UNIVERSIDAD DE SAN CARLOS DE GUATEMALA FACULTAD DE INGENIERA TECHNICAL ENGLISH 4 SECCION P

Front page

Report No.1
Characteristics of being a leader/ Types of Leader

Eduardo Alejandro Motta Porras

201020844

Fecha : 05/03/2013

Introduction
Leadership is really important skill that not all people have it, but the leaders that exist they all have certain characteristics in common. These characteristics are fundamental to be a leader, in manner to illustrate what Im trying to say lets mention some: a leader must be positive, has to be a people person and has integrity. These are some of the characteristics a leader must have. Its important to remember that every person is different meaning that each leader will be a different one. By mentioning this it is crucial to also study the different types of leader that exist. In the following report there is information that surrounds both of these subjects.

Objectives
Investigate and to understand what is needed to become a successful leader. You can subdivide the present document in two parts, which pretend to go with a full understanding of the subject: Types of leaders Characteristics of a leader

Body
Characteristics of a leader
Thousands of articles and books have been published describing what it takes to be a superior organizational leader. Some researchers and authors claim a superior leader possesses certain traits or abilities; others say it's all personality. Still others maintain it's the behaviors--not necessarily the intentions or thoughts--that are crucial. Whatever your viewpoint, it boils down to this: successful leaders share the following characteristics or views: 1. Mission: Leaders know what their mission is. They know why the organization exists. A superior leader has a well thought out (often written) mission describing the purpose of the organization. That purpose need not be esoteric or abstract, but rather descriptive, clear and understandable. Every employee should be able to identify with the mission and strive to achieve it. 2. Vision: Where do you want your organization to go? A vision needs to be abstract enough to encourage people to imagine it but concrete enough for followers to see it, understand it and be willing to climb onboard to fulfill it. 3. Goal: How is the organization going to achieve its mission and vision and how will you measure your progress? Like a vision, goals need to be operational; that is specific and measurable. If your output and results can't be readily measured, then it will be difficult to know if you have achieved your purpose. You may have wasted important resources (time, money, people, and equipment) pursuing a strategy or plan without knowing if it truly succeeded. 4. Competency: You must be seen by your advisors, stakeholders, employees, and the public as being an expert in your field or an expert in leadership. Unless your constituents see you as highly credentialed--either by academic degree or with specialized experience--and capable of leading your company to success, it will be more difficult for you to be as respected, admired, or followed. Practically speaking, not all executives immediately possess all of the characteristics that spell success. Many leaders learn along the way with hard work. As crises and challenges arise, those at the top of the hierarchy have key opportunities to demonstrate to others that they are in fact, qualified to be leaders. In actuality, greater competency can be achieved as a leader gains more on-the-job experiences. 5. A strong team: Realistically, few executives possess all of the skills and abilities necessary to demonstrate total mastery of every requisite area within the organization. To complement the areas of weakness, a wise leader assembles
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effective teams of experienced, credentialed, and capable individuals who can supplement any voids in the leader's skill set. This ability is what sets leaders apart from others. However, the leader needs to be willing to admit he lacks certain abilities and go about finding trusted colleagues to complement those deficiencies. After building the team, the entrepreneur needs to trust that team to understand issues, create solutions, and to act on them. 6. Communication skills: It does little good to have a strong mission, vision, and goals--and even a solid budget--if the executive cannot easily and effectively convey his ideas to the stakeholders inside and outside of the organization. He must regularly be in touch with key individuals, by email, v-mail, meetings, or other forms of correspondence. Of course, the best way to ensure other people receive and understand the message is with face-to-face interactions. Getting out of the office or touring different sites is an irreplaceable method of building rapport and sending and receiving messages. "Management By Walking Around," or MBWA, meeting employees at their workstations or conference rooms, or joining them for lunch are just a few of the many effective approaches leaders can use to develop positive contacts with employees. 7. Interpersonal skills: Successful entrepreneurs are comfortable relating to other people; they easily create rapport and are at least more extroverted than they are introverted. These factors help leaders seem approachable, likeable, and comfortable in their position. Those qualities contribute to staff wanting to interact with their leader. They also help motivate employees to do a better job. When workers can relate to their boss, they believe that their boss is more concerned about them, with their performance, and with their output. Furthermore, they believe that they can go to their boss with problems they encounter on the job without fearing consequences for not knowing how to resolve issues. Not all entrepreneurs are adept at interpersonal skills. Those that aren't, might find it helpful to take a course, choose a mentor or locate a therapist to help them build interpersonal skills. The intangible cost is too high to not improve these abilities. In addition, here's where a strong team comes into play. The less experienced leader who is still learning these skills can rely on the team to get out and to "press the flesh," interact with employees, and spread a positive attitude to help develop morale. 8. A "can do, get it done" attitude: Nothing builds a picture of success more than achievement, and achievement is the number one factor that motivates just about everyone across all cultures. When employees see that their boss can lead and direct, has a clear vision and attainable goals, and actually gains results in a timely manner, then that person's credibility increases throughout the organization. Entrepreneurs must modestly demonstrate their skills to give their constituents valid reasons to appreciate and value their efforts.

9. Inspiration: Quite often, employees need someone to look up to for direction, guidance, and motivation. The entrepreneur needs to be that person. Hopefully, Human Resources has hired self-motivated individuals. Nevertheless, there are times, when many employees need the boss to inspire them by word or action. Employees need someone to look up to, admire, and follow. Even when the production or delivery of services looks like "it is all going well," the leader may at times need to step in personally to offer a suggestion or encouragement to ensure that employees perform their jobs in an optimal manner. 10. Ambition: Resting on your laurels is bad for employee morale and entrepreneurial credibility. Employees need to be constantly striving for improvement and success; and they need to see the same and more in their leaders. When the boss is seen as someone who works to

Types of Leaders
Most common Leadership Types are: - Autocratic leadership. - Bureaucratic leadership. - Charismatic leadership. - Democratic leadership or participative leadership. - Laissez-faire leadership. - People-oriented leadership or relations-oriented leadership. - Servant leadership. - Task-oriented leadership. - Transactional leadership. - Transformational leadership. Autocratic Leadership Autocratic leadership is an extreme form of transactional leadership, where a leader exerts high levels of power over his or her employees or team members. People within the team are given few opportunities for making suggestions, even if these would be in the team's or organization's interest. Most people tend to resent being treated like this. Because of this, autocratic leadership usually leads to high levels of absenteeism and staff turnover. Also, the team's output does not benefit from the creativity and experience of all team members, so many of the benefits of teamwork are lost. For some routine and unskilled jobs, however, this style can remain effective where the advantages of control outweigh the disadvantages. Bureaucratic Leadership Bureaucratic leaders "work by the book", ensuring that their staff follow procedures exactly. This is a very appropriate style for work involving serious safety risks (such as working with machinery, with toxic substances or at heights) or where large sums of money are involved (such as cash-handling). In other situations, the inflexibility and high levels of control exerted can demoralize staff, and can diminish the organizations ability to react to changing external circumstances. Charismatic Leadership A charismatic leadership style can appear similar to a transformational leadership style, in that the leader injects huge doses of enthusiasm into his or her team, and is very energetic in driving others forward. However, a charismatic leader can tend to believe more in him or herself than in their team. This can create a risk that a project, or even an entire organization, might
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collapse if the leader were to leave: In the eyes of their followers, success is tied up with the presence of the charismatic leader. As such, charismatic leadership carries great responsibility, and needs long-term commitment from the leader. Democratic Leadership or Participative Leadership Although a democratic leader will make the final decision, he or she invites other members of the team to contribute to the decision-making process. This not only increases job satisfaction by involving employees or team members in what's going on, but it also helps to develop people's skills. Employees and team members feel in control of their own destiny, and so are motivated to work hard by more than just a financial reward. As participation takes time, this style can lead to things happening more slowly than an autocratic approach, but often the end result is better. It can be most suitable where team working is essential, and quality is more important than speed to market or productivity. Laissez-Faire Leadership This French phrase means "let them do" and is used to describe a leader who leaves his or her colleagues to get on with their work. It can be effective if the leader monitors what is being achieved and communicates this back to his or her team regularly. Most often, laissez-faire leadership works for teams in which the individuals are very experienced and skilled self-starters. Unfortunately, it can also refer to situations where managers are not exerting sufficient control. People-Oriented Leadership or Relations-Oriented Leadership This style of leadership is the opposite of task-oriented leadership: the leader is totally focused on organizing, supporting and developing the people in the leader's team. A participative style, it tends to lead to good teamwork and creative collaboration. However, taken to extremes, it can lead to failure to achieve the team's goals. In practice, most leaders use both task-oriented and people-oriented styles of leadership. Servant Leadership This term, coined by Robert Greenleaf in the 1970s, describes a leader who is often not formally recognized as such. When someone, at any level within an organization, leads simply by virtue of meeting the needs of his or her team, he or she is described as a "servant leader". In many ways, servant leadership is a form of democratic leadership, as the whole team tends to be involved in decision-making. Supporters of the servant leadership model suggest it is an important way ahead in a world where values are increasingly important, in which servant leaders achieve power on the basis of their values and ideals. Others believe that in competitive leadership situations, people practicing servant leadership will often find themselves left behind by leaders using other leadership styles.

Task-Oriented Leadership A highly task-oriented leader focuses only on getting the job done, and can be quite autocratic. He or she will actively define the work and the roles required, put structures in place, plan, organize and monitor. However, as task-oriented leaders spare little thought for the well-being of their teams, this approach can suffer many of the flaws of autocratic leadership, with difficulties in motivating and retaining staff. Task-oriented leaders can benefit from an understanding of the Blake-Mouton Managerial Grid, which can help them identify specific areas for development that will help them involve people more. Transactional Leadership This style of leadership starts with the premise that team members agree to obey their leader totally when they take a job on: the transaction is (usually) that the organization pays the team members, in return for their effort and compliance. As such, the leader has the right to punish team members if their work doesn't meet the pre-determined standard. Team members can do little to improve their job satisfaction under transactional leadership. The leader could give team members some control of their income/reward by using incentives that encourage even higher standards or greater productivity. Alternatively a transactional leader could practice "management by exception", whereby, rather than rewarding better work, he or she would take corrective action if the required standards were not met. Transactional leadership is really just a way of managing rather a true leadership style, as the focus is on short-term tasks. It has serious limitations for knowledgebased or creative work, but remains a common style in many organizations. Transformational Leadership A person with this leadership style is a true leader who inspires his or her team with a shared vision of the future. Transformational leaders are highly visible, and spend a lot of time communicating. They don't necessarily lead from the front, as they tend to delegate responsibility amongst their teams. While their enthusiasm is often infectious, they can need to be supported by "detail people". In many organizations, both transactional and transformational leadership are needed. The transactional leaders (or managers) ensure that routine work is done reliably, while the transformational leaders look after initiatives that add value. The transformational leadership style is the dominant leadership style taught in the "How to Lead: Discover the Leader Within You" leadership program, although we do recommend that other styles are brought as the situation demands. Using the Right Style: Situational Leadership
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While the Transformation Leadership approach is often highly effective, there is no one right way to lead or manage that suits all situations. To choose the most effective approach for you, you must consider: - The skill levels and experience of the members of your team. - The work involved (routine or new and creative). - The organizational environment (stable or radically changing, conservative or adventurous). - You own preferred or natural style. A good leader will find him or herself switching instinctively between styles according to the people and work they are dealing with. This is often referred to as "situational leadership" For example, the manager of a small factory trains new machine operatives using a bureaucratic style to ensure operatives know the procedures that achieve the right standards of product quality and workplace safety. The same manager may adopt a more participative style of leadership when working on production line improvement with his or her team of supervisors.

Conclusions
Leaders move people, to achieve a common goal. They don let anyone or anything get in the way of achieving their goal, by mentioning these we can also mention different ideologies, etc. They are polite, but insistent. The constantly and consistently drive forward toward their goal. Most people can be leaders, is just a matter of having the initiative. The basic message in this document is that you as the owner/entrepreneur need to "be out there" for your employees. Continually demonstrate to them why and how you earned the position you now hold. Communicate with them using any of a variety of methods that show them you are worthy of being followed. Make that process inspiring and positive and you can almost guarantee that your results will be consistent with your efforts.

Recommendations
These are some final recommendations: 1. You as a leader must be out there with your employees or who ever the people is, your leading. 2. If you want to become a leader is important for you to have a goal. 3. Be constant and consistent.

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E-graphy
http://vectorstudy.com/management-topics/types-of-leadership http://www.leadership-toolbox.com/characteristic-of-leadership.html http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/204248 http://www.articleclick.com/Article/7-Characteristics-Of-A-Leader/924946

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