The Art of Leadership

Since leadership is defined as “the process in which an individual influences the group of people to achieve a common goal”, an effective and inspiring leader must accordingly uphold a good sense of positivity and consequently elicit others to work zealously in order to achieve that goal. To meet this end, he or she should acquire certain unique traits identified by some researchers as intelligence, extraversion, adjustment, openness to experience and importantly an enamoring charisma that can induce others to shadow and model them.

It is axiomatically held that effective leaders, despite the hardships or circumstances in which they operate, share some fundamental traits with each other, such as autonomy, eloquence, charisma, social and emotional intelligence, ability to motivate, and a penetrating spirit toward a good change.

It goes without saying that one of the effective leaders history has ever known is Barak Obama. If I were to choose the best political leader history in general and USA in particular have ever seen, I would certainly find no weight against Obama’s leadership. He is presumably the right paradigm of an influencing, effective and inspiring leader in the eyes of a vast majority of Americans if not all.

Back to his early age, we find that the man stems from an African immigrant father who diligently worked to instill moral values in his son and prospective world leader. His childhood is still living with him till now. This grabs my attention to Williams Wordsworth saying which goes as “a child is the father of a man”. If anything to be inferred from this quote, it will certainly be that our traits, be they positive or negative, are installed and established from the get-go of our life and therefore early life experiences, such as  nutrition and childhood hobbies and practices inextricably shape the leadership style as the experience of the president Obama demonstrates. His Initial endowment has played a large and deterministic part in the triumph he is experiencing in his leadership of the American people.

 Beside the Initial endowment, leadership is also developed. Some would argue that leadership is genetic, innate, and a leader is born with leadership quality and there is no room for others to excel at it. Others would argue otherwise and say that leadership is developed