Managerial Challenges in Today\'s Business World Affect

¶ … 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 today's leaders face may not be as dire as the ones faced in Japan, yet certainly the challenges are no less important to those who face them. 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 a myriad of daunting tasks that might not seem possible to leaders who may not have the skills, confidence or panache to accomplish such events. When discoursing on leaderships skills; Bennis seems to dwell on the academic side of the leadership equation, yet true business leaders, men and women who have toiled in the trenches of the business community offer more industrious insights into what characteristics a good leader should display.

Steve Case, founder and former CEO of AOL, offers his thoughts on what today's business leaders should exhibit as characteristic traits; three of those traits are, perseverance, passion and caring for people (Nakagawa, 2010). It is important to note that unlike Bennis' attitude that business leaders don't care about their employees, Case places such caring in the top three characteristics of a true business leader. Another recent study determined that authentic leaders are the ones who are "involved in overcoming difficult experiences and using the events to give meaning to their lives" (George, Sims, McLean, Mayer, 2007, p. 129). In both examples the focus is not on profitability or the bottom line, but on individuals and meaning.