What is Leadership ?

Leadership is a word of a thousand meanings. It seems simple but there is a lot of different perspectives for people to interpret and describe the word Leadership. A year ago, when I was in high school, I challenged myself became the President Director of my own student company. My goal was to lead my team to create a sustainable company with a creative product and to become the winner of a business competition called the Asia Pacific company competition 2018. From that experience, I found that to become a leader is not as easy as I thought it was. Even though we managed to bring our company to victory, there were a lot of pieces of leadership style that I missed to be a good leader. In the Leadership class, my journey to finding the missing pieces of leadership began. I learned several theories and concepts that I found useful such as Behavioral skills theory and Situational Leadership concept.

As I mentioned before, leadership has a lot of different explanations. In my leadership class, we started the discussion by sharing our thought of leadership. We even debated about who can be a leader. Is leadership only for men or also women? Then, we came up with a point that describes the meaning of leadership. We all agreed that leadership is the ability and values of an individual or group of individuals to make a decision, influence, and guide followers regardless of if the leader is a man or a woman.

I found several theories that defined leadership in different ways. My thought about leadership is strengthened by the Katz’s Behavioral skills theory. Katz (1940) acknowledged that there are three basic supreme skills that can be learned such as technical skills, human skills, and conceptual skills. This theory contrast with the other one that stuck in my mind: Great Man Theory. In this theory, Carlyle (1840) assumed that the traits of leadership are intrinsic, or simply means that great leaders are born not made. I mention this theory not that I agree with it but instead, I’m in the opposite of this theory. I believe that everyone is capable to be a leader.

The other theory that was open to my mind about leadership is the Situational Leadership theory and concept by Hersey and Blanchard. This theory focused on the characteristics of followers as an important element of the situation, and consequently of determining effective leadership behavior (Hersey & Blanchard, 1960). This theory gave me a concept on how to apply the leadership style in the real world. In this concept, the first thing we can do is evaluate the followers to know their abilities. Then, we predict what we have to do to fit the situation based on their abilities and achieve the desired goals. From this concept, I found the missing pieces of leadership style that I should’ve used to be a good leader in previous experience where I led my student company.

In conclusion, all the theories and concepts that I learned are very helpful. First, the behavioral theory makes me certain that leadership can be learned. Then, Situational leadership concept supports that idea by explaining several ways to lead the followers depends on their capability. I learned that leadership is needed not only to guide or influence others but also to guide myself. Leadership is an important function of management in life to maximize efficiency and to achieve goals.