1. Influence

Obviously, it is impossible for business leaders to control everyone, but they can have an influence on nearly every people they want. In my point of view, a leader is one who knows the way, who shows the way and who goes the way while influencing others to accompany and assist him to fulfill group goals while fulfilling their potentials.

The influence of leadership mainly reflected in the following aspects: leaders’ insight into the motivation and needs of those who are led; the formal and informal relations between leders and those who are led; the balance of different interests, especially the interests of those who are led; the way and effects of communication; the leaders have various influential and effective rights, etc.

Leaders’ influence come from three aspects: firstly, influence comes from their thoughts, those who have unique judgments on complex issues always have more influence on other people; secondly, a solid foundation and consummate skills in professional fields

Execution and Transformation

1. Decision Making

For leaders one hard thing they always need to do is decision making, especially response to emergencies rapidly and properly, the ability of decision making refers to making operating decisions, personnel decisions, tactical and strategic decisions, etc. and it is one of the most important element of good leadership.

Good decision can help the enterprises to avoid many losses, because of the uncertainty of the future, many factors should be considered and analysed for the leaders to make a decision, it requires leaders have the following qualities: to understand and make good use of various decision-making theory, decision-making methods and decision-making tools; fast and accurate evaluation of strategy proceeds; to predicate, assess, prevent and resolve business risks; to process essential resources to fulfill goals; to be provided with the ability of choosing the best strategy and the time to implement it.

Execution and Transformation

Execution is the design and management of business process to meet or exceed all expectations in the customers’ value set.[4] Stephen Covey has called execution “the great in most organizations today”.[5] In the competitive business environment, the different ability of execution is an important criterion of the difference of good and normal leaders.

Execution is a systematic process, it includes a rigorous discussion of the methods and objectives, persistent conduct and the concrete implementation of the responsibilities.

Execution is a company’s overall strategy, it is also relative with the corporate culture, without ideal execution, a good strategy can be fail at last. On the contrary, even if the strategy was not very perfect, it still could be adjusted and succeed with the right execution.

The outcome of execution depends directly on the business leaders’ transformation ability. Although not every execution is realting to a transformation, getting rid of obstacles in implementation is a key point for successful execution.

In order to adapt to the requirements of transformation, and then re-build and optimize organizational systems, the leaders need to effectively integrate the strategic objective of the enterprise with the new corporate culture, the organization and process systems and staff capacity, so as to eliminate the resistance of transformation.

Good personal qualities

1. Continuous Learning

For business leaders continuous learning is a very imperative requirement because that we are in an era of rapid development and change, the knowledge already acquired by people will soon become obsolete in this time and age, leaders can continue to gain new knowledge by continuous learning.

In addition, continuous learning does not only refer to acquire new knowledge and professional skills, it also calls to constantly conclude the past working experience, adapt to new circumstances and try to find more effective working methods.

Trustworthy

Trust is a basic quality for all the relationship in one’s life. Without trust, it is impossible to establish the healthy and productive environments, my own opinion that trustworthy requires leader to say what they do and to do what they say, when trusted by people, they are more likely to give their best to you, this is because people are not willing to recognize someone as their leader unless they trust them, not just intellectually, but ethically and morally as well. Likewise, people won’t follow someone unless they’re convinced that person knows where they’re going.

Conclusion

In the 21st century, when social change, international exchange, information technology, character development and many other challenges and opportunities come to the front of every participant of the social devision of labor, no matter whether or not we are in the leader’s position, we should have more or less some leadership.

This is because leadership means that we can always analysis the overall situation in marco views of problems, and to maintain own established goals and mission the same when engaged in specific work.

Leadership also means that we can more easily response to the complex and changing world with holistic and balanced ideas. And leadership also means that we can give others more attention when we concern about self-demand, and always try to seek a more equal, more candid and more efficient solutions by constant communication.

The factors I mentioned above are definitely not the whole elements of the “good leadership”, in fact, “good leadership” is all-inclusive, it concerns with all kinds of factors. In addition, in my point of view, “good leadership elements” means greatly different to individuals that have various personal qualities, so the elements that I have listed are only general and significant elements in business fields, and the more detailed knowledge of leadership is still needed to further explore.

Reference

[1] Chemers M. (1997) An integrative theory of leadership. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.

[2] Jeffrey D. (2011) The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five of Disruptive Innovators. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.

[3] Henri F. (1949) General and Industrial Management. New York: Pitman Publishing.

[4] Rod C. (2010) Leadership in a Wiki World: Leveraging Collective Knowledge To Make the Leap To Extraordinary Performance. Indianapolis: Dog Ear Publishing, LLC.

[5] Stephen C. (1992) Principle-Centered Leadership. Los Angeles: Fireside Press.

Bibliography

[1]Warren B., Burt N. (1985) Leaders. New York: Harper and Row.

[2]Trompenaars, F., Hampden-Turner,C. (1997) Riding the waves of culture: understanding cultural diversity in business (second edition). London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing

[3]Hansen C. (2003) Cultural myths in stories about human resource development: analysing the cross-cultural transfer of American models to Germany and the Côte d’Ivoire . International Journal of Training and Development,7.

[4]Maurice M., Sorge A., Warner, M. (1980) Societal differences in organising manufacturing units: a comparison of France, West Germany and Great Britain. British Journal of Industrial Relations, 18.

[5]Hackman J., Oldham G. (1976) Motivation through design of work. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16.