The Importance of Developing Leadership Skills

In the present world, leadership is the sole necessity of every successful business. According to my perception, an organisation or a country can sustain its competitive growth through the extensive use of leadership activities. In this context, it has been observed that positive leadership styles have received a significant popularity and assistance over the passing years. In this regards, the study aims to argue the role of leadership activities in different context and its impact on learning. Based on the concept of leadership we have chosen to outline the case of Barrack Obama nomination acceptance speech to demonstrate the leadership activities that inspired people.

For my personal input and learning, I told my group that instead of questioning widely about the successfulness of Barrack Obama, it is necessary to ask a question to the society members about the doings of Obama. After carrying out the analysis, we were easily able to draw a very understandable conclusion on the issue.

We have learned from the group report that the speech he made was an act of transformational leadership that had a profound impact on the people to accept his presidential candidature in America. After reading the entire speech, we realised that he managed to influence people with confidence as well as assistance that transformed him into a great leader.

However, one of our major learning of the team from the group report of Obama’s speech is that transformational leaders are completely different from other types of leadership. The transformational leadership tends to create change and combine a number of human factors into the charisma of visionary through the process (Boehm et al. 2015). In addition to this, this type of leaders usually attracts and sustain the attraction of the followers. In this context, as influenced by the view of Jacquart and Antonakis (2015), I can say that Obama managed to influence his followers by interacting with their human side, in combination with his body gesture, attitude and personal opinions to relate and influence the followers.

We have learned from the unit that Obama’s speech is that made him a truly inspirational leader, which requires a complete balance of skilled, attributes and behaviour that is flexible with the listeners. From these, we identified that the great balance in different factors represents positive leadership. These factors are assertiveness, charisma, enthusiasm, humility and high amount self-confidence (Wasike 2017). The high balance of attributes and behavioural factors enhances the likelihood of influencing others thereby increasing the chance of relating with different followers.

The Impact of Transformational Leadership Activities

However, from the following module, I have realised that as a leader I have a quality to illustrate the goals and necessities to the group members to accomplish a specific task. In addition to this, I have the strong ability to motivate others by positively delegating them towards a specific task. For instance, while preparing for group unit, while I was leading the team in doing the report, I realised that I am not only confident but also responsible in managing work and quite enthusiastic in doing the task. However, I lacked the sense of charisma to attract group members and assertiveness

While doing the unit, I learned that Obama displayed the trait that was consistent with effectively leading the listeners. Moreover, he managed to successfully keep his followers engaged by his collective vision and charismatic body gestures, constant gaze and projection voice (Mirer and Bode 2015). These attributes in him encourage the inclusiveness through his speech. Therefore, from these, I learned that I lack these traits entirely. For me to truly turn in to the inspirational and motivational leader I need to have the ability to set a proper goal for myself and then for my follows. This will be more effective when I will be able to relate to the emotional nature of all the team members and followers (Gentry 2018). This is because; I have learned from the unit that leaders are able to achieve more success if they have the high balance of follower cont8ingent attributes and behavioural factors in them.

In my case, my experience of leadership while working with the group has been paramount to me that helped me redefining my present leadership skills. I have personally been very fortunate to get a formal opportunity to establish my skills of leadership and to be given the opportunity to utilise my skills of leadership as well. This has given me a high exposure to my new options and has helped me to accelerate my growth as a leader. However, after working with my group over the Barrack Obama speech analysis, I recognised that such opportunities are rare in their communities; this is because of perspectives in between blacks and whites in America. As influenced by the perception of Rahim (2017), I can assert that despite these issues, he encouraged the community members to embrace with the progress and to stay united in order to become stronger as a nation and to provide equal opportunity for all.

The Role of Communication Skills in Achieving Successful Leadership

As influenced by the statement of Ng and Rivera (2018), I can assert from this, that transformational leadership is the most appropriate type of leadership in communicating with the audience. I need to work on my leadership capability to achieve the qualitative attributes of transformational leadership. Similar to Obama, I need to use various types of mediums to communicate with my vision of change such as classroom meetings or team meetings, debate, promoting through poster, the capability of motivating speech, which is one of the major rhetorical medium of leadership. Obama’s speech has provided me with a dynamic and virtual exploration of resources that helped to understand the better use of transformational leadership in practice. However, I have learned that successful leadership is not possible simply through the utilisation of transformational leadership attributes, but it will be more impressive when accompanied by motivating rhetoric. Therefore, influenced by the view of Boehm et al. (2015), I can say that, communication skills are the most potential contribution component to obtain a leadership position. As for my perception, one could argue in this context, that even on the most basic phase of communication, a specific individual is always striving to inspire the audience party in the way they want to articulate the message (Wang et al. 2016). 

Conclusion

In order to achieve this unique position of leadership, I have enhanced my skills in achieving the attribute of charisma that relates to an individual’s special abilities of vision provided with a sense of mission. Specifically, it an intellectual capability to arouse creativity and innovation in different issues and solution to different issues. By doing so, I will be able to encourage growth and learning of other team members. I will be able to learn all this during my next course with my team members. I need to apply all that I have learned from this course unit to check my progress of skills. Therefore, I can similar to Obama, leaders are not only a person who influences people but also accepts a challenge to reduce the occurrence of risk for their followers.

Reference list

Boehm, S.A., Dwertmann, D.J., Bruch, H. and Shamir, B., 2015. The missing link? Investigating organizational identity strength and transformational leadership climate as mechanisms that connect CEO charisma with firm performance. The Leadership Quarterly, 26(2), pp.156-171.

Deinert, A., Homan, A.C., Boer, D., Voelpel, S.C. and Gutermann, D., 2015. Transformational leadership sub-dimensions and their link to leaders’ personality and performance. The Leadership Quarterly, 26(6), pp.1095-1120.

Gentry, B., 2018. Inspirational Leaders, Personal Narrative, and Youth Identity. In Why Youth Vote (pp. 49-76). Springer, Cham.

Jacquart, P. and Antonakis, J., 2015. When does charisma matter for top-level leaders? Effect of attributional ambiguity. Academy of Management Journal, 58(4), pp.1051-1074.

Miller, M.L. and Bode, L., 2015. Tweeting in defeat: How candidates concede and claim victory in 140 characters. New Media & Society, 17(3), pp.453-469.

Ng, L.T. and Rivera, J.P.R., 2018. Exploring Transformational Leadership and Fellowship in a Cultural Context: The Case of the Philippines. Asia-Pacific Social Science Review, 17(3), pp.136-141.

Rahim, M.A., 2017. Obama vs. Clinton: A Study Exploring the Impact of Leadership Language. In Diversity, Conflict, and Leadership (pp. 103-124). Routledge.

Wang, X.H.F., Kim, T.Y. and Lee, D.R., 2016. Cognitive diversity and team creativity: Effects of team intrinsic motivation and transformational leadership. Journal of Business Research, 69(9), pp.3231-3239.

Wasike, B., 2017. Charismatic rhetoric, integrative complexity and the US Presidency: An analysis of the State of the Union Address (SOTU) from George Washington to Barack Obama. The Leadership Quarterly, 28(6), pp.812-826.