¶ … leadership characteristics that are important in making a good leader. The major attributes highlighted are commitment, character and competency. There is emphasis on how to integrate these attributes in all levels within an organization. Furthermore, there are improvements listed on making leadership better. Leadership

There has been a search for the best leaders ever since mankind evolved. Surely, regardless of where a person lives o what century he lives in, he will need a good leader. People often wonder what characteristics would qualify someone as a good leader. The characteristics or the abilities a person has a leader would vary depending on who it is they are ruling. No one race or region is alike and thus different tactics are required to deal with them in an appropriate manner. Regardless, there are a set of characteristics that should be present in any leader regardless of where they rule.

Commitment

Commitment is basically the key ingredient in the success recipe of almost every organization. The trap or the trick here is that commitment itself is not useful if it is only present in one or two persons in the organization. Commitment is something hat should be there in all the workers. Who would exactly be in charge of all the workers? That's Right! The leader would be in charge of making sure that all the employees are committed to the organization. What good is that if he himself is not commitment? Therefore leadership in itself commands that a leader be committed to the organization. (Rost,1991) Leaders in the past such as Henry Ford and Pierre du Point showed commitment in their ventures. If we look at it more recently, then people like Ross Perot and Steve Jobs also show quite a lot of commitment as well. (Rost,1991) Commitment needs to be there if a person wants to be a leader from the beginning. If a person doesn't like an organization or isn't interested about it, he or she would not be even interesting in leading it let alone committing to it. Commitment means that the leader is on and all over the organization at all times. This really shows that with great power, there is a lot of responsibly on the person. Not everyone can take on responsibilities and carry out each and every one of them. It takes struggles, sacrifices and occasionally requires the person to go an extra mile. For instance in an organization, employees work from nine to five and then go home. They don't really care about what is happening on the upper level or what if the company goes in loss. Surely they will be out of a job, but they can always go look for another job. However, for a leader the company is basically his everything. Thus a high level of commitment is not only preferred, it is quite mandatory.

Character

Regardless of which persons a leader would lead, the fact is that everyone wants to be treated with respect. There would be people who would butter up or be alright with however they are treated but there would be a point when they reach their limit and thus go on to work against the organization. A few nice words and politeness can instill the feeling of commitment that the leader himself has. The entire idea of the character or the personality of the leader is quite debatable. Many render the personality and the character of the leader a very crucial aspect in determining the leader's success. (Sogunro,1998) However, on the other hand the effectiveness of leadership is also dependent on the character of the employees or the person's the leader is managing. As mentioned earlier, leaders will not be able to lead a group without having followers. In other words, there needs to be people who will listen to the leader and respond to his orders. If the people themselves are very indolent and keep going away from their job, then they are surely not worthy of politeness of good character. Leadership itself has been defined as a process that is very interactive. There needs to be a good communication between the leader and the persons carrying out a task. The interactive process has to influence the persons. A leader that is not influential will not get many tasks in the office...

Thus, being influential is quite an n important part of the character of the leader. Apart from influential, leadership requires the leader to be order to motivate the persons in his company. Many leaders feel that when employees come up with solutions or techniques on their own, they are undermining the leader's abilities and his job. An employee would go against the leader if he or she would have something done without the leader's permission. There is nothing wrong with being motivated and with coming up ideas that are in the best interested of the company. This brings us to the fact that a leader should be able to bring out the best in his followers. He should allow them to show and to reach their true potential. The leader should make sure that he works to encourage and further boost up the potentials of all his followers.
All the three qualities mentioned in the character of a leader go on to show that leadership itself won't be there if there weren't problems. In other words, for a leadership process to actually take place, there would problems that the persons would approach the leader with and he would show the people how to solve it and how to keep on moving tackling the obstacles in the way. For a leader to be able to handle the stress and steer the persons in the right direction, his character needs to be strong. The leader needs to be able to motivate the people and encourage them to come with the solutions. Ten minds would think well than one mind. The more solutions there are to problems, the better the problem would be handed.

Competence

The way managers and persons in an organization work under and with the leaders is quite an area of controversy. The real issue arises because no one view can be agreed on what the leaders should do and what they shouldn't do. In other words, in every organization, there is no set of rules or a definition of commitment. However, commitment is something that goes around and varies regarding how these functions are conceptualized. At current hey are many processes and philosophies that are being backed up by certain frameworks and processes of recruitment. There is no way any hiring officer can judge whether someone knows the value of c or not.

What exactly would define as the most competent manager? One way of doing is how they describe or differentiate a certain task. In other words, how the leader goes about and tells what people have to do. (Storey,2004) For instance, it is not hard to order around and tell people what to do. Any persons with a bossy attitude can place orders and command people to act in a certain way. However, getting the job done and following through with the demands takes commitment. Storey (2004) states that the competence in a leader is not only determined by his qualifications but also by his behavior. A person can be very skilled and can have the best GPA. However, his competence and efficiency in carrying out certain orders,.

One way to assess a competency of a leader is to look at the way he is hiring and who is hiring. A leader himself can't be judged in what he does because most of his actions only involve appointing persons and getting tasks done. If a certain organization has been failing at have a good person for a certain position, then surely the leader is not competent enough to hire. Competency basically is something quite general. In kind of a general aspect, a competent leader would mean that he knows how to manage everything. He knows what is going around in the organization and he is not afraid to take on new opportunities. To explain this in a better way, a competent leader would know and be able to judge which steps to not and which opportunities he should stay away from.

Integration of skills

As it is mentioned earlier in the paper, that a leader cannot exist without followers. The characteristic that are mentioned above are just as necessary in a follower as they are in a leader. All of the followers cannot take on the vision or the perceptive of one leader. An organization can never work when all the followers think, work and process in a way that the leader would want. Such an organization is not present till this day and even if it was there, it wouldn't be successful. In other words, the followers need to be aware of what the leader wants. They should know what his commitment level is, they should be aware of how competent is and most of all, they…