J. Edgar Hoover's Life: J. Edgar Hoover

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John Quincy Adams once said, “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” After getting a behind the scenes look at J. Edgar Hoover’s life and accomplishments I consider him to be a very influential leader. I was always familiar with the name J. Edgar Hoover, but I never fully understood his impact on the United States. Edgar, as his mother would call him, wasn’t a perfect man by any standards. He was born with a variety of traits that contribute to his leadership. Some of these traits attributed to his downfall. Throughout the movie there were many instances that tested his leadership in both negative and in positive ways. If the traits approach to leadership exists, J. Edgar was …show more content…

Edgar Hoover has a very unique style or leadership. I consider him to be a transformational leader. A transformational leader exemplifies five characteristics, which include creativity, interactive, visionary, empowering, and passionate. Transactional forms of leadership are seen throughout many transformational leaders in the form of recognizing contributions from members of the group. Hoover is a transformational leader because he embodies an abundance of charisma. Charisma can be viewed as charm, but I like to think of it in the form of passion combined with self-confidence. Edgar was a very driven man when it pertained to the security and well-being of the United States. Charisma is a trait that every leader must possess. Hackman & Johnson define charisma as providing vision and a sense of mission; inspire; build trust and respect. As the director of the FBI, it was crucial that Edgar got his team on board with his ideas otherwise citizens would continue to be at risk. Hoover was a creative genius. He developed a system for finding books throughout the library based on subject and author. This process cut time spent searching for books in half. He used the same framework to develop his fingerprint database. Although this database would take a long time to implement, his forward thinking got the ball

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