Leadership in Organizations

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presentation techniques and the advanced rhetoric skills including the non-verbal tactics such as body gestures, facial expression and voice animation.

Since the key to great leadership finally lies in relationships between people whom I deal with on the job, both my superiors and team members are the persons who are able to assess my leadership abilities from a 360-degree angle and provide me comprehensive feedbacks on my leadership behavior. These feedbacks will contribute me to reflect my leadership style, and to continuously gain leadership experiences in the pursuit to become an effective leader. While it is usual to receive comments on my strength and weakness from my superiors during the appraisal interviews, my team members could refrain from telling their true opinions due to the obstacle of hierarchy. Hence, I believe that empowering and mentoring my team employees are the correct manners to enforce interaction and form mutual trust and respect in the team. When creative and critical thinking of every team member are stimulated, and everyone feels cared, I will gain unfiltered access to their thoughts and feelings.

Furthermore, customers and business partners could effectively motivate me to become better as they are able to evoke my empathy by showing me the achievement before and after my engagement.

Finally, my family and friends as well as the lecturers and peers of my EMBA class including the Kellogg and WHU alumni will also inspire me to develop my leadership skills through regular exchange of leadership experiences.

3. How could you help others become better leaders?

In order to help others to become better leaders, I would explain that leadership is a complex and multi-faced process that needs to be continuously developed and critically reflected.

By demonstrating the different roles between managers and leaders, I am endeavoring to elaborate on the theories of transactional and transformational leaderships and emphasize on the fact that effective leadership is more about interaction with people in order to achieve common goals instead of a top-down dictation.

As next, I would encourage potential leaders to find out and energize their leadership purposes by developing a strong will as well as determination to approach their goals. Also, it is inspiring to question them how they are going to put their leadership purpose into action and overcome the likely hurdles. Once people are clear about their leadership purpose and know about how to lead themselves, it will be more effective for them to lead others.

Comparing the traits between effective and ineffective leaders, I would advise leadership candidates to formulate and communicate a clear vision, through which they should passionately inspire their followers to strive for the common targets. Since effective leaders exert influence and persuasion on their followers, it is essential to highlight the effectiveness of charismatic behavior that an effective leader has to develop. Thus, I would recommend candidates to evoke emotions of their followers while they are talking about their visions, and to train their rhetoric and presentation skills by watching speeches of great leaders or reading the related literatures. In order to maintain charisma, leaders have to deliver on the promises which they made in their speeches and take responsibilities for any kind of risks.

Furthermore, I would encourage leadership candidates to set up mutual trust and respect in their organizations by empowering their employees and caring about them by addressing their professional and social needs. I would suggest potential leaders to avoid unequal treatment in their teams, and to focus on the team’s overall performance by discussing and solving problems with the team as a whole rather than with individual team member. Also, potential leaders have to support creative and critical thinking and gain the ability to bring about change in their teams. Hence, mentoring is a helpful manner to build up a close interpersonal relationship to between leaders and employees and enforce employees’ loyalty.

Finally, successful leaders are used to make critical self-reflection in order to learn from their leadership experience. Also, they require smart abilities to motivate people and themselves at work. Although leaders should fairly reward their employees for their effort and achievement, I would distinguish extrinsic from intrinsic motivation. In terms of the latter one, for instance I would recommend leadership candidates to regularly arrange customer visit for their employees and themselves with respect to some best-practice projects because once people get strong empathy through their achievements that customers appreciate, they will intrinsically motivate themselves to do things even better in the future.