International Conference Paper East Asian Cultures

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International Conference Paper
The Role of Leadership in today´s Business World
By Jeannine Katharina Loosen

On February 14th 2012 I attended the international conference held by Professor Jan H. Melsen at ESERP Business School in Barcelona. The main topic of the conference was theconcept of leadership, which related directly to Mr. Melsen´s professional background in the field of consultancy and training in corporations. Leadership has become increasingly important in the business environment and was therefore as very interesting topic to learn about. Mr. Melsen pointed out some important key aspects related to the concept of leadership, which I would like to shortly lay out asgroundwork for my own contribution to the area.
Jan H. Melsen defined leadership as an activity in which an individual guides and or directs a group. He pointed out that leaders are not necessarily born but can be “made” through learning and practice. He acknowledged that each of us could be a good leader, given that we are willing to improve our personal qualities that are vital for thisrole. This leads us to the next part of the conference about the prerequisites of a successful leader. Melsen explained that confidence is an absolutely inevitable trait of a good leader. He said that a leader must have confidence in himself in order to make others trust in him. Moreover he emphasized on the importance of a leader having a clear vision and mission of where he and his teams stands andwhere they would like to arrive by sharing specific ideas and values. In the realization of the mission of the company, a successful leader should be energetic, optimistic, persistent and more than anything inspiring. In continuation Nelsen described a good leader as a slow and public -speaker, who uses wise body language, makes shrewd and quick decisions and works hard using emotionalintelligence and coherence in his approach. Moreover, the speaker made an interesting distinction between a manager and a leader by describing a manager as someone o solely reacts to certain issues while a leader would take a step further and actually based his work on certain mindset that is linked to the importance of listening to his employees in order to reach an understanding of their thoughts andfeeling (Melsen, 2012).
In the previous part of this conference paper I am going to take a step further and investigate the concept of leadership from an angle that was not touched upon during the conference, namely that of leadership in project management, which I think are of high importance. In order to do so, I will relate the ideas that Prof. Melsen´s brought forward with my own, gatheredknowledge and information that I have come across in my master studies in which we recently touched upon Project Management and the importance of leadership within this area.
In the field of Project Management, leadership plays a vital role. First it is important to define a project manager. In our negotiation class led by Dionne Jacomello (2012) we understood a project manager as someone who worksat the heart of an organization´s strategy execution since a company´s strategy is carried out in form of projects. In the execution of such projects, those in charge need to have certain managerial skills that are very influential on a firm`s performance on the market. Project managers are in charge of teams of different sizes, who are meant to jointly work towards business objectives. Leadershipcharacteristics as the ones explained by Professor Nelsen determine the bond of such teams. What really decides over the success of each member´s success and the overall fulfillment of such project plans is the leadership ability of the project manager. The biggest project disaster is in fact mainly caused by a project manager who fails in his role as a leader. If leadership is not carried out...