Leadership is what every organization looks for in its potential and actual employee. Leadership skills seem rather simple but at the same time they are a real challenge for anyone trying to become a leader.

The concepts of power and leadership are historically and functionally linked. Leadership is often defined as the process of guiding others’ actions toward the achievement of group goals. Power is generally defined as the capacity to guide others’ actions toward whatever goals are meaningful to the power-holder. According to these definitions, power provides a means of accomplishing the work of leadership. Moreover it can also be a by-product of having done so effectively. Thus, power and leadership often go hand-in-hand, yet the effectiveness of leaders and power-holders are judged using different criteria. Typically, great leadership is attributed to those perceived as having provided a vision that inspired others to cooperate for the benefit of the group. Power, in contrast, is perceived in those who are able to influence others, using whatever means necessary, independent of the social value of the outcomes achieved. Good leadership is typically defined in terms of organization effectiveness; it is attributed to the individual who appears to have had the greatest positive impact on the behavior of many organization members. In contrast, a person’s ability to wield power effectively is judged in terms of the power-holder’s personal success and accomplishment. From this perspective, all effective leaders have power but not all power-holders are leaders.

Let me name some skills that I believe are constant and then some attributes in which the emphasis may have changed. First and foremost, leaders need courage: courage to make the tough decisions and courage to stick with a strategy that others think will not work. You can assume a certain intelligence level if someone is in the CEO position, but it doesn’t always follow that the person possesses courage. Sometimes that doesn’t become clear until it’s too late. Second, a good leader today needs to be a creative thinker, not just thinking in a step or linear process from a logic static point, but rather thinking in leaps and bounds. Not just connecting the dots but drawing new lines on the page. Third, he or she must have a very high integrity level. Integrity was always important, but it is extremely significant now because we are dealing in an ever-changing environment and a highly uncertain environment. And, increasingly, you’re asking an organization’s employees to follow you when you are not giving a hundred percent of the answers. So, they have to believe in you on the basis of your courage, your logic, and the power of your arguments, in combination with trust and faith in your integrity. Now, moving to today’s challenges of leadership, it is essential to know how to use technology to move a business forward. It’s not something that you can ignore any longer. Technology is now so integral to the various business issues and opportunities that we all face, that you have to have a strong understanding of and appreciation for it in order to be fully effective as a leader. It is also critical that you have a global perspective, because resources— both human and financial resources as well as raw materials and value-added services—are distributed across a wide spectrum, not only geographically but also culturally and ethnically around the world. Without a global perspective, it’s going to be difficult to take advantage of the diversity of opportunities in the moderate to long term.

Some view leadership as a kind of religion; we didn’t want to find a leadership answer to our study in that sense. I used to be a leadership atheist; now I’m a leadership agnostic. It’s not that I don’t think leadership is important, but in this kind of research, it’s not a particularly helpful concept in the sense that it’s easy to attribute everything we don’t understand or comprehend t leadership.

For me leadership is very important in a rapidly developing business environment. As known, there are two ways of surviving such a business race: either to run faster or to retire. I choose the first variant. Running faster in the business world means being a true leader. It is the state of soul: thinking faster, making more prompt decisions, making the right use of the available resources.

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