Leadership

The most talked written and discussed topic in management being “leadership and leadership skills”. The reason for the subject getting more popular is being changing business equations, challenges, opportunity and business dynamics. Some argue that this as a born skill while some say that the leadership skills can be developed over a time.

I will buy both the arguments as I think that leadership is an art as well as science. My belief is that Art is something that a person is born with, not everyone is born with an artist within, to support my argument I will quote a real example. I and my brother learned classical form of music, though I have learned the art but I couldn’t achieve command over that on the contrary my bro got command over that, similarly leadership can be learned but the person should have the art from within to be a perfectionist. Mind you this is an example in terms of art; this dosen’t means that a person who can’t play music can’t be a good leader.

I believe that it’s a science as well because any science can be understood, interpreted, groomed & developed with time. So leadership is far above and beyond than what it is understood in general. Many people who consider themselves as leaders without understanding a great deal about it, merely by reading few articles or fantasizing about what great leaders should be.

Leadership generally has two type of power, the legitimate power of the position and the expert power that led to their appointment (may not be true in all the cases). Power being defined as the ability to exert influence over others while authority is the foundation on which that power is built. But power does not necessarily imply a commonly accepted authority, Power of a person depends on how the person is perceived by others, if there is no follower of the person he is no more a leader.

image source: mmipublicrelations.com