Organizational Leadership - Module One

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The Leader I Admire

The leader I’ve chosen was my social studies teacher in high school, Mr. Edwards. His style of managing a classroom and extra-curricular activities was vastly different from the leadership I had previously worked under and it made a profound impression on many of us. Students who struggled with the rigid authority of didactic instructors found the kind of sink-or-swim motivation they needed to take responsibility for their education. Students who felt constrained by a linear progression of facts were able to explore topics and themes organically and dig for meaning on their own terms.

To me, three of the traits mentioned by Northouse stand out as most characteristic of good leadership: initiative, responsibility, and emotional intelligence (specifically, the ability to manage the social interactions of others). In the case of Mr. Edwards, initiative is best exemplified in his creation of learning situations that differed greatly from standard teaching methods at the time (or, at least, in the school board we attended). His lessons were always open-ended and guided by our struggle to understand why events took place the way they did. We were challenged by his materials and questions to explore the motivations and justifications behind everything. For responsibility, I would propose that his sense of accountability to each student as an individual was his greatest strength – he saw each of us as a having a ‘problem’ that could be solved by finding the right learning method and demonstrated to us that he would continue to work with both the group and the individual until the goal was achieved. Finally, for emotional intelligence, Mr. Edwards possessed a talent increasingly rare among high school teachers for getting everyone paddling in the same direction – he could take a group of seemingly ostracized and ostracising factions and get them to work together in a safe and respectful environment by using sheer curiosity and interest to unite them.

While potentially over-simplistic, the trait approach for measuring and understanding leadership is undeniably straightforward and measureable. Its basic premise – that good leaders have innate qualities that make them good leaders – is easy to apply in many situations and is easy to test. Assessments can be administered that rank a candidate on their built-in characteristics (such as extroversion, intelligence, and charisma) without the complication of situational conditions. Although the trait approach concedes that desirable leadership qualities may be improved or (at least) placed in the appropriate working environment, the approach seeks primarily to isolate the default mechanisms of personality that shape a person’s response to all situations rather than actually observing the person in the attempt to lead.