Question: Successful leadership is about winning hearts and minds. Discuss.
Warren Bennis, an American scholar widely regarded as a pioneer on the contemporary field of leadership studies, once said that “Leadership is the wise use of power. Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it.” Indeed, leadership comes with power but in order to gain this power, a leader must encompass three main leadership qualities. Besides winning the hearts and mind of the people, a leader must also be able to lead by example and have foresight. Only by mastering the above 3 qualities then can a leader be considered as a successful leader. Do you still think successful leadership is just about winning the hearts and minds of the people?
You may ask: why bother to win the hearts and minds of the people? A leader has to be able to win the hearts and minds of the people to gain their support. This is necessary because a leader must have followers, followers who are willing to listen to the leader, followers who believe in the leader. So how does a leader achieve this? Well, to win their hearts and minds of people, I believe that it all starts with the leader encouraging and motivating the people. By doing so, the people will feel that their leader actually cares for them and that the leader is as though a close friend of theirs, supportive. This will definitely help bridge the gap between the leader and the people, bringing their relationship closer. Through this, the leaders are then able to gain the trust of the people, and when this mutual trust it built, the group can then effectively reach goals as a whole, as one. Of course, the leader must also be meritocratic and fair in order to win the hearts and minds of the people. The core of it all is to make the people happy, make everyone happy. Being biased to a certain group of people may bring them happiness and gain the