Leadership Essay

As John Maxwell said, ‘Leadership is influence. Nothing more, nothing less’. One cannot disagree with this statement as it is quite true. However, the definition of leadership is diverse, as there are different theories concerning this issue and different ideas of what good leadership is. The words ‘leader’ and ‘leaderships’ are sometimes used interchangeably, used as synonyms. However, I think that these two words are quite different.

A leader is a trusted individual that influences his/her followers through their leadership style, or process. A leader is the person that motivates and inspires his/her team to reach the vision in mind. Can anyone be a leader? Well, according to the trait theory, the answer is no. A person is either born a leader or not. Actually, in order to be a leader one must obtain a certain set of traits, or characteristics, that will give them the required package and help them lead their followers through good leadership. For instance, one must be honest, intelligent, fair, creative, straight forward and so on, in order to practice effective leadership and be a somewhat good leader.

It is debatable, but quite a lot of people claim that Gandhi was the best leader in history. With his special and unique way of leading, Gandhi, the political leader as well as the anti-war activist (these two words are rarely used in the same sentence) fought silently and peacefully, without harming anyone and got independence to his country India by leading the independent movement and inspiring the Indians to fight for their freedom and make India free of British rule.

On the other hand, there are some theories that concern leadership more than they concern leaders, such as the contingency theory as well as the behavioral theory.

The contingency theory of leadership suggests that leaders are effective depending on the situation that they’re in; in other words, people can be leaders in a certain environment and not necessarily be leaders in another environment. This theory could remind us of a chameleon, that changes colors depending on the leaf its on, just like a leader would change his/her way depending on the environment, or the situation.

As for the behavioral theory, it suggests different leadership styles which are related to sets of behaviors; it also takes into account the process of reward and punishment on the different behaviors.