Who is a leader?

You say you aren't a leader? I would say RETHINK! A leader is not a specific person with a title! Everybody is a leader! Some lead big groups of people, some lead small groups and some just lead themselves. In any case everybody is a leader. Remember! The number of people you lead doesn't define how good of a leader you are.

I would say there are tons of qualities that make up a good leader, but then, no one's perfect. Every person has some qualities through which he/she leads and then some weaknesses. Weakness isn't a bad thing. It's just a natural thing. But then a good leader is the one who overcomes these weaknesses and keeps striving for improvement. While it is not even necessary that a certain quality be good or bad, it could just be different, because there are many different leadership styles.

A few months ago, I was reading a book by Sean Covey called the "Seven Habits of Highly effective teens." It was a book that made me ponder over myself and my leadership philosophy. That book mentioned seven habits that if a person acquires those, he/she would almost be a perfect leader. While the book mentioned habits like being proactive, prioritizing, synergizing and some others, there was one that I felt was the most important for a leader who is leading a group, and that was 'seek first to understand, then to be understood'. I feel like until you don't listen and respect the people you are leading, they also wouldn't care to respect and listen to you, and that's not the sign of a good leader. So being a good leader would want you to listen the people you are leading, take ideas from them, and take them into consideration while making decisions. Though in certain situations it's not possible to take everybody's idea into consideration, and so making a good decision on behalf of your team is also a very important and good quality of a leader.

Having good relationships with your team members was one good quality of a leader which helps in better results. Now if we consider the main working aspect, that shouldn't be any other than management. Management of time, workload, team members etc is everything. Until you don't manage your resources properly you are definitely going to have great problems meeting deadlines. There are different types of management plans,and that depends on the type of goal you have, that which plan works best. Knowing all different plans is very important so to implement it at the right time. For example, your company 'Pepsi' decides that it needs to be a major seller in sports drinks, so this would be a totally broad plan, in which you set direction. As you advance, the plan gets more specific, which is then managed by different management plans like who is assigned what work to meet this goal.

*Picture from internet

One more thing which I must say is very important for a leader is 'communication'. Though it is a two way process, I would say it is the responsibility of the leader to make sure that his members get the message or task correctly, and have understood it thoroughly. To explain this let me give you an example. Recently in my management class, the students were divided into groups and then a leader was appointed by the teacher. All groups had a goal to make the most reliable and attractive bird house using ice cream sticks. We all in our groups waited for our leaders to give us instructions on how to make it. Unfortunately our leader couldn't make himself clear enough and it resulted in everybody just stacking up their sticks to make a birdhouse, that wasn't really attractive. Now if you see, if the leader would have made himself more clear on what to do and then made sure that we understood, we would have ended up with a better product. Though it was also our mistake that we didn't clear ourselves by asking questions. I guess this is a pretty good example to show how much communication is important.

In the end I would just remind you again, there is no one particular leader who is the best, everybody can be excellent leaders depending on how you use your leadership styles and philosophy. The qualities of a leader that I mentioned were just a few prominent ones, other than this there is so much more in every person and every leader.