Key Concepts In Leadership

What are the main characteristics of effective leadership? How can we understand leadership today? This wide-ranging, inter-disciplinary book provides readers with a complete introduction to the essentials of leadership. Included here are accessible and insightful entries on what leadership is, how it is practised and the relevant strengths and pitfalls. The book provides a one stop introductory guide to one of the most central and contested concepts in the social sciences. An invaluable reference tool, this book offers insight into issues such as: • Are leaders born or made? • Authoritarian versus participative leadership • The psychology of leaders and followers • Leadership development • Leadership styles, skills and functions • Leadership in practice This book is an indispensable guide to the central concepts of leadership for professionals and students alike.

This is an indispensable and authoritative guide to the most crucial ideas, concepts and debates surrounding the study and exercise of leadership. Bringing together entries written by a wide range of international experts, this is an essential desktop resource for managers and leaders in all kinds of institutions and organizations, as well as students of business, sociology and politics. Topics covered in this guide include: authority creativity cross-cultural leadership motivation emotional intelligence group dynamics.

This is an indispensable and authoritative guide to the most crucial ideas, concepts and debates surrounding the study and exercise of leadership. Bringing together entries written by a wide range of international experts, this is an essential desktop resource for managers and leaders in all kinds of institutions and organizations, as well as students of business, sociology and politics. Topics covered in this guide include: authority creativity cross-cultural leadership motivation emotional intelligence group dynamics.

This resource frames leadership as based in learning processes and distinct from management processes. It presents practices and tools together with examples and pointers for intervening with contentious problems.

Learn how to lead like Jesus, whether in the home, the church, the community, or the marketplace; moving not only from success to significance but taking a step beyond significance--surrender.

Just as the Wright Brothers combined science and practice to finally realize the dream of flight, Ryan and Robert Quinn combine research and personal experience to demonstrate how to reach a psychological state that elevates us and those around us to greater heights of achievement, integrity, openness, and empathy. It's the psychological equivalent of aerodynamic lift, and it is the fundamental state of leadership. This book draws on recent advances in positive psychology and organizational science to describe four questions that, when asked in any situation, will help us experience the fundamental state of leadership. Engaging personal stories illustrate how the Quinns and others have applied these concepts at work, at home, and in the community. --

Wall Street Journal Bestseller From the acclaimed author of Turn the Ship Around!, former US Navy Captain David Marquet, comes a radical new playbook for empowering your team to make better decisions and take greater ownership. You might imagine that an effective leader is someone who makes quick, intelligent decisions, gives inspiring speeches, and issues clear orders to their team so they can execute a plan to achieve your organization's goals. Unfortunately, David Marquet argues, that's an outdated model of leadership that just doesn't work anymore. As a leader in today's networked, information-dense business climate, you don't have full visibility into your organization or the ground reality of your operating environment. In order to harness the eyes, ears, and minds of your people, you need to foster a climate of collaborative experimentation that encourages people to speak up when they notice problems and work together to identify and test solutions. Too many leaders fall in love with the sound of their own voice, and wind up dictating plans and digging in their heels when problems begin to emerge. Even when you want to be a more collaborative leader, you can undermine your own efforts by defaulting to command-and-control language we've inherited from the industrial era. It's time to ditch the industrial age playbook of leadership. In Leadership is Language, you'll learn how choosing your words can dramatically improve decision-making and execution on your team. Marquet outlines six plays for all leaders, anchored in how you use language: • Control the clock, don't obey the clock: Pre-plan decision points and give your people the tools they need to hit pause on a plan of action if they notice something wrong. • Collaborate, don't coerce: As the leader, you should be the last one to offer your opinion. Rather than locking your team into binary responses ("Is this a good plan?"), allow them to answer on a scale ("How confident are you about this plan?") • Commit, don't comply: Rather than expect your team to comply with specific directions, explain your overall goals, and get their commitment to achieving it one piece at a time. • Complete, not continue: If every day feels like a repetition of the last, you're doing something wrong. Articulate concrete plans with a start and end date to align your team. • Improve, don't prove: Ask your people to improve on plans and processes, rather than prove that they can meet fixed goals or deadlines. You'll face fewer cut corners and better long-term results. • Connect, don't conform: Flatten hierarchies in your organization and connect with your people to encourage them to contribute to decision-making. In his last book, Turn the Ship Around!, Marquet told the incredible story of abandoning command-and-control leadership on his submarine and empowering his crew to turn the worst performing submarine to the best performer in the fleet. Now, with Leadership is Language he gives businesspeople the tools they need to achieve such transformational leadership in their organizations.

Leadership, Capacity Building and School Improvement provides a fresh and original perspective on the most important issues confronting today’s practitioners and academics in the field of educational leadership. New and exciting concepts are introduced such as the research-engaged school of the future. While its theoretical and evidence-based approach raises to a robust level the discussion on the most important leadership challenges of the day, the book is at the same time intensely practical in addressing everyday issues faced by contemporary policy makers and school practitioners. Underpinning the eleven chapters is a conceptual framework founded on the notion of leadership as capacity building, giving the book a coherence that many others on school leadership lack. Among the themes actively discussed are: Conceptualising and Contextualising Leadership – what is leadership? What distinguishes good from mediocre and poor leaders? What are the traits, dispositions and attributes that make for good leadership? How does context influence leadership? How appealing is leadership as a career? What are the components of capacity building leadership? Contemporary Leadership Themes – what is learning-centred leadership and how can it best promote good teaching and student learning? How can leaders distribute leadership across the school, and what are the pitfalls? How can leaders capitalise on the notion of the school as a professional learning community? How can leaders best be nurtured and developed? Policy, Leadership Practice and Impact – what new forms of leadership are presaged by the specialist schools policy as a means of school improvement? How can schools combine a focus on academic achievement with the need to prepare students for the changing twenty-first century workplace? Leadership, Capacity Building and School Improvement provides an up-to-date authoritative, critical and insightful account of school leadership. It combines advocacy and argument with evidence-based practice drawn from the most plausible and robust sources. This book will prove a valuable tool for those taking higher degrees in school leadership and management: school leaders on NPQH courses and school practitioners as a whole interested in interfacing with the latest empirical evidence and ideas, as well as academics teaching and researching in the area of educational leadership. Since the book adopts an international perspective, drawing its examples and evidence from both the Anglo-American and the Asian contexts, it will be found relevant to academics, policy makers and practitioners across these regions. Clive Dimmock is Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Education in Singapore and Professor Emeritus at the University of Leicester, UK.