7.1 Leaderships

UNIT 7: Leadership, Power, and Ethical Behavior

Author : H. Lutfi Mulyadi, M.Sc

Traits are personal possession of attributes, including values, character, needs, motives, temperament, abilities and personality (Holsinger, n.d). Traits of leaderships important for the success of an organization are (positively and confidently) (empowering and inspiring) people, staying in control to manage better feelings of his own and the people, becoming a transformational leader on giving his people motivation to deliver the creation of a fascinating vision, leading as a role model with integrity and by self-implementing what he talks, and helping the people shine by doing assessment to carry out the training to improve their skills for a successful team (Mindtools, 2017).

Skills of leaderships are knowledge and competencies helping the leaders reach the objectives. Those are conceptual, human or interpersonal and technical skills. Leaders also must aware of cognitive styles dealing with personal perception, processing, interpretation, and use of information in leadership practice (Holsinger, n.d).

To represent the thinking styles, the following Herman’s whole brain thinking model might apply. 

Non effective leaders use only one quadrant of the thinking model, while the effective ones tend to collaboratively use the whole quadrant simultaneously in their practical leadership life. Last but not least, autocratic and democratic behavior have been used to describe the leadership behavioral studies (Holsinger,n.d). For the purpose of organizational success or achieved goals/objectives, effective leaders may choose which behavior suitable for application based on the situation.        

Based on the situation, leaderships can be considered as an art to choose which traits, skills, styles and behavior suitable for action. The study of (Leadership, 2016) also stated that it is the art of involving people to achieve the target. Target and people oriented are the character of a great leader. Different from the great one, good leaders only focus on their people or the target.       

            In my country, one of the most admired leaders is Prof. Dr. Ing. Bj. Habibie, the third Indonesian president who is also the first Indonesian aerospace professor to solve the crack propagation problem in an aero plane and to develop Aerodynamics, Thermodynamics and Construction respectively known as Habibie method, factor and theorem (Wikipedia 2020). His strongly attractive leadership role models are his trait of empowering and inspiring young Indonesian scientist and engineer to be a great leader, his interpersonal skill of building national and international networking, his technical skill of thinking everything with an engineer’s way of analyzing what is the problem and what is the solution such as modelling how to stabilize the bad economic situation by finding the solution of the bad IDR exchange rate with other currency using the damped oscillating spring model, his firstly established Indonesian conceptual skill of applying regional autonomy of power and spread resources with the regulation of the central government, his style of collaboratively using all cognitive styles as a country and wife (Ainun) ’s loyal problem solver and lover, and his democratic behavior (Wikipedia, 2020) as the first Indonesian president to liberalize and democratize political party laws and to democratically held the election 3 years before scheduled. Those events resulted in the end of his presidency. His less than a year presidency strongly influences democratic Indonesian life.  He really deserves to be the father of Indonesian Democracy as well as the father of Indonesian and the world aerospace technology.           

            In this global pandemic situation with development of healing technology, all country’s people in the world, including the one of Indonesia should be positive and have tried to be a leader rather than a boss. Compared to a boss (Group, n.d), a leader would prefer to learn rather than know everything, to listen rather than talk more, to find the best solutions rather than give answers, to encourage rather than criticize, to recognize gifts simultaneously rather than find everyone’s weakness, to express vulnerability rather than defend an ego, to focus on the social rather than the personal life, to be responsible rather than blame others, to inspire performance rather than require the results. By thinking as a positive leader rather than a boss, we hope everyone can contribute to the end of this outbreak.       

  

References

Holsinger, J. (n.d.). TRAITS, SKILLS, AND STYLES OF LEADERSHIP. Retrieved December 29, 2020, from http://account.ache.org/eweb/upload/HolsingerCarlton_Chapter%203-81ea7b48.pdf

Mindtools Videos. (2017, April 18). 5 traits of successful leaders [Video]. YouTube. 

Leadership, C. (2016, August 20). Great Leadership is an Art. Retrieved December 30, 2020, from https://www.calienteleadership.com/great-leadership-is-an-art/

Wikipedia, H. (2020, December 27). B. J. Habibie. Retrieved December 30, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._J._Habibie

Group, V. (n.d.). Blog - The Difference Between a Boss and a Leader. Retrieved December 30, 2020, from https://www.volarisgroup.com/blog/article/the-difference-between-a-boss-and-a-leader