The Meaning and Essence of Leadership in Business

By Karen Kleinwort

Change is the only unchanging features in this changing world. Everything surrounding us changes with the passage of time to be in line with modernization. The ongoing business environment is no exception when it comes to this trend. Modern business is on a triumphant march through tracking changes via hard work from the most efficient business leaders.

Effective leaders adopt strategies and techniques to try to win or take the lead in the competitive market, which is ultimately a game of “survival of the fittest.” In both good and bad times, there is always a need for quality leadership. The success of a business or an industry is mostly dependent on the leaders it gets or inherits. The successful implementation of desired leadership techniques is crucial for meeting the changing demands in business. The mystique of leadership in and of itself makes it one of the most widely debated, studied and sought-after commodities in business.

The Meaning of Leadership

Leadership is the social process of influencing the behaviors of others without posing any threats of violence. It is a process of influencing the thoughts, attitudes and behaviors of others by setting a direction that helps visualize what they can hope to achieve or what lies ahead for them. It’s the capability of getting other people to do something significant through harnessing their efforts jointly.

Leadership in a very ordinary sense refers to creating a group of followers whom another individual leads. Merely accompanying a group of people isn’t leadership unless the person actually is choosing and showing a direction to the followers. Without followers a leader isn’t a leader in spite of having the desired qualities or nature of a leader.

The Essence of Leadership in Business

The nature of business leadership is both a complex and compelling phenomenon. Many discussions of leadership confuse personality, important objectives, formal position and specific behaviors with acts of leadership. It may involve certain characteristics, but leadership is not confined to these characteristics; rather, it’s all about influencing others in a substantial way.

Whether the setting is a business, a government, an educational institution or in an athletic setting, most people would agree that having a good leader is desirable. A good leader is someone like a good physician. Just as the physician must identify the patient’s disease accurately to ensure the effectiveness of the prescribed treatment, the business leader must also be able to diagnose problems, values and voices while finding effective solutions.

In leadership you push past the average expectations by carrying a sense of mission, motivating, learning and inspiring new ways of thinking. This is known as transformational leadership. It emerges as the most updated and diversified techniques in the field of leadership theory and practices to boost workforce competency and performance.

Leadership and Management in Business 

True leadership in business is a subtle quality, and thus we often confuse management duties with personal style with leadership. Management and leadership are related, but they are not the same. You can be a manager or a leader; you can also be both or neither. The biggest difference between managers and leaders lies in the way they motivate others. When executing plans as a manager, you focus on supervising results, comparing them with goals and correcting deviations. In contrast, as a leader you focus on energizing people to overcome hurdles in reaching goals. Effective leaders hunt pressing issues such as influence, power, dependence, and policies for change.

Power, achievement and affiliation shape the basic human needs and are acquired over time to result in legitimate reward, coercive, referent and expert powers in business issues affecting leadership behaviors. If as a leader you have a high need for institutional power rather than personal power, you may be more effective. Personal power can be transformed into leadership abilities through the adoption of different approaches to leadership and adjusting your perspective of what the meaning of “power” is.

What we must remember when trying to expand and embrace the idea of being a leader ourselves is that leadership encompasses the field of a widely discussed phenomenon in the business world. A leader overnight is not made, created or born. The growing influence of global culture and workforce diversity makes the task of being an effective leader that much more challenging. In a very simple and straightforward manner, leadership is all about energizing people toward a specific goal. The theoretical and practical knowledge regarding leadership may facilitate you to implement perfect leadership strategies in business development and activities which you can then embrace using the required adaptability and emotional intelligence to succeed as a business leader.