Leadership

Leadership is defined as the ability to influence a group towards the achievement of a vision or set of goals. The ability and willingness of the followers to accomplish a task. This mean that the leader builds a team and they follow directions given by the leader.  Leaders work in an inverted pyramid. Instead of all your employees working for you, you work for them. It’s the leader job to serve them.  With good leadership companies will success. If they build the best team, they’ll build the best environment where all the best people want to work. I agree with the fact that it's important not to try and feel that you have to control every aspect of your workplace. In fact, if you tried to do that, you might as well just be running a one man business with zero employees. One question that I have is whether or not maintaining a great deal of control over your employees significantly hinders your business and how productive you are.

Leadership is the key to being successful. The idea of having employees work for you is not what you want, what I believe people should have is a group of people pooling their knowledge together to accomplish a specific goal. Many people think that idea spurt up from one person but that’s only the idea. The actual products and work that go into the idea is from a collected group of people working together.

 I think that it is important for people to work together to accomplish something. I think it is difficult to do everything on your own. I feel like if some people try to do everything by themselves, some of the great ideas that have come about in this world would never have happened. I think that teamwork is extremely important for success. You cannot do everything on your own and expect a major accomplishment. The leader’s real job is to build a team of people far more talented than you at each position. This is very important. No matter how great you are as a leader, you can't possibly do everything and you can't do everything as great as experts in a particular field. You need to surround yourself with talented people and if you can find those who are more talented than you, hold on to them, tightly. This approach takes a certain kind of humility and humbleness, but it will lead to great success. I think that it is important to take advantage of every opportunity to make yourself better. By surrounding yourself with people that are smarter than you, you can only make yourself and your team better. It is about bettering the group as a whole. 

Good leaders establish a vision and inspire others to follow a new direction to achieve these goals.  The leader is responsible for providing followers with the information, support, or other resources necessary for them to do their jobs.

Leadership is interesting because they contain three essential elements: the team elements, the task elements (related to objectives) and the individual element. Every successful leader has to work with all of these elements known as the three circle model. Sometimes leaders and followers evolve these together, with the leader consulting others to gather opinion and win support and effectively and ethically influence them.

Influence is the ability to persuade someone to think or act in the way you want. This ability is an essential part of leadership. After all, someone who can't convince people of things isn't a leader and no one is following him or her. Therefore, it is important for an effective leader to understand their influence. That way, he or she can use this understanding to become even more skilled at getting things done.

Influencing people is something leaders do on many levels with many different people. All of us try to influence almost everyone we meet in different ways. We try to convince people to like us or to leave us alone, to sign our petition or to think about the educational system.

Some leaders work within one style. Others are more flexible and can adapt their style to meet the needs of different situations

Leadership style is all about the approach you adopt as a leader. There are a number of styles available for a leader to follow and a number of factors that might influence the style that she or he will adopt. Whether you exercise flexibility and choice is down to you. A very powerful part of your style of leadership is your need to make decisions upon their own beliefs about their responsibility for decisions, as well as their followers' capacity to make decisions.

Personality can be interpreted as the typical ways in which a person behaves. Personality develops as we mature and is normally fairly consistent or stable by the time we reach adulthood. The working environment can have a big impact on the leadership style you might adopt. The two main influences are the demands of the organization, its market, systems and processes, and the culture of the organization.

I think one of the major mistakes a lot of business owners make nowadays, is underappreciating their employees. Forgetting that if it weren't for the employee, there would be no business. We live in a society that is consumed by power hungry people drunk off their own ego. To me, a great leader is a leader that someone from the outside can't even tell they're the leader because they are working just as hard as their employees. They lead by example.

I also realized something very important studying this course. Your goal as a leader is to design yourself out of a job. To build a team that’s so good they don’t need you. And that doesn’t mean you have to go home or retire. It means you’re free again, to dream, to envision. More importantly, to plan the future of the company and steer the ship, while everyone else is keeping the ship moving in whatever direction you point them. So flip that pyramid over, and stop thinking everyone works for you. Stop trying to run the company, and go out and find people smarter than you in every area. And let them lead you to victory. Maybe now you’ll have time to plan that victory party.