Some Thoughts about Leadership
It’s been a long time the concept leadership has taken over the title of best sellings. Most of them are simply trying to sell you their chicken soup without providing the spoon. The simple-anecdotal-evidence are abundant to proof their points of view and hardly trustful. So the central problem, what IS leadership, has hardly been systematically defined. Therefore i decided to figure it out by interviewing and analyzing the leaders i’ve ever met. They are CEOs of companies, chairmans of associations, or my professor of doctorate, who is also a leader of our research group. Based on my background knowledge, i conclude some of the points consist the concept leadership.
1. Positive Aggression
A team is simply a group of human beings if the team has no goal to pursuit. But the common goal of a team is usually ambigous and reshapeable. But sadly most of the people are either not clear enough what they really desire or are too defensive to claim. A team leader then emerges to find out or, in some extreme circumstances, tell the group what they can pursuit. This requires the leader to be more or less positive aggressive. It describes the desire of seizing profit for her- or himself and for the whole team, with or without vitiating benefit of the others explicitly. For example, if you are asked to finish some task, where you know yourself are more or less the best in your acknowledgment. And after that if you would require the asker to do the same thing, she or he agrees without any hesitation. You are in this case positively aggressed. For another example, if there is no explicit prohibition of possessing some pubic resource and someone is really grabbing it for the benefit of himself and his crew. Then if someone else is also to legally access this resource, the former possessor can choose either to recruit the new comer or make a deal of sharing without reducing the profit of her- or himself and her or his crew member’s. This resource can also be said positively aggressed. Most of us, regretfully, are too shy to be aggressive, even a little bit. Or we simply mind the thought of others too much and suppress our aggression. Actually according to the research of psychology, the one being asked to finish the job always admires the task distributor. So it seems that if you really want to be liked or be admired as a leader, you’d better ask the experts to do jobs they good at for you with repayment.
2. Allowance of Uncertainty
Different from a boss or even a dictator, a leader has to at first behave herself or himself. The leaders mentioned above share another fairly common characteristic, that is the allowance of uncertainty. Once the leader decides a direction of marsh, she or he is uncertain what comes next at most of the time. Consider that you are in a military squad committing a mission, which may succeed by only 50% chance. The squad leader now has to stop you from worrying about the 50% chance of failure by kindly lie to you, or comfort you by saying that she or he will deal with the half fail and encourage you to focus on the successful part. Eventually you will forget the fact that the every second trail of this mission may fail and perform your best. Till the end of the whole mission, however, it is the leader who takes the burden of being tortured by the possibility of failure.