"Are you born a leader?"

Hello everyone,
Thank you for coming once again to my blog where I fill you in on leadership and what it’s all about anyways. Whether you’re in school, holding a job position, or just wanting or thinking about creating charisma for yourself through a newly developed organization, I am here to help. This week we are going to be looking at “The Great Man Theory” and “The Trait Theory”. These two different concepts are very different in a sense that they both contain different guidelines of what leadership meant and in some cases still means today.

As discussed in the previous blog, the concept of “The Great Man Theory” led to the thought that leaders were born to be great. The leaders of the time were politically powerful, wealthy, and royal. What would you say on who you think could fit into this category? Perhaps, Abraham Lincoln or Nelson Mandela who served as the President of South Africa from 1994-1999. His political figure in society has always been one to notice for his great acts to promote a better democratic multi-racial country for his people. Today, he still remains an ‘idol’ among many people from all across the nation. This could be a perfect example on the applied theory mentioned above. The way this would apply to my life would make sense in a way, but I believe that being outspoken could definitely be a contributing quality in which this is something that I am becoming more and more dependent upon. The other conceptual theory was the “Trait Theory”, that in a way lacks a theory altogether. This is because the definition of a great leader was the physical appearance of the person such as the hair, build, height, and so on so forth. Through studies traits arose to make what researchers thought to be “The five top traits for effective leadership” and they were:

-Intelligence
-Self Confidence
-Determination
-Integrity
-Sociability

Now when I look these they do make somewhat sense, but there are many traits that could easily be placed with these. This theory can relate to my life in that when I have been or will be put into a leadership position, it is essential that you look and present yourself in good manner because who wants to follow after some poorly dressed, ‘scruffy’, pessimistic person? I certainly won’t. How about you? What do you define as a good leader?

There have been many theories over the years but on a side note as learned during lecture was the “Achievement Motivation Theory” in which was designed by McClelland where it focuses on how the leaders performance and need for power, achievement, and affiliation. Though this can be seen as a minuscule outlier to the wide spectrum of leadership theories varying from tested, proved, researched, and so forth, the achievement theory may be one that a certain leader goes by. All in all, the essentials of good leadership is what you feel is right and what others view of that in being their purpose to come to reasoning with you in the long term.

picture above (www.black-collegian.com/newsspecial-reports/mandela2000-1st1.shtml)