Introduction
The purpose of writing this assignment is to explore and determine the perspective of “Leadership behaviors” with using the context of the educational environment. The help of book named “The Leadership challenges” written by James Kouzes and Barry Posner.
The exercise of power by a person is known as leadership. The challenge taken by a person to do something that will never be able to occur is called leadership practice. The most important thing in leadership that matters at the top is the behavior shown by the leader (Guzmán, Muschard, Gerolamo, Kohl, & Rozenfeld, 2020). The second thing that matters is the skills that are present in the leader. There is different perspective about the leadership in which some says that most of the people are born with leadership qualities while some have to develop it by themselves (Farrell, 2017).
There are some specific qualities a leader possesses such as Charisma confidence and influencing the people in the right direction. Values depict the centralized behavior of a specific person and how important it to be for them. The most important aspect of values is the influence of leadership to motivate and encourage to act in such a way to achieve a specific goal (Aslam, 2018). The second aspect is a vision that sets the goals and objective of becoming a leader and how a leader is going to achieve its vision defines the values.
The most important aspect of authentic leadership is the trust and honesty that should be sustained. Telling the truth about the objectives of becoming a leader is also an important aspect of authentic leadership. Authentic leadership always acts under the integrity and ensuring that the trust of followers try not be broken or their sentiments try not get hurt. Moreover, the leadership gets some specific goals that depict their movements and actions.
The authentic leaders will always focus on the main aim and goal and will not divert their goal while achieving a specific target. Authentic leaders depict the empathy behavior among them and do not make fun of anyone’s feelings. Moreover, a strong leader has always control over personal emotions as well. Moreover, an emotional intelligence behavior in the leaders will help them build strong and genuine connections with the teams.
Another important aspect of authentic leadership is that they always do focus on personal development than development on their teams (Hao & Yazdanifard, 2015). An authentic leaders keep on learning from their experience and know that there is something that wills be learning and adapt to bring the best output from the things that have been learned. The authentic leaders also provide knowledge to their followers or the people that find these leaders in the way of guidance for them (Black, 2015). Every leader achieves success after a number of failures and thus an authentic leaders stay determined and they show resilience. They are strong enough to cope up with difficult situations.
Following are the proposition and structure of the arguments for this paper,
• Self-knowledge and living personal values are the foundation to authentic leadership
• Nurturing of personal and professional relationships are a pre-requisite to nurturing authentic leadership
• Authentic leadership demands the renewal of spiritual capital in support of the distinctive mission of a catholic school.
Self-knowledge and living personal values are the foundation to authentic leadership
Self-Knowledge
The self-awareness of one’s personality is defined as the self-knowledge that helps in elaborating the leadership their position and where they stand as a leader. The implication of this is much difficult than explaining it. There are a lot of practices that are required by a person to become a self-examiner. The first thing that helps us to examine about our self is the emotional intelligence. As described above the emotional intelligence is the key factor that describes the personality of a leaders and tells their ability to understand and manage their own emotions in a much positive way. The management of emotions in a positive way helps in relieving the stress and communicate effective (Showry & Manasa, 2014).
The qualities of authentic leadership are that it has the ability to communicate effectively and it will only happen if a person possesses emotional intelligence that comes by assessment of self-personality. Moreover, self-knowledge helps in building effective critical skills in a person and mainly the leaders. The critical skills involve the following things such as trustworthiness and wisdom might be an integral part of the personality of an authentic leader. Self-knowledge help in building character traits that are one of the main qualities of the authentic leaders that credits humanity. Self-knowledge helps the leader understand the flaws in their personality and the factors that are a hindrance in way of achieving their goals and objectives as well (Browning, 2018).
All these are the important aspects of an authentic leader, authentic leader self-assessment helps in providing the solutions to a number of problems and flaws in the personality of the leader. Then after assessment of oneself, the authentic leader will try to remove all the flaws of their personality that abide them of achieving their desired objectives (Esentas, Özbey, & Güzel, 2017). Continuous improvement in the personality is the best example of the authentic leaders and thus they help in improving many aspects of leadership that help in the upcoming future to serve different nations. Self-knowledge determines the leader where they stand and help them strive for being more and more better day by day. They also remember why they wanted to become the leaders and how close they are to achieving their goals thus these all are the qualities of an authentic leader and self-knowledge promotes the leaders to be more and more authentic day by day.
