Leadership and management concepts and practices

Leadership & Management -- Traits of the 21st Century Leader

The modern day leader is generally different from the leaders of the past century, generally due to the fact that he needs to run the organization in a means that responds to the emergent challenges from the micro and macro environments -- and these challenges are numerous.

First of all, the modern day manager has to be able to use the human resource as the most valuable organizational asset, rather than the force operating the machines. This is important for all business entities, but even more so within organizations which offer services rather than products. Within the United States for instance, nearly 80 per cent of the entire contribution to the gross domestic product is constituted by revenues from services operations; the sector employs more than 70 per cent of the entire labor force (Central Intelligence Agency, 2009). Given this situation, it becomes obvious why the modern day leader must reveal an increased ability of interacting with the staff members. In order for him to best capitalize on the characteristics of the human resource and ensure that this sustains the company in achieving its overall goals, it is compulsory for the manager to:

Be a good listener

Be a good communicator in the meaning that he must maintain constantly open communication channels, but also encourage communications

Be a good orator

Reveal an increased ability to motivate people and align their individual goals to the overall objectives of the organization

Be fair, ethical, and constructive in his endeavors

Be polite at all times; employees no longer function on threats and a tense working environment in which the employer / manager is the tyrant, but respond to friendly working environments in which the manager is the collaborator and the colleague

Secondly, there is the force of the environment which transformed the customers of the past decades, from the force purchasing whatever the company produced, into today's clients which tell the company what to produce and sell. From this angle, the modern day manager must be able to:

Recognize the importance of customer satisfaction

Create an organizational culture focused on customer satisfaction; he needs to possess all of the previous skills in order to motivate the employees to become integrated within such as business model

The manager must be outgoing, open and communicative in order to be able to sustain direct interactions with the customer base

He must be well articulated, well read, well spoken, and extremely important, charismatic, so that the audience, generally all categories of stakeholders, is interested and able to easy understand his arguments

He must be open to suggestions for improvement

He has to be self-confident, but also recognize the value of the input received from various categories of stakeholders

He must be open minded, and continuously willing to take risks, based on clear analyses however

The incremental roles played by the staff members and the organizational clients are both direct impacts of the growing forces of globalization. Yet another factor caused by globalization and generating mutations in the traits required from a manager is that of an intensifying competition. In order to respond to this threat, the contemporaneous leader has to meet the following criteria:

He must stand on a high moral ground and he must be able to implement the principles of ethics in any given situation

He must be able to present the facts in a means that creates advantages for his organization and discourages the competition

He must be able to recognize the company's strengths and weaknesses as well as the environments' opportunities and threats and capitalize on the strengths and opportunities, while also minimizing the negative impact of the threats and weaknesses

He must be determined and objective and he must be able to territorially expand his company in order to benefit from the comparative advantages of other global regions and, in this, overcome the competition (Chowdhury, 2003)

Aside the sets of traits imposed by the three major changes within the business society -- the growing roles of the customer base and that of the human resource, combined with the intensifying forces of competition -- the modern day manager must also meet the following criteria:

He must be able to understand the changing features of the contemporaneous environment and as such implement change management within the organization. "A change leader sees change as opportunity. A change leader looks for change, knows how to find the right changes and knows how to make them effective both outside the organization and inside it" (Drucker, 2007)