Leader-centric and follower-centric leadership

Hi everyone,

Since reading this course that is closely related to project management, my thoughts are wandering about the leadership as well. For me, personally, leadership and management go hand in hand together. Recently I read couple of books:

1. A Very Short Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Studying Leadership (Jackson & Perry, 2011).
   
2. Leadership in Organizations (Yukl, 2013).
   

Both books talked about the leadership in big, mostly intercultural organizations. In my opinion, the role of the team leader who has to manage the team that are located in different parts of the world and have members from different cultures is complex and severe.

First thing first, I think what is important for every manager, especially in big organisations, is to understand that his job is to establish the balance between the concern of the team members and the productive manufacturing process. As Jackson & Perry (2011) highlights – “most effective leaders will achieve a balance between twin challenges of getting the job done and looking after welfare of the workers” (Jackson & Parry, 2011, 27p). For achieving this goal, the leader needs to have a great set of personal traits and skills.

I believe that leadership depends on followers as well as followers depends on leaders. By saying this, I want to highlight that for example, being a women manager in male dominated industry as well as having teams in different countries as such would be highly challenging. Most importantly leader working within international teams must have strong cross-cultural skills and profound understanding about particular countries’ modus vivendi (“manner of living”). I believe that comprehending and having the right perspective of the cultural values and practices would help me, as a manager to have a critical view on what and why particular issues are arising in the teams as well as it would prevent any prejudices and bias experiences.

Equally important is “Understanding what people want and how they perceive things” (Yukl, 2013, 150p) as that makes the process of choosing the right influence strategy and persuasive communication more lucrative (Yukl, 2013). Having solid interpersonal skills help to understand human behaviours within the team as well as it eases to establish cooperative relationships with the colleagues. Moreover, interpersonal skills would help me to coordinate and manage people on a personal level. By this I mean that having a profound competency of this skill would enhance my ability to communicate within teams as well as with each member individually. I believe that well-being of my followers highly depends on the efficiency of the communication and mutual understanding.

Another important skill for the manager of high-tech company is “technical skills” which means thorough understanding of the operations, processes, manufacturing and production of the company. Yukl (2013) suggests “Technical knowledge of products and processes is necessary to plan and organise work operations, to direct and train subordinates with specialised activities, and to monitor and evaluate their performance” (Yukl, 2013, 149p). Having such skills would help leaders to organise the work load and manage the time limits for the production and / or projects.
At the same time, personal traits are as important as the skills are. Traits such as intelligence, knowledge, judgmental, optimism, positiveness, emotional control, insight and many more are always advantageous for a leader to have, however, it is not the most important and valuable feature of the manager. The most important is that leader has an “ability to keep on learning from your experiences” (Yukl, 2011, 139p).

These are my thoughts about what skills are needed for being a great leader and project manager in a big corporation. Would like to hear your thoughts on what you think it's important for being a great leader?