Personal Values
Many leaders in the world doesn’t possess any personal norms or values while dictating their followers because there is no proper vision behind their struggle. In an authentic leadership, there are some values that leaders focus on. The top values are the honesty. Living personal values are important because they are also important in making a leader more authentic. A leader is called as authentic when their values are honesty. This means that for that particular leader the top preference is honesty. Honesty can be from the team and to the team. Every leader has certain teams and it is the responsibility of the leader to correctly communicate its whole team about whatever the condition or circumstances are. An honest leader will not communicate well with their teams so honesty is an integral part of an authentic leader.
The other personal values such as kindness are also important in an authentic leader. The leader is kind to the team and followers and this quality depicts that leader is authentic. The other qualities contain the courage, determination, and patience. Authentic leaders never leave the arena this means that they never give up and this is the most important quality of an authentic leader. Moreover, the actions that are possessed by the leaders are the role model for its teams or followers, the authentic leader made an example for others and thus people will have increased confident through this. There are certain priorities that one authentic leader chooses to become closer to its goals. If the priorities of a leader are not towards the objective, then the leader is not said to be authentic.
So these are the points that depict how self-knowledge and living personal values are fundamentals of Authentic leadership as they are the most important part of the development of the authentic leaders.
Nurturing of personal and professional relationships are a pre-requisite to nurturing authentic leadership
The leadership task is not very easy. The leaders are those who develop trust in the followers or teams or employees. There is no need to micromanage them. The authentic leaders are those whose words match with their actions and thus no one will be able to question their position. The leaders opt to nurture personal and professional relationships with their employees or followers so that they nurture more authentic leadership. It is stated that whatever you teach your team they will be the reflection of your deed an authentic leader treats their followers or employees in a very good manner they take care of them and then it produces a feeling of care in the employees or teams and they will be taking care of their employees and teams in future as well.
The authentic leaders do believe in their teams/ employees and maintain a trust relationship with them. It not only increases their confidence but also the power to build a strong relationship professionally and personally as well. The teams are always being in suspense about the other member’s achievements and abilities and thus they value relationship more that is based on the trust. Another important task the authentic leaders do is that they provide proper and regular feedback that itself creates a personal and professional relationship with the team of employees. They are helpful in accessing the team players and how they can perform better and then how they can be the future leaders. These are the practices that are required to be done to improve the personal and professional relationship between the leaders and their followers (Glamuzina, 2015).
The relationship with the teams and employees helps the leadership personally recognize individuals and this helps in accessing them these are the qualities of authentic leadership and they are eager to recognize the future leaders. When a leader generates a relationship with the teams it enhances their confidence and they tend to be more loyal in their work than before. Because in this manner the employees tend to be more vigilant about their performance and they will try to improve more as you have recognition of each individual and relationship with them. Saying thank you to the team member also helps in boosting their confidence and thus they consider it a good gesture. Saying thank you means you are creating a relation with them personally as well as professional and thus they will be more loyal towards their works. The relationship with the employees will be more strong if the leader starts practicing to listen to them, about their quires and the difficulties they face during their work. This will also improve communication skills between them as well. And the productivity of the organization increases.
The leaders expect too much from their teams and they expect to provide better responses to them thus increasing the relationship between the leaders and their teams. The time spent on nurturing the relationship will be very beneficial to the leaders for a long period of time. Thus the authentic leaders are produced with the help of strong relationships with their leaders. Thus, this depicts that a strong personal and professional relationship with employees helps in productive performance in building authentic leaders in the future that will be following the footstep of their leader that was also authentic and this goes on.
