Liderazgo

Summary
1. Leadership means influencing others to work willingly toward achieving objectives. Being a leader requires more than having a command of leadership theories: It also means managing organizational culture; motivating employees; managing groups, teams, and conflict; and facilitating organizational change.
2. Thinking like a leader means reviewing a leadership situation andidentifying what is happening, accounting for what is happening (in terms of leadership and other behavioral science theories and concepts), and formulating leader actions.
3. The leader must provide a direction that followers can work toward. This direction may be a statement of vision, mission, or objectives, depending largely on what the leader wants to achieve and the level at which he or she isacting.
4. To be a leader one must also have the potential to be a leader. Having the right stuff (in terms of personality traits) is the second foundation component. Some traits on which leaders differ from nonleaders include drive, the desire to lead, honesty and integrity, self-confidence, cognitive ability, and knowledge of the business.
5. Legitimate power and authority are elementsin the foundation of leadership, because a leader without power is not a leader at all. Sources of leader power include position, rewards, coercion, expertise, and referent power or personal magnetism.
6. Leadership style or behaviors include structuring and considerate styles; participative and autocratic styles; employee-centered and production-centered styles; close and general styles; andtransformational behavior.
7. Although there are some differences in the way men and women lead, they do not account for the slower career progress of most women managers. Institutional biases such as the glass ceiling and persistent, inaccurate, stereotypes are contributing factors.
8. Situational leadership theories like those of Fiedler and House and the leader-member exchange theoryunderscore the importance of fitting the style to the situation.
Once your organization is staffed with competent employees, these employees must be inspired, motivated, and led. In this part of the book, we'll therefore turn to leadership.
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Planning an ad campaign, organizing a management team, and making decisions on when to launch your site is only part of what successful managers like Barbara Hyder do. After plans are set and the organization is in place, nothing is going to happen unless the leader's teammates and subordinates want to move in the direction that's been set. Makingsure that happens is a big part of what leaders do.
Leadership is generally defined as influencing others to work willingly toward achieving objectives. As we'll see in this chapter, leadership therefore means crystallizing a direction for subordinates, and then tapping into all the authority, charisma, and traits the leader can muster to make the subordinates want to follow the leader in achievingthe leader's goals. In the last two parts of this book we've covered the management functions of planning and organizing. Now we turn to the concepts and skills involved with actually influencing the organization's employees to implement the company's plans. We turn to leadership.

Leaders Fill Many Roles

There's a lot more to being a leader than just the contents of this leadership chapter.That's why all of Part 4 of this book is called "Leading," although it also covers topics like motivation, groups, conflict, and change.3 Leaders simultaneously fill many roles, interacting with and motivating subordinates, leading groups whose members are interacting and in which conflicts might arise, and being part of a group reporting to the leader's own boss. The knowledge contained in...