As mentioned by the musician, the essential task of leadership is “changing the way work works, so you can improve the work.” In other words, leaders lead their group or team by influencing them to clear their minds about something they are not sure about and persuade the group to move towards the right path by sharing collective knowledge. The good leaders have that vision to see the future to avoid the fear of unknown or unknowable. Gary Yukl defines leadership as “the process of influencing others to understand and agree about what needs to be done and how to do it, and the process of facilitating individual and collective efforts to accomplish shared objectives.” (Rowe & Guerrero, 2011) Moreover, the management tries to perfect the current processes or procedures to fulfill the overall objective of the organization. However, leadership is based on sharing the collective knowledge and influencing a group of people to look at different alternatives to solve a problem.
Moreover, the musician describes the five L “qualities” of good leaders. Following are the five L “qualities”:
Leaders do lead: The first quality is that leaders are accountable for leading their group or team and they lead from front or behind. In other words, leading from the front means that the leaders actually tell their group or team members what to do and they explain them how to accomplish different goals. However, some leaders believe in leading from behind which means they empower their group or team to think what they need to accomplish and how they should accomplish those tasks. Depending on the situation, these leaders decide whether to lead from the front or behind.
Leaders listen: The second quality is that leaders must have good listening skills. Without listening to their followers, leaders cannot understand their point of view and it makes it hard for them to lead effectively. After all, the job of a leader is to
References: Rowe, G., & Guerrero, L. (2011). Cases in Leadership. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, Inc.