Authentic Leadership Demands the Renewal of spiritual capital in support of the distinctive mission of the Catholic school
Certain perspectives are there while talking about spiritual capital and it’s a necessity for authentic leadership. The Catholic schools base all of their learnings on Jesus which means the development of spiritual characteristics in children is solely done by one and only role model who is Jesus. Certain issues in the faiths are causing disruption in these values which is why the leaders produced by the organizations are not authentic. Authentic leadership is always the one that focuses on moral values more than anything else. The task and benefits associated with it don’t matter as the values and ethical considerations are the only things evaluated while deciding about the decision. Major complications in that are the positioning of right believes and practices in the students in Catholic schools to develop authentic leadership among the nation. The leadership that includes the moral values and practices in accord with the Catholic believes and education is authentic leadership and must not include any other faiths or practices irrespective of their moral or ethical grounds.
Components of Authentic Leadership
There are many components of authentic leadership, four of which are very important and are as follow:
• Transparency of actions
• Internal Moral perspective in decisions
• Self-awareness and build-in ethical values
• Balanced processing of all kinds of operations (Towler, 2019)
All of the components are the primary demands to state someone as an authentic leader and most of these are the basics taught in the Catholic Schools. But still, some are not confined to the basic nature of Catholic education and require a lot more than just a basic level of Catholic education. For example, balanced processing is not something that can be incorporated in someone through any kind of education as it comes through practice and continuous work as a leader. A person balances his/her daily routine with difficulty and there are many things that go missing in daily practice which can’t be managed effectively. The same is the concept for the authentic leader as the current level of spiritual capital is not enough. A relatively high level of spiritual capital provided in the children through Catholic education is thus, the main requirement of an authentic leader. Major things in this scenario are the problems associated with the technicality of the tasks that might be difficult for the Catholic education which is based on moral and practical teachings of Jesus rather than practical education (CSNSW, 2019).
Catholic Schools are faith communities that work as a branch or subsidiary of the church to teach children. The curriculum of the school is based on the teachings of Jesus and is based on the high moral and ethical values of an individual and his behavior in an organizational environment. Some of the basic values of the school are not applicable in one’s practical life but it has been observed that the major concerns regarding one’s decisions in life either it is personal or professional are based on the values and morals that they have collected in their early childhood education. The support of spiritual values is therefore the key demand of authentic leadership which is a part of Catholic education. It has also been observed that the quality and moral discipline in children is not as effective as it should have been.
Technical Perspective
Intelligence, purpose, vision, and values are all interconnected and are needed to be more sophisticated in all of its operations (Allen, Kern, Vella-Brodrick, & Waters, 2018). The Catholic school is providing all of these through the teachings of Jesus but there is still a lack of technical and organizational skills. The advancements of the current age are the most important factors in deteriorating the standards of the Catholic schools and they are thus not able to produce the best and appropriate authentic leaders for the society that help society in being a good place for living in. One of the implications to avoid these scenarios is the incorporation of a minor level of practical and technical education in the Catholic school which would improve the personal as well as professional lives of children.
Spiritual capital is the one most complicated term in all of the scenarios. It is the main thing that the Catholic schools try to develop in children at their young age (Park, Dizon, & Malcolm, 2020). However, the value can be added to the major portion of this education by incorporating some external agents. It would support the development of the catholic schools and would definitely improve the leadership qualities of the children that would graduate from school. Thus, a sound environment would develop in which a more appropriate authentic leader with higher spiritual capital would be produced which is important for nation-building. Although different values are different in different scenarios which might limit the need for high spiritual capital of a person.
Conclusion
The paper depicts that there are several leadership qualities that are adopted by several leaders and they are known as authentic leaders. The authentic leadership requires a leader to be analyzing self-knowledge and living values to be an authentic leader. The self-assessment helps to build the basics of an authentic leader. The values tends to be strong and the person should follow these values that are positive and thus it will be categorized as authentic leadership. The authentic leadership will always focus on nurturing the relationship with the teams and employees and that in return nurture the authentic leadership in the future. These are very important in terms of leadership building. The leadership creates a sound relationship by having trust in the team or employees, through inspiring them, get involved in them, listen to their worries and problems and try to solve their problem to know about them and thus it will help in creating a meaningful personal and professional behavior.
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