21st Century Leadership
Introduction
The contemporary environment entails a variety of challenges for both the leaders and employees. The consistent, rapidly changing world necessitates leaders with soft cognitive power, divergent thinking, and leaders with capabilities of tolerating stress (Prentice, 2013, 177). Technology is relative to efficiency although the leadership of the current day requires a leader to build trust and enduring relationships within the working environment. Stiff Competition is pervasive in the modern context, and so, novel ideas in a leader are not just a concept. Instead, innovation exists as a primary requirement to becoming a good manager in the global market. The global market deserves capable leaders who are committed to taking risks, and extensively, motivational leaders to inspire colleagues and employees towards a common goal. It requires leaders who have the skills of establishing interpersonal connections, which enhances the process of addressing the various issues of globalization. For that reason, leaders should characterize different influential skills, preferably, psychology and cognitive-related capabilities to facilitate achievement of business endeavors.
Literature Review
Leadership is a broad topic, and so, there is a wide range of literature on the subject. The pieces of literature mostly highlight the preparedness that a leader should involve while functioning to standout in the ever-changing, multifaceted, multiethnic, interconnected world. The works disapprove the soundness of autocratic, dominant leaders by demonstrating the outgoing influences of globalization on organizational leadership (Prentice, 2013, 177). They posit the importance of engaging different skills including cognitive and psychological-based capabilities when leading in the present world, which encompasses multifaceted models of leadership.
The leadership framework of the 21st century supposes a wide range of leadership types including designated leadership and active followership, peer leadership, and self-leadership. Appointed leadership or more traditional-related leadership reflects the formal role of a leader to ensure the improvement of public accountability. Active followership characterizes the leadership role to align functioning with participant’s opinions or ideas in a group; inferring that being in control does not necessarily make one a leader (Lapierre & Carsten, 2014, 141). The peer leadership is an informal community-based form of command. The direction is characterized by one’s capabilities to influence acceptance and commitment towards the execution of a group’s activities whereas endorsing the creation of interpersonal relationships (Baker, 2014, 1). According to Bryant & Kazan (2013), self-leadership elaborates personality in regards to ways and capacities including health and wellness, uprightness, and integrity (2). While global leaders are of much use in the leadership models of today, the change is dependent on cultural empathy because cultural empathy tends to validate leadership competency (Thornson, 2010, 15). The literature narrates that cultural understanding is an essential requirement to becoming a global leader owing to its close connection with egolessness. This is to state that global leaders can function with ease from one culture to another by interpreting and understanding the new environments despite cultural differences.
The multicultural environment, driven by globalization, postulates that efficient execution of leadership roles are relative to cooperation (Jowah, p10). Leadership styles have transformed from the driven, commanding models to new, more productive, relationship-based leadership systems. The new systems tend to symbolize the leadership models of the upcoming century where the central theme of leadership will be to build harmonious relations and influences. Administration in the 21st century is expected to act in ways that will be able to influence community growth, help others while facilitating betterment of the surrounding environment. The principal attributes of leadership will be compassion and integrity.
The studies assert that leadership characterizes the capability to influence togetherness towards a shared objective in an organization, cooperation, and social empathy, which inaugurates peace and chances for a sustainable future (Gentry et al. 2007, 2). Different styles can enable the attainment of the primary leadership essentials in the upcoming century of more significant developments. However, many agree that constructivist leadership postulates significant, useful influences in the 21st century.
The drive of constructivist leadership focuses on aligning members within an organization with the roles of a leader because it accepts every member as a leader. The direction mentions the establishment of a democratic, reciprocating and reflective environment where everybody has the freedom to suggest the foremost concerns within an organization. The style serves as a learning process where interactions employed as the immediate basis for inquiring more focused, skillful and interactive leadership within an organization. Competent leaders avail real democratic values through their capabilities and willingness to engage with other members, listen and portray respect for other people.
Contribute uniqueness
The realm of an innovative leader illustrates a leader with the ability to differentiate useful practices from unhelpful activities in a context for better control and management. Innovation infers that a leader in pursuit of compelling achievements combines uniqueness with normal functioning.
Innovation is a potential base for improving organizational performance hence a leader has to be original when performing operational responsibilities to outdo the challenges of globalization (Ladkin & Spiller, 2013, 65). The process of validating originality involves the internalization of leadership concepts; that may be acquired through reading or hearing from other managerial sources. However, it is important to note that the leader has to enact the internalized concepts to enhance the realization of performance practically. The aspect of uniqueness includes significant diversity and is commonly driven by the need to explore for strategic mechanisms of resolving leadership problems in a business context.
The key to resolving the most pervasive issues in a business context requires a leader with unique perspectives, which incline to reciprocate outstanding outcomes (Schwartz & Gimbel, 2000, 65). It is, however, essential to understand that the people within the reign of management determine the viability of a leader’s perspectives to resolving a problem. This is to say that novelty has to be accepted by the major players including co-workers and employees within a working environment for prosperity.
The appropriateness of inaugurating innovative ideas depends on one's abilities to communicate purpose in regards to the appearance of a situation. The rationale for enhancing acceptance is relative to the sources of information (Kowalski & Lasley, 2010, 432). It is thus essential for a leader to apply knowledge of diversified orientations for valid solutions. Also, information from unrelated disciplines should be synthesized to generate communicative ideas.
The importance of comprehensive exploration is profound when a leader is in pursuit of inventive perspectives. The widespread examination is the baseline to uniqueness because it allows the discernment of useful and impractical ideas within the realm of practical situations; implemented by other managerial players of a different organization. Comparing the practicality of other leader's views on similar situations increases chances of developing better and unrelated solutions to a problem hence imposing the essence of uniqueness.
Uniqueness is dependent on the leader’s capabilities to communicate a problem by its concepts throughout an organization. A leader has to convince the other members of the need to accept the new implementations in the body to influence change
Act effectively
There exists a reasonable difference between efficiency and effectiveness, suggestible, ability emphasizes on doing things right whereas effectiveness defines the capabilities of executing the right things. The leadership of the 21st century proposes that leading is not just getting things done quickly or performing the most tasks within a short period. Instead, leading notes the need to formulate a vision while setting priorities and goals within the work environment. It conceptualizes the need to offset the difference between urgent tasks and essential operations. This suggests that functions should be executed by urgency to avoid functional complexity.
Be resilient
Every human being makes mistakes, but the difference exists in the process of responding to those mistakes. In response to the increasing trend of organizational goals in the modern world, it is true to state that a leader with bigger goals is prone to making more mistakes than leaders with limited sets of goals. Importantly, innovation is the basis of leadership flexibility to formulating both long-term and short-term solutions for the unrelenting challenges, which tend to change with globalization. Innovation enables a leader to experiment new mechanisms of handling the emerging problems along the line of duty. Additionally, it is more comfortable to venture into more modern discoveries for short-term impacts through innovation. The search for long-term and unforgettable effects relies on one’s willingness to take the encompassing risks and in essence, it means that a leader should not be distracted by failures when performing duties.
Self-confidence is a primary factor to being a leader in the 21st century, which in most cases is established through past experiences, preferably, achievements. The beneficial fact of self-confidence is that it is a reliable source of encouragement and motivation to performing new challenges through personal qualities gained from the former experiences.
Integrity in the 21st century has a significant impact on progress development since honesty is a fundamental consideration to the development of long-term commitment. The world has transformed to levels where integrity is measured through audience wisdom. This confirms that leadership is a social context thus it cannot be isolated from the audience. Leaders are therefore forced to declare the practicality of integrity while functioning to gain long-term commitment.
Embrace change
The orientation of the newer business environments requires insists that leaders have to regularly, explore for change. They should not only identify difference but should also enact strategic response to the shift by valuing it as an opportunity. The current orientations of business activities encounter different forms of rapid changes including geographical, economic and technological changes. The changes have successfully outdone the earlier business movements thus new knowledge is necessitated to concur the impacts of globalization in the market. Technological advancement including mobile technologies has reduced space while enhancing accessibility and expertise whereas imposing significant challenges to leadership, however, increasing opportunities.
The reality of new and changing digital-related systems has domineered the whole schemes of healthy living in the contemporary world. The exchange of information has taken new and different directions through which people share opinions and ideas with ease owing to the instantaneous capabilities of the digital systems. People have the freedom to interact with anyone across the world through a channel that suits one's purpose and preference for the diverse digital platforms. As a result, leaders have challenging tasks to maintain the reputation of their organizations in the market. The complexity is facilitated by the fact that it is almost impossible to control the flow of information along the digital platforms due to its diversity and limited censorship within the cyberspace. Therefore, leaders in the current are required to gather and engage with their audience in different environments through the digital media to deliver clarifications whereas receiving the concerning issues in the market.
Stay grounded
Relaxation is a significant threat to the 21st-century leadership. Instead, Leadership of this era requires patience, compassion, and simplicity for it to stand out. The leadership of today is prone to unpredictable changes, meaning egoism should not distract a leader instead it should motivate one towards the establishment of new measures for continuous changes by globalization. Simplicity is established to endorse the sense that leadership is modernly reliant on collaboration.
This is to mean that hierarchical leadership does not predict or bear productivity in controlling the organization rationale of today. The era's command exists as a collaborative practice that is enhanced through interactive responses. Simplicity intends to influence an understanding that a leader's thinking should be oriented to establishing socialization rather than building independence. It is commonly accepted that every person in the community entails valuable contributions towards leadership success especially in this era of changing social trends and so, the need for leaders to put in place mutual interactive systems for fruitful outcomes.
The hierarchical model of leadership has limited meaning in the current organizations. The craftsman apprentice schemes have been replaced by learning organizations. The organizations have substantial knowledge and capabilities of higher magnitudes, which generally force people to resist top-down models of leadership. Globalization has not only transformed the leadership structure but has also established community with diverse notions of leadership. Rather, the newer generation has identified newer alternatives to satisfaction. People have turned to learning as an appropriate tool for controlling the impacts of globalization instead of relying on leadership-related governance.
The former generations valued leaders by their capabilities to bring about sustainability within the working environments. On the contrary, it is deducible that leaders in the 21st century will be recognized by their potential to sustain and force superior performance through appropriate alignment of people by organizational mission and standards. The era will be considerate of leaders with abilities to empower followers whereas emphasizing service delivery and collaboration in different levels of an organization.
Aligning
The most prominent challenge of a leader is to align members by the organizational mission and universal values. Formulating a flexible alignment structure is more challenging in extended organizations since arrangement usually focuses on maintaining employee loyalty by organizational culture. In traditional leadership addressed the complexity of alignment through rulebooks, implementation of compliance systems and also by enacting training programs as the basis for controlling employees; systems that lack purpose in a technology-advanced environment. Employees tend to abide by the mission and organizational values through proper arrangement thus the need for aligning employees through policies that do not influence deterioration of workers will lead to compliance. As such, alignment in the 21st century will be formulated by employees capabilities and promise to agreement rather than the forceful orientation of the traditional leadership.
Empowering
The hierarchical leadership is characterized by the delegation of power from higher management levels towards the employees. In the hierarchical model, the amount of power delegated determines the levels to which employees will comply with the organization's mission and norms and extensively organizational performance. Thus, organizations are bound to delegating limited power to guarantee adherence among the employees. In comparison, leaders in the 21st century have the obligation of empowering the organization as a whole despite functional levels since leadership holds the accountability of ensuring goal achievement.
Serving
The principal obligation of leaders is to ensure that customers are lined to justifying service. It is arguable that organizations that fail to meet customer satisfaction have less influence in the market in comparison to its competitors with systems that are relative to service value. Moreover, it tends to be a norm in the modern world that employees are more motivated to maintaining customer service over stakeholder standards. Evidently, customer and employee satisfaction sets chances to revenue growth and in due course increasing shareholder value. For that reason, the 21st leadership tends to put more emphasis on improved service in the market rather than prioritizing organizational expectations.
Collaborating
Similarly, patience is an essential factor in the modern world. It is eminent that not every process guarantee immediate responses, particularly process that focuses to impose long-term changes. Delays should not inaugurate discouragements rather they should be considered as potential opportunities for improvements. Results often take time thus people should be willing to invest in time and other resources in leadership, which will in due course facilitate achievement of sound outcomes.
Patience and compassion tend to infer similar perspectives of leadership in the sense that leadership is dependent on both patience and kindness. Direction is a complex task to handle without communicative determinations and commitment. The complexity deserves still dedication since guidance is usually meant to establish a base for future developments. People are liable to dedicate their skills to the process with a cognitive belief that it will reciprocate desirable results in the future.
References
LAPIERRE, L., & CARSTEN, M. K. (2014). Followership: what is it and why do people follow? http://site.ebrary.com/id/10875704.
BAKER, M. (2014). Peer-to-peer leadership: why the network is the leader. http://www.aspresolver.com/aspresolver.asp?BIZP;2384876.
BRYANT, A., & KAZAN, A. L. (2013). Self-leadership: how to become a more successful, efficient, and effective leader from the inside out. New York, McGraw-Hill.
Gentry, W.A., Weber, T. and Sadri, G., 2007, April. Empathy in the workplace: A tool for effective leadership. In Society of Industrial Organizational Psychology Conference. New York, New York, USA (pp. 1-16). Extracted from https://www.ccl.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/EmpathyInTheWorkplace.pdf
Thornson, C.A., 2010. Development and validation of the cross-cultural competence inventory. Extracted from https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=http%3A%2F%2Fstars.library.ucf.edu%2Fcgi%2Fviewcontent.cgi%3Farticle%3D2684%26context%3Detd&btnG=
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LADKIN, D., & SPILLER, C. (2013). Authentic Leadership Clashes, Convergences and Coalescences. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Pub. Ltd.
SCHWARTZ, M. K., & GIMBEL, K. G. (2000). Leadership resources: a guide to training and development tools. Greensboro, NC, Center for Creative Leadership.
Kowalski, T. & Lasley, J. T. (2010). Handbook of Data-Based Decision Making in Education. Routledge
