Leadership 2

Leadership connotes a willingness to stand as an example, as well as to guide and, or, influence others in attaining a goal. Effective leadership begins with the same strengths that can be found in a healthy personality structure. Developing leadership skills is, from this perspective, the same process as attaining a strong sense of personal identity and worth. Style of leadership is often the defining characteristic of behavior observed as specific to leaders. The competencies of successful leaders are understood to be adaptive coping responses regulated across many different spheres of individual functioning, cognitive beliefs and expectations, emotional reactions, and intentions that may impede goal attainment. LEADERSHIP before a person can take any action to lead their followers, they must be able to recognize approximately where their followers are in the developmental cycle. To do this, he or she must watch closely the actions of his or her followers and determine to what degree their actions are being influenced dominantly by either confidence or competence. Once the leader knows the point of confidence vs. competence in his or her followers, he or she will know which factor to build on. When the leader feels they have successfully motivated their followers to be both very confident and competent, and that the followers are ready and have the responsibility to lead themselves to their goal, then they know that at that point, the followers are ready to accept some leadership themselves. Once the followers are ready for some leadership of their own, the next problem at hand becomes how to go about empowering them with the leadership responsibilities. Needless to say, the leader cannot simply step away and allow the responsibility to dump onto the followers; surely if that happened, they would quickly lose confidence and possibly competence too. Instead, the leadership and responsibility of the followers should