¶ … Managerial challenges in today's business world affect both the non-profit and for-profit entities in similar manners. Though oftentimes these challenges may also affect the entities in different ways; consider for instance, the recent tsunami and earthquake events in Japan. Many of the Japanese non-profit entities focused on what needed to take place to help individuals, families and victims to recover from the devastating occurrences. The leaders of these entities were faced with the devastating effects that are the human element of most natural catastrophes. Leaders in the business community, though they too see the human side, have a focus more on the business side; what it takes to get the business up and running again. Leaders from both sides realize that neither is more important than the other, and oftentimes their goals and objectives are tightly interwoven. Therefore it behooves the leaders of both types of organizations to display leadership traits that will lend confidence to those that they seek to lead.

The challenges...

One of the challenges faced in today's marketplace is the ability to react to situations such as the events in Japan. These types of challenges can define the leader and oftentimes a transformational leader will bring an entirely new direction to the entity. Fu et al. describes transformational leaders as individuals whose actions "motivate followers to do more than expected and act for the good of the collective" (Fu, Tsui, Liu, Li, 2010, p. 222).
Challenges are faced by leaders who display both good and bad leadership capabilities and can affect the 'collective' in both good and bad ways. The end results are easily discernable as to which leaders exhibit the good traits, and which leaders exhibit the bad ones. As Warren Bennis states in his diatribe on leadership "we do not yet know what a theory of leadership would look like" (2007, p. 4) yet we do know that good leadership can accomplish…