Source: Freight Dawg- The Logistics Blawg 2015
With the various lessons from research about leadership, one can say that the ability of a leader to have both the qualities of a transformational leader and a charismatic leader is a gift that makes the leader understand the vision of his organization and wellbeing of his/her followers and that makes the leader have the qualities of visionary leadership (Conger 2001). Looking at the concept of visionary leadership, one should consider leaders being called visionary leaders means that these leaders were able to over come major challenges that the world had looked at impossible and they took the risk to transform and make major changes that made the world a better place and looking at some of the examples include; Henry Ford in the 1980s, he invented the quadricycle which wasn’t successful but because he was persistent he never gave up and he was able to invent and became the founder of Ford Motors company which transformed the world by making mobility from one place to another easy and another example would be John D. Rockefeller that made it important for the world to know the importance of “winning friends and influencing people” was a very fundamental success factor for any business (Kaufman 2014). In my own perspective from the examples above, the two leaders were visionary leaders meaning they were both transformational and charismatic leaders which enabled them to transform their visions into reality.
Source: Philanthropy Roundtable 2015
John Pierpont Morgan inspires me on my understanding of effective leadership because as a young man doing my MBA, I would like to become a transformational and charismatic leader in order to lead my people from Uganda out of poverty just as J.P. Morgan did in America and these are the things that inspire me about him and they include; he was raised and taught how to become an international banker by his father and in the early days of his career, he was a banker but as a transformational leader, he felt that by just being a banker that wasn’t enough for him as a leader so he actively started investing in railroads until he had to reduce and eliminate the unproductive competition in the railroads so he merged all the railroads into one which made it more productive (Levenick 2015). As a charismatic leader, he was able to influence and work with Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla in order to merge the Edison General Electric and Thomson-Houston Electric a company still in operation even today and the most important thing he did that inspires me as an entrepreneur was when he was able to consolidate Carnegie steel and other similar companies into one which came to be called U.S. Steel which was the first billion-dollar company in the history of the USA (Levenick 2015). But what really inspires me about him is the ability to eliminate useless competition in major industries to form one major company in the industry for the good of the people and I would like to learn more from other sources so that I can be able to transform Uganda into a better place for the people of Uganda to enjoy.
Having worked as a team in my leadership moodle, I was lucky to have worked with four gifted individuals who taught me a few things about leadership and teamwork and this was done through the feedback that I was given by each one of them. Basically from where I come from, when one is made a leader of a team that would simply mean that he/she is better than the rest and his/her decisions would never be questioned by his/her followers but what my team members taught me this term was that a team makes better decisions together than just one individual’s decision and this was a big challenge to me but I am glad that the team gave me time to fight this challenge and together we made better decisions on how to complete our assignments as a team.
In the video above Mr. Howard Schultz talks about how when one is fighting for survival and respect, they will do anything in their power that means that as leader when you dream you have to dream big and then fight to turn it into reality as he did with Starbucks. He also talks about a leader and he says that the leader has to make people understand the culture of the organization and the people have to understand that they can not take a break because they have competitors who want to take food off the organization’s table.
As I progress through my MBA, I would like to develop the following leadership skills which include; strategic-thinking, decision-making, teamwork, problem-solving, time-management and self-motivation. I will develop these skills using the personal development plan that will help me make an individual reflective progress plan (The Higher Education Academy 2009) that will enable me check on what skills I have achieved and what other skills I need to achieve by the end of my MBA.
Source: Presentation Process.com 2015
Using the Mckinsey 7S model to analyze what changes I need to make so that I can compare what I envisioned or planned to develop as a leader and what actually exists in the present state (Grant 2008).
References
Conger, J. (2001) ‘Visionary Leadership: A Talk with Jay Conger’ Leadership in Action [online] 21 (2), 19-22. available from <https://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer?sid=of3a855e-f5a5-4ae7-9305-1f9f59316fe2%40sessionmgr4001&vid=4&hid=4206> [25 June 2015]
Grant, P. (2008) ‘The productive ward round: a critical analysis of organisational change’ The International Journal of Clinical Leadership 2008 [online] 16 (4). available from <https://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=2f99d4fe-803e-4710-83aa-26116b628ad%40sessionmgr4003&vid=11&hid=4206> [27 June 2015]
Joiner, E. (2015) Leadership. [10 April 2015] available from <https://www.freightdawg.com/2015/04/i-had-my-annual-review-for-work-today-during-the-conversation-with-my-particularly-great-boss-the-subject-of-leadership-c.html.> [22 June 2015]
Kaufman, M. (2014) 10 Traits Of Great Business Leaders. [05 September 2014] available from <http://www.forbes.com/sites/michakaufman/2014/09/05/10-traits-of-great-business-leaders/2/> [23 June 2015]
Levenick, C. (2015) ‘J.P. Morgan’ Philanthropy Round table. [online] available from <http://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/almanac/hall_of_fame/john_pierpont_morgan> [24 June 2015]
Presentation Process.com (2015) Create Beautiful 7S Model Using PowerPoint Smart Art. [online] available from <http://www.presentation-process.com/7S-model.html> [25 June 2015]
Schultz, H. (2011) ‘Howard Schultz on Leadership’ London Business Forum [online] available from <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1WmackWSQY> [26 June 2015]
The Higher Education Academy (2009) Personal development planning and employability [online] available from <https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/PDP_and_employability_Jan_2009.pdf> [26 June 2015]
Kyompitira Valentine 