed to come up with their ideas which made a room for them to be more innovative and creative. The projects that were being addressed were meant to improve the productivity of the organization and so different ideas were needed in order to help realize the way forward. The members of the organization were given a chance the air out their problems and come up with the desired solutions for the same (Goldsmith, Baldoni & McArthur, 2010). The airing of the ideas motivated every member to be innovative and creative in their thinking considering that there were no ideas that were being closed out. The members of the group were given a chance of personal growth in that they were made to believe in themselves regarding the ideas they gave.

Nevertheless, some of the ideas did not become effective due to the limited time. Everyone could not manage to give out their input on the issues at hand, which was a big challenge in the long run. Moreover, there were no rooms for error thus for every idea to be implemented it had to be thoroughly reviewed which did cost the members more time in examining the ideas.

In other times considering another leadership style would be better because different ways of doing things would bring changes with even more effective results (Segil, Goldsmith & Belasco, 2003) in the end. For instance, in our case considering pacesetting leadership style would even be more effective since as a leader it’s just strategizing the things that should be done and give the members the challenge of achieving those set goals.

Intention of the Activity and the Outcome

The communication will be kept open in that everyone will feel comfortable to air out their ideas without any fears and this will help all to commit each member of the group to innovativeness and creativity in all that they do (Peters, 2005). Working with a team using this style will encourage respect for ideas despite the fact that people might not agree with all the ideas aired. Every member of the team will feel like he or she is a part of the working team.

Being a follower in a group where it involved full participation through giving my best to the group is one thing that made me understand group dynamics better. Despite the fact that we were being supervised to give the expected outcomes, as an individual I took the challenge of implementing each idea that I had for the betterment of the group. I ensured that the leader got the best out of me and that he could get ideas from other individuals from the group as well.

The involvement in all the group activities made several improvements to the leadership skills that were learned in class. Followers are classified as effective versus passive and independent versus dependent followers. Effective followers are supposed to adhere to the goal of the leaders and work towards helping him or her achieve the goals they have at hand. Passive followers are the ones that listen to the views of the leaders and accept the views as valid and the standard truth. Independent followers are those followers that can easily work on their own to deliver a common good to the whole team while dependent followers are incapable of working alone and rely on the leader or other members of the group. In most cases the leaders are ambitious the zeal should be extended to the followers in order to achieve best results (Goleman, Boyatzis & McKee, 2002). The followers are expected emulate the good attitude of their leaders towards achieving the set goals. 

For the group to be effective, as a follower one has got to have the aspect of flexibility whereby he or she can be able to adapt to the changes that might come in in the line of duty. I would implement this approach to help me to be effective in my work bearing the fact that regulations keep on changing depending on the environment (Grint, 2005). At times even natural disasters come and therefore, as a good follower there has to be that adaptability to those changes. I also should ensure I am well able to communicate with not only the leader but also the other group members. Good communication skills bring satisfaction both to the leader and the other people working together (Giuliani & Kurson, 2002). For instance if one is not able to accomplish a certain task one should be able to communicate the same on time so that the leader can plan accordingly.  This will reduce conflicts that might come in as a result of uncompleted tasks.

If I take a position of being a follower another time I would be more aggressive in undertaking my tasks. I would work hand in hand with the leader so that I may learn their mind and know their desire in the task at hand. The aggressiveness and desire to achieve the best results would increase productivity in my work and even allow me to know how to handle different tasks. I would also ensure that I am more persistence towards achieving certain goals and ensure that even if it does not work at that particular time I would have to put more efforts to make it work.

References.

Giuliani, R. & Kurson, K. (2002). Leadership. New York: Hyperion.

Goldsmith, M., Baldoni, J., & McArthur, S. (2010). The AMA handbook of leadership. New York: American Management Association.

Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R., & McKee, A. (2002). Primal leadership. Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press.

Grint, K. (2005). Leadership. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kippenberger, T. (2002). Leadership styles. Oxford, U.K.: Capstone Pub.

Osborne, C. (2008). Leadership. London: DK Pub.

Peters, T. (2005). Leadership. London: Dorling Kindersley.

Sadler, P. (2003). Leadership. London: Kogan Page Ltd.

Segil, L., Goldsmith, M., & Belasco, J. (2003). Partnering. New York: Amacom.

Tracy, B. (2014). Leadership. New York: American Management Association.