The Art of Leadership

Introduction
Leadership is defined as the art of influencing others for the profitable achievement of organisational goals and objectives (Bryman and Parry, 2013). In a sense, leaders are considered to the most valuable asset of an organisation as they are responsible for moulding the behaviour of employees for pursuing shared goals and objectives of the organisation. According to Bass (1990), leaders within an organisation are transformational as they help employees to differentiate between what is right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, as well as important and unimportant. The foremost goal of leaders within an organisation is to develop employee’s self-interest, while helping followers to provide exceptional results.
By considering the importance of leadership within an organisation, the report focuses on evaluating the effective and desirable characteristics of leadership. In addition, the paper encompasses a critical evaluation of the view that different leadership skills and core competencies are required for international and domestic leadership.

Concepts of Leadership
Leadership is simply the ability to inspire others to pursue the strategic goals and objectives of the organization, to such an extent that is becomes a mutually shared effort and vision. Hence leadership can be defined as the art of influencing others to enhance the performance and productivity of the individual in the accomplishment of organizational tasks and objectives (Mielach, 2012). This implies that leadership is an ability to step outside the comfort-zone for initiating a revolutionary change process within the organization. Meanwhile, Peter Drucker defined leadership as the art of having followers (Riggio, 2009). Thus leaders are c...

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The characteristics that are considered to be desirable help a leader in becoming effective, regardless of the nature and size of operations. A leader has to have exceptional communication skills in order to maintain a meaningful relation with the followers. For this, a leader’s integrity is imperative to bring in the needed reliability so the follower could depend on the leader. A leader has to be self-aware and confident to make constructive use of his capabilities to install in motivation with positive attitude among the followers. Following leaders does not imply that they have to be mindless but they have to possess the intellect to understand and share the objectives with their leaders. To be a desirable leader, one has to have considerable tolerance level to be facing expected ambiguity. In short, his character is actually transferred into followers.