What is a leader?
A leader is an individual within a group who wields the most influence over others. There is always a leader in a group because without a leader, the group does not exist.
What has a good leader to do?
- He has to appreciate the collective brilliance of a team.
- He believes in the power of diversity.
- He sees leadership as a role and not as a position.
Role of a good leader
Direction setters: they define the team’s purpose.
Boundary managers: connecting the team to the broader organization and hierarchy.
Commitment to people: members are primarily concerned about relationship and about being valued as a team member.
Coaches: in order to enable the team to achieve its aims and objectives the team leader also needs to ensure that the team has the right members with the right skills and the necessary resources to achieve its task.
Facilitators: to make things easier, everybody must know what he has to do.
Negotiators: finding and negotiating for needed resources.
Enthusiasm, Energy, Inspiration and Expertise: team members want to be inspired and motivated by team leadership which has the energy and enthusiasm to fire them up.
Two theories of leadership
The Great Man Theory: People are born leaders, leaders are not like other people and they lead in all situations.
The Contingent Theory: Relations with others, clarity of role definition and position of power.
What makes a leader effective?
Production-oriented (quantitative aspect): initiating structures, getting the job done, organizing work, setting goals and defining roles.
People-oriented (qualitative aspect): establishing good relations with subordinates, explaining things to them and making sure they feel okay about their job.
Comments:
Now concerning our comments for this presentation, we mainly though that it came out a little short during the class so our team thinks that they might not have practiced enough before coming in class to present it because otherwise they would have realized it was a little short in time.
The games and activities used were really relevant even if the quiz was a little hard to conduct or to understand at the beginning but the analysis of the results were alright.
Concerning the Powerpoint and the body language on the presentation day. First of all, the slides were a little bit charged, meaning they had a lot of information on them making it hard to read and listen at the same time to the team members. Finally the team members were pretty calm during the presentation and concentrated, the only negative aspect comes from the way they used the space, in fact, they barely moved even when one of the members was a little hidden by his partners and it came his turn to talk.
