Leading a team is more than barking orders at people. Team leading is about motivating a group of people to work supportively and effectively together. Each member of a team is an individual. Team leading is also about maximising the contribution that each different individual can make to the team as a whole.
Leadership is usually taken to mean change. The leader is not content with what appears satisfactory today. The leader is constantly seeking better and better results. Tom Peters has said that the old saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" no longer applies. Everything can be improved so "Fix it anyway!" Leaders have visions of what is possible - and they achieve these visions in different ways. Some inspire followers. Others invest in teaching people. Still others see and create a system that people can live within.
Professor Robin Stuart-Kotze, in his recent research, distinguishes leadership from stewardship. Leadership, he says, is about change, about seeking to create the conditions in which people will perform to ever higher standards, to change the company constantly, to compete in an ever-changing world. Stewardship, which we might think of as ordinary management, is about control, maintaining the status quo, keeping things going, and doing the best one can with what one has got.
Thus, leadership is generally taken as having a creative aspect while management (or stewardship) as having a controlling aspect.
In history, great leaders have achieved things that ordinary mortals would have felt were not even worth trying - Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Bismark, Churchill, Martin Luther King, Simon Bolivar, Lincoln, Mao Tse Tung. Each of these leaders had different approaches. For example, Napoleon is usually thought of as a military leader, inspiring his men. However, his monument to the world is really the system of laws and civil management that he installed in France, and which has been exported to many parts of the world.
Taken from our online Development Academy.
For more information on our leadership programmes visit Call of the Wild's website.
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