Azter Leadership: An Unsuccessful Model
When leadership comes to mind, it comes with thoughts of shining knights, beacons of truth, and unflappable exemplars. As a child, everyone hears the fairy tales of leaders that are able to do battle with evil, alone, and rescue their cause from sure defeat; the media is saturated with stories such as these. However, leaders and leadership can and does come in different packages, sizes, and abilities. It is not always the case that a leader is the unsung hero of a cause and, in fact, this paper will show that sometimes the leader avoids the limelight focusing it on the cause and his followers. A basic understanding of leaders and leadership will be established and then a critique of a modern company will be explained. As this paper will show, just as we have great companies with strong leadership, we also have companies on the slide with no definitive direction or leadership.
Two fundamental things about leadership must be understood prior to critique a company. First, leadership is a trinity that relies on leaders, followers, and situational cues. Second, leadership, as a practice, has many aspects which can be learned; however, an equal, and an equally important, number of aspects cannot be learned. A superficial understanding of leadership would have us believe both that leaders simply exist and that they exist without training, knowledge, or extrinsic influence. However, a deeper and more thorough understanding must be had in order to fully examine the strengths and weaknesses of a company's leadership.
The trinity of leadership previously mentioned is described in Daft's textbook on leadership. He expresses that leadership cannot exist is a vacuum. Leaders must have followers to lead in a situation that requires a direction. And these followers and directions are often times not the same. This is illustrated when Daft (2005) says:
The central focus of research [is] the situation in which leadership occurred. The basic tenet of this focus [is] that behavior effective in some circumstances might be ineffective under different conditions. Thus, the effectiveness of leader behavior is contingent upon organizational situations. There is no one best way of leadership (p. 81).
Prior ideas about leadership dictated that there were hard and fast rules. As mentioned above, this cannot be the case due to a number of factors.