Major Themes from Kouzes and Posner leadership challenge
This paper is a reflection of Kouzes and Posner’s views on becoming a good leader. It asserts that good leaders influence a company’s performance, culture, and profit. The primary objective of Kouzes and Posner’s leadership challenge is how to be an outstanding leader. The other key element is that besides inspiring action, which encourages employees to achieve their goals, a great leader also needs excellent communication skills.
The authors’ highlight that effective leaders impact the performance, ethos, and benefit of an organization. The vital goal of the challenge is how to become an excellent leader. A strong leader goes beyond the minimal and has an impact on the organization as a whole.
According to the authors, leadership plays a crucial role in successfully managing teams at whichever phase a company is in, be it a start-up company, a growth phase of a reputable organization, or as the key to success. In their leadership studies, Kouzes and Posner partnered with numerous influential leaders around the world. Their discoveries and numerous occurrences of leadership are the foundation of this substantial and inspiring Leadership Book. The views on the book are based on five practices of exemplary leadership. The practices are inspiring a shared vision, modelling the way, challenging the process, making it possible for others to act and raising the spirits (Kouzes & Posner, 2012). Those are the five methods crucial in the process of becoming a leader and are briefly discussed below;
Leadership Characteristics
The Leadership Challenge (Kouzes & Posner, 2012), presented an outstanding version of a functional leadership model. Kouzes and Posner’s previous Trait-Theory leadership model stimulated them to come up with their Five Leadership Practices model, widely referred to as Kouzes and Posner’s Leadership Challenge Model. Unlike several other leadership theories, they have built a practical philosophy into an individual entity which, in this case, is a leadership education structure. Following research on personal experience of excellent leadership, Kouzes and Posner came up with Five Leadership Practices. They proposed the following;
• Model the Way: The leader sets an example through defining the universal behavioural principles and then embodying them. It is crucial also to accomplish small wins to build momentum.
• Inspiring a shared vision: Leaders should work on their vision before bringing other participants onboard to own the idea—emphasis on visualization and the use of powerful, evocative language to capture the vision to inspire others.
• Challenge the process: The leader is a change agent – challenging, questioning, and seeking new ideas, learning from, experimenting, allowing for mistakes and taking risks. Importantly, encouraging new ideas to flourish.
• Enabling others to act: Building a spirit of trust and collaboration. Encouraging people to share information. Kouzes and Posner believe that leaders must disclose what they believe and care about and, when necessary, show some vulnerability. This also entails delegating power, believing in others, and investing in followers’ training and education.
• Encourage the heart: Encouraging people in an organization is a necessary behaviour that leaders need to do. Whatever in life and work, get others recognition could bring more efforts and achievements.
Organizational Impact
A leaders role goes beyond just being the manager or supervisor of an organization. A true leader depicts traits that inspire and succeed those around them. Kouzes and Posner (2012) state that there are five exceptional leadership foundations. Leaders with these characteristics can inspire and motivate others to increase productivity and cohesion. As a student with graduation, these key traits need to be understood, and an individual who exhibits these traits can gain insight.
Sharing a common vision between leaders and colleagues will instil trust in a leader understand and communicate their needs. An organization should understand that learning and maintaining a transparent connection will contribute to more exceptional organizational performance (Love, 2009). To consider how leadership qualities should be integrated into the world is a vital attribute to outstanding leaders. It has had an enormous effect since, irrespective of how many talents or attributes a leader may potentially have, there are still opportunities to alter or to affect the world in which the leader works
My Opinion and Position
The leadership challenge is not about place, money, and prestige. It emphasized that leadership concerns relation, credibility and what you’re doing (Kouzes & Posner, 2012). Respect for performance is the foundation for the creditworthiness of workers in the workforce. The interaction between managers and workers will decide the success and culture of the organization. Therefore, giving staff enough trust and encouragement will improve the business. The five leadership characteristics are the blueprint for the way, encourage a shared awareness, question the method, allow others to act and foster the core (Kouzes & Posner, 2012).
Kouzes and Posner and the HBR (VUCA)
The Kouzes and Posner’s visionary leadership is aligning with Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity (VUCA) given the fact that vision in stormy times is even more vital (Bennett & Lemoine, 2014). Having a clear vision as to where an organization is supposed to be within the short and long terms as a leader hugely improves a business. A good example is the ability to make business decisions to counteract turbulence while considering the organizational perspective. Knowing, a leader’s willingness to pause, search and react will overcome confusion. To be successful in a VUCA setting, leaders must learn to look and respond to the uncertainty and the potential outside their practical fields, which relates to the leadership challenges of Kouzes and Posner of Model the Way, challenging the process and Encourage the Heart. They both needs leaders to connect and develop and show their co-operation abilities to the growing level of workers in their organizations.
Application and Integration
Governments are finding it rough these days given current trends of pandemics and economic turmoil. Globalization, with its threats against the other, has created opportunities with one hand. The global persistent economic stagnation has stalled repeatedly on the road to recovery. Consider the difficulty of digesting technical developments affecting the market and the effects of generational shifts in the workplace, and there can be no question regarding challenges leaders’ faces. This is not easy to identify and instead work with the myriad factors that may impede operational success. After all, this is a VUCA universe, which requires a practical solution to such leadership challenges which Kouzes and Posner offer.
The connection between the VUCA and the five outstanding leadership experience is specifically agreeable in paper. Companies have adopted these two different but connect leadership approaches to train staff and strategic personalities so to steer organization through the leadership challenges of the today
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