Key elements defining leadership

Published on January 30, 2022   8 min
Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
Hi, I'm Dr. Robert Lussier, Professor Emeritus at Springfield College. I have more than 475 publications with 8,000 plus Google Scholar citations, with book sales exceeding 2 million copies including a leadership book that this presentation is based on. I'm also a visiting professor through my 'publish do not perish'. I go to universities around the globe to improve student and faculty ability to get published; see my website, publishdonotperish.com for more details.
0:35
In this talk, I'm going to be defining leadership and I'm going to be saying that it has five key elements within it. First of all, we want to talk about how this change has taken place over the years we've moved from an old autocratic leadership style to a new participative and servant leadership. Now, the old-school hierarchy command and control through autocratic management is no longer effective in many organizations. High-performing organizations and managers share the leadership as employees participate in performing the five management functions of planning, organizing, staffing, leading, and controlling. Now, the old-style autocratic managers focused on being self-serving; whereas, employees are there to help them. Whereas, servant leaders focused on serving others by helping them accomplish goals and complete their tasks. In high-performing organizations, leadership is shared as individuals with expertise lead when their competencies are needed and follow others having more competency to the task completed. In organizations that are high-performing, a key is that they have employees giving ideas to improve performance but if they try to be autocratic, they just will not come up with new innovative ideas to help the organization. We are all leaders and we can all improve our leadership skills.