Leadership And Traits

7 Pages 1819 Words

Leadership and Traits
What is leadership? What is the history of the study of traits regarding leadership? What attributes and traits do successful leaders possess? What traits and skills do business leaders need today? Can anyone learn to be a good leader, or are you born as such? Can traits be used as an overall guide to identify good leaders? These and other questions have been examined and re-examined by scores of people and organizations throughout the years in the pursuit of finding an effective combination of traits that is prevalent in all successful leaders. I will answer these questions and explore the wide spectrum of information that has evolved today’s leaders into the multi-dimensional and versatile visionaries that they are.
As a process, the textbook defines leadership as the use of noncoercive influence to shape the group’s or organization’s goals, motivate behavior toward the achievement of those goals, and help define group or organizational culture. Another source simply states that leadership is the ability to guide, direct, and influence people. There are many definitions to leadership, depending on whom you ask. My definition of leadership is the progressive directing of an individual or a group to collectively attain a specific outcome.
Prior to the wide array of modern studies dedicated to leadership theory, it was thought that great leaders were born that way. In the early 1500’s, using the noble class as his model, Niccolo Machiavelli wrote a book and a play that outlined his perception of what good leadership traits are. These were identified as fraudulent, hypocritical, harsh, deceitful, and ruthlessness. The underlying logic is that as long as a desirable outcome is attained, the method used in arriving there is irrelevant. This kind of leadership style sounds barbaric at best. In the 1900’s, these primitive theories made way for more sophisticated studies. Throughout the next...