Leadership Essay, Research Paper

Before a person can take any action to lead their followers, they must be able to recognize approximately where their followers are in the developmental cycle. To do this, he or she must watch closely the actions of his or her followers and determine to what degree their actions are being influenced dominantly by either confidence or competence. Once the leader knows the point of confidence vs. competence in his or her followers, he or she will know which factor to build on. When the leader feels they have successfully motivated their followers to be both very confident and competent, and that the followers are ready and have the responsibility to lead themselves to their goal, then they know that at that point, the followers are ready to accept some leadership themselves. Once the followers are ready for some leadership of their own, the next problem at hand becomes how to go about empowering them with the leadership responsibilities. Needless to say, the leader cannot simply step away and allow the responsibility to dump onto the followers; surely if that happened, they would quickly lose confidence and possibly competence too. Instead, the leadership and responsibility of the followers should be increased gradually as they are steadily empowered, and at a rate that depends on how well the newly gained leadership is handled. At all times though, the leader must be prepared to guide or even realign the direction the newly independent followers take. The leader must also realize the risk of failure in the complete empowerment of his or her followers, as starting over completely is hardly possible. Were that to occur, the subject would near definitely experience a severe loss of confidence as a major consequence to a premature empowerment situation. And lastly, if a leader is completely successful in empowering his or her subjects and has sent them well off on their way to their ultimate goal, the leader must realize that he/she has completed his or her own