Aztar Leadership

Azter Leadership:

An Unsuccessful Model

When leadership comes to mind, it comes with thoughts of shining knights, beacons of truth, and unflappable exemplars. As a child, everyone hears the fairy tales of leaders that are able to do battle with evil, alone, and rescue their cause from sure defeat; the media is saturated with stories such as these. However, leaders and leadership can and does come in different packages, sizes, and abilities. It is not always the case that a leader is the unsung hero of a cause and, in fact, this paper will show that sometimes the leader avoids the limelight focusing it on the cause and his followers. A basic understanding of leaders and leadership will be established and then a critique of a modern company will be explained. As this paper will show, just as we have great companies with strong leadership, we also have companies on the slide with no definitive direction or leadership.

Two fundamental things about leadership must be understood prior to critique a company. First, leadership is a trinity that relies on leaders, followers, and situational cues. Second, leadership, as a practice, has many aspects which can be learned; however, an equal, and an equally important, number of aspects cannot be learned. A superficial understanding of leadership would have us believe both that leaders simply exist and that they exist without training, knowledge, or extrinsic influence. However, a deeper and more thorough understanding must be had in order to fully examine the strengths and weaknesses of a company's leadership.

The trinity of leadership previously mentioned is described in Daft's textbook on leadership. He expresses that leadership cannot exist is a vacuum. Leaders must have followers to lead in a situation that requires a direction. And these followers and directions are often times not the same. This is illustrated when Daft (2005) says:

The central focus of research [is] the situation in which leadership occurred. The basic tenet of this focus [is] that behavior effective in some circumstances might be ineffective under different conditions. Thus, the effectiveness of leader behavior is contingent upon organizational situations. There is no one best way of leadership (p. 81).

Prior ideas about leadership dictated that there were hard and fast rules. As mentioned above, this cannot be the case due to a number of factors. The contingency approach to leadership expresses that the lowest common denominators of these factors are leaders, followers, and situations. These three factors are interrelated with each affecting and contributing to the others.

Leaders must recognize that they are but a part in the process of achieving goals. Without followers or a situation in which to lead, the leader plays no part. However, assuming that both followers and a situation await leadership, there are two major approaches to which the leader should subscribe. Task oriented leadership implies full commitment to the job at hand. Relationships are formed, structure is oriented, and followers are lead solely in the direction of completed task. People oriented leadership implies full commitment to those who must complete the job at hand. Work is delegated and employers are focused in the direction of employee satisfaction; those that feel well, work well.

Followers must also recognize that they are part of the process and, as Daft explains, the best leaders often make the best followers. As leaders must be receptive to the followers and situation, so to must the followers be receptive. Daft explains this dichotomy when he writes:

The nature of leader-follower relationships involves reciprocity, the mutual exchange of influence. Many of the qualities that are desirable in a leader are the same qualities possessed by an effective follower. Both leader and follower roles are proactive; together they can achieve a shared vision (p. 256).

This reciprocity often involves the following group knowing its limitations. A cohesive, mature group will be able to achieve more together than an alienated, immature group. As mentioned in class, a bunch of superstars put together is a group while a bunch of average stars working together is a team (R. Robinson, Lecture, 2004). The group must recognize their weaknesses be they alienation from not previously working together, or immaturity from not having a depth of understanding of the task at hand.

Finally, the situation is a part of the process that no one can predict. Business models can forecast and attempt to calculate trends which make the situation easier to predict; however, the dynamic nature of both the leader and followers and the situation greatly diminish the effectiveness of forecasts. The very idea that situations