Leaders Creating Value in Organizations

Leadership in today’s world has a vital role for organizations in achieving and maintaining long-term success, to create sustainable values and to improve the quality of business. Without good leader any activity is doomed to survive in changing environment. Only purposeful leader with clear vision and openness to diversified world can effectively achieve goals, creating and keeping up certain values.

Actually, leadership is about “understanding people, and mainly about the process of getting people all pointing and acting in the same direction. It is about listening, and making a real connection with the followers. It implies unique vision, making strategic choices, and designing and enabling an organization to conduct business.” (Leader Values)  In short, leadership has evolved to the creation of a culture around a shared vision and value system based on certain principles.

Creating a vision that encompasses the ultimate goal of the organization gives direction to the purpose, processes, and employees. Through communicating this vision, the leaders are able to tie in the vision to the work processes, constructing a solid structure to bring focus to the organization’s goals. A clear vision creates an environment of support from lower management and as well as their subordinates.

In other words, leadership can be defined as a way to influence others ideas. Values represent a leaders standards and what exactly a leader represents. Leadership has stood the test of time as a way to influence other actions, thoughts, and ideas. The primarily purpose of leadership is to create goals to follow and live by. Values play a central part of a leaders psychological makeup. Values are an important component of the moral reasoning process. Values also serve to organize attitudes, which are general and enduring positive or negative feelings about some person, object, or issue.

Leaders value the relationships they hold with their co-workers and employees. A leader sees his or her relationship with others as the window to how effective they are at leading.  If they have good relations with others, then that reflects how they operate and who views them as valuable.   Although many leaders can have the wrongful impression that they are the ones that make things happen and that is untrue.  The realization that the leader does not know everything is an attribute that makes them a better leader.  A leader that is humble creates an environment that is relaxed and warrants the creation of better work and products from other employees.

Trust of the leader among employees becomes a major responsibility in the office when leading others.  It is impossible to lead people who think that you are not trustworthy. A good leader knows that they must earn the trust of their co-workers rather than expecting it to be handed to them with their position within the office.  Leader must also give full support to his employee base in times of prosperity and ruin.  Employees must have a sense of confidence in their leader when decisions are to be made and operational changes that affects them as a whole.

Effective leader is also good listener and communicator.  I think that employees find a grave difference between hearing and listening.  Listening involves taking time to understand not only the problem but also the details surrounding the situation that is occurring. A good leader is cultivated through hearing the troubles of employees at a deeper and more personal level.  Employees are conscientious that their leader take the time to know intimate details about them and this increases their loyalty and motivation to reach higher levels of productivity.

This relationship also improves the work environment and enables employees to commit to their jobs, the corporation, and to their leader. Appreciation is another value-creating activity and is an esteem-builder that is irreplaceable by any other means.  It energizes people, and it makes them want to exceed their goals and commit to a lasting relationship to a particular company.  By creating a supportive atmosphere, it aids the overall productivity of the employees because they feel successful when the corporation succeeds.

It is vital for leaders to “conduct their work in an ethical manner to earn and maintain the confidence of team members, colleagues, employees, employers, clients and the public” (Gray and Larson, 550). Leadership integrity must be firmly grounded in the company’s values and integrated into individual employee values.  Leaders must build a company culture based on its core values and supported by a storehouse of stories, by telling your people what the organization stands for, what it is trying to achieve and what is in it for them.  The changing world calls for leaders who will react openly to the introduction of new cultural identities and diversities and who will face ethical issues responsibly.

“Leadership comes from within us, in the sense that deeply held values and principles provide the road map for the way we lead, and the way other people respond. Whether the leader is a person of impeccable moral fiber, or quite disreputable, it is always their personal value system that sustains them in their quest.” (Leader Values) First of all, we must realize, understand and communicate our own value systems, and must focus on balancing the interests and concerns of others, helped by understanding their value systems. This is a precondition to enable others to recognize, understand and then follow any leader’s activity.

In conclusion, it is clear to see how many difficult characteristics a leader must possess, making the importance of the leadership role irrefutable.  Much like sheep needing a shepherd, a group needs a leader to guide them in the right direction.  In order to be classified as a leader, one must have a sense of drive, leadership motivation, integrity, self-confidence, and knowledge of the business.  It is with these characteristics that a true leader can accomplish the ever-important aspiration of getting a group of people to work with each other towards a goal and create sustainable value in organization.

References:

§  Leader Values. 4 E’s in Short. Leader Values Website, 2004 <http://www.leader-values.com>

Gray, Clifford F.; Larson, Erik W. Project Management – The Managerial Pr