What is a Good Leadership Style

Leadership Best Practices
Introduction
Military leadership depends upon the ability to motivate, support and drive the team to accomplish the mission. Leadership styles are diverse in the military and can include everything from the autocratic style to the servant leadership style. The key to employing best practices in military leadership, however, is to understand the needs of the situation, the needs of the stakeholders, and the needs of the moment so that the right strategy is employed for the goal to be achieved.[endnoteRef:2] This paper will discuss leadership best practices, particularly how sharing leadership best practices can help individual, group, corporation and military success. [2: For this reason, Stogdill asserts that contingency theory is the best way to explain how leaders should perform.]
Leadership Definition
Leadership has been defined as the ability to give empowerment to others (Conger). Leaders make a difference in the lives of others by helping them to achieve their objectives—not by doing the work for them but by giving them everything they require in order to succeed. This can include clear directions, a clear vision of what the mission is, a clear sense of what to do, or a clear path so that the workers can exercise their skills and talents without constraint. The leader can make many mistakes, such as fall into micro-managing, which is the problem of not giving one’s workers enough space and freedom to do their jobs without feeling that their every move is being watched and monitored (which can add stress to the worker’s burden and reduce the performance and productivity overall). The leader has to be cognizant of how his tone, example, and behavior is received by workers and must act accordingly. A leader who is obtuse and disconnected from his workers is one who sends a bad message—i.e., that he does not care about his workers or what they are doing (Schyns, Schilling).
How Sharing Leadership Best Practices Can Help
As there is no one-size-fits-all way to lead, sharing best practices in leadership can help leaders to realize the options they have as leaders and how those options can work in different environments and situations. Leadership is required in various settings—in one-on-one settings, in group settings, in corporations and in military exercises and activities. By sharing leadership best practices, leaders can be more equipped, knowledgeable and ready to lead according to the needs of their environment. As Stogdill has noted, there is no one set of traits that leader must possess; rather a leader should be fluid and able to adapt with a range of tools to choose from depending upon what is required. Leaders can vary greatly: the one thing they typically have in common is that they see what type of leadership is needed in the moment and provide it.
Individuals
Sharing best practices in leadership can help individuals by providing the leader and the follower with a sense of the various tactics and strategies that might be employed to get the individual the message, support, vision and assistance required. Leaders have to use social and emotional intelligence[endnoteRef:3] to put themselves on a better footing with individuals (Conger). The use of social and emotional intelligence is a recommended best practice because it allows the leader to engage one-on-one with a worker in a manner that can get the worker the psychological support that the person needs for fulfilling a duty. [3: Social and emotional intelligence are defined as the ability to read and respond to the social and emotional cues of the individual.]
Other times leaders might ignore the individual because they are focused on the big picture of leading a group. They might look at the numbers or at the overall organization and not take into consideration the issues that are affecting people at an individual level. Finding the right motivation for each person is something that has to be considered, as motivation is a key factor in driving workers to want to apply their all for the organization. Leaders can apply resiliency training in the military by using their position as a means of communicating personally with their followers, giving them the example of what it means to be dedicating and sharing their best qualities with the individual in an effort to inspire and guide (Reivich, Seligman, McBride). Another recommended best practice is to have leaders focus on transparency so as to inspire personal responsibility no matter what tasks they are facing. In resilience training, for instance, Army leaders learn that when they communicate an ideal of commitment and dedication to their soldiers they are able to enrich the culture of the corps and inspire an improved sense of morale and camaraderie. A personal or even servant style of leadership can be used to motivate soldiers or workers in any environment to overcome whatever struggles or challenges they are facing and make a positive impact.
Groups
The key to leading groups is to inspire communication and personal accountability among the groups. Many groups suffer from bad leadership because the leader does not engage well with others and remains aloof for most of the time (Schyns, Schilling). This has the effect of breaking down the group and making it inoperative. The group has to communicate, share responsibility, and be able to support one another from the outset. The group has to have a clear leader as well, one whose position is defined and who can help them all to define their own positions. When a leader takes charge in a group setting, the group benefits from the leader’s vision and passion; when a leader fails to emerge in a group, the group flounders because it has no direction. A leader therefore can benefit from knowing best practices in a group situation to help diffuse tensions and to help generate better communication among group members. The leader has to be able to set the tone for the group so that all members of the group appreciate what the other is giving. This can be especially important in group settings where there are multigenerational workers. They may not understand one another because they come from different generations and have different expectations among themselves. The leader has to know how to bridge these gaps and help each group member to recognize and appreciate what the other members have to offer. This can come by pairing members together so that they can learn from one another and give support when needed.
Corporations
Leadership best practices in corporations can be useful because every corporation is going to have its own unique challenges that first of all have to be uncovered through an internal audit. Then the leader has to be able to formulate a vision of what the corporation must do to succeed. That vision then has to be communicated among the stakeholders. It is also important to obtain feedback from workers and to involve them in the decision-making process so that they can feel that they have a stake in what is being asked of them. The corporate setting may also have a great deal of diversity, which would require the leader to be sensitive to cultural differences and to be inclusive as much as possible.
Military Objectives
When it comes to sharing best practices in leadership in helping to secure military objectives, the leader has to be aware of what the mission is, what the risks are, how to achieve the goal, and what the best approach is. To that end, leaders are recommended to have multiple data streams that they can draw from to be as informed as possible. They must be willing to listen and to engage others; but they also have to be able to give orders in a precise way while leaving room for soldiers to make decisions on their own. This is what is known as the art of empowering others, and the leader in the military should focus first and foremost on empowering soldiers so that they can take pride and ownership in their abilities and in their duties. The military leader’s training in resiliency can be most effective in this setting because resiliency is needed among soldiers as they are likely to face stressful situations and every man counts. The mission in other words depends upon the whole team working together and every person taking responsibility to achieve his defined duties.
Conclusion
The sharing of best practices in leadership is necessary because there are so many different types of settings and circumstances in which leadership is required and no two situations are going to be the same. For that reason, leaders should be well-versed in best practices. That way they will be able to sort through the various ideas and postures to find the one that will work the best in the given environment. By learning how to apply basic leadership principles and to use basic leadership skills like social and emotional intelligence, the leader can help soldiers to summon their internal strength and become better, or the leader can help corporations to overcome performance issues by developing better communication.

Works Cited
Conger, Jay A. “Leadership: The art of empowering others.” Academy of Management
Executive 3.1 (1989): 17- 25.
Reivich, K. J., Seligman, M. E., & McBride, S. “Master resilience training in the
US Army.” American Psychologist 66.1 (2011): 25.
Schyns, B., Schilling, J. “How Bad are the Effects of Bad Leaders? A Meta-
Analysis of Destructive Leadership and Its Outcomes.” The Leadership Quarterly 24 (2013): 138-158.
Stogdill, R. M. Personal factors associated with leadership: A survey of the literature. 
Journal of Psychology 25 (1948): 35–71.