Principles of Leadership

With great power comes great responsibility - Spider-Man

I think all of us have already encountered this famous quote (if not, you’re living in a cave for so long). Why have I mentioned this phrase? Well, I’ll be associating it with this blog’s topic - principles of leadership. Here it goes..

First things first, let’s first differentiate managing and leading. Leaders are defined to have people follow them while managers have people who work for them. In order to have a successful business, an owner needs to be both a strong leader and a manager to get there team on board to follow them towards their vision of success. In here, let’s focus on leadership. In order to stand this word more, I’ll be delineating some of the principles regarding it.

The managerial grid, developed by Robert Blake and Jane Mouton, shows the relationship between a concern to people and concern for production. What does this mean? I’ll ask you; once you own your own business, would you prioritize in focusing the task at hand to accomplish the company’s objective or you’d rather spend more time in understanding the strengths and interests of your workers so that you’ll have great working relationship with them? In managerial grid, it simply implies that some leaders have greater concern for people than results, and vice versa, some have greater concern for results than people. However, some leaders are also weak in both aspects, but in the bright side, some may be great in both of them (the latter being the more ideal one).  

In the pygmalion effect of Douglas McGregor, it pertains to expectations and effect. First, we have this theory X and theory Y. For theory X, the leader  believes that employees have no ambition and have little interest in improving their skills. For theory Y, leaders perceive that employees are self-learners and have their own purpose of working. Though the meaning is frank and simple, I’ll give an instance with this. Imagine yourself as a leader, with two group members. Without really knowing them since the three of you just met, you initially make your own concept on how they work. If you think that they are really great, you’ll get higher expectations and assign more tasks to them, thus increase in performance. But if you think that they are just lazy, you didn’t entrust them with anything, leading to a decrease in performance. In here, perception leads to expectation, which leads to performance.

Every manager needs to be able to make good decisions. However, single decision-making process fits every scenario. So in Vroom-Yetton normative theory, it offers a number of different processes and directs one toward the best decision at a specific situation. There are five decision making-processes that are described by the model, including autocratic 1, autocratic 2, consultative 1, consultative 2 and collaborative. As a leader, it is stated that a leader could adjust into any of the leadership style to meet the particular circumstance given to the staffs.

The three principles explained regard the type of leaders one could be. To give more emphasis, when choosing the type of leadership style to follow, keep in mind the quotation by Peter F. Ducker: "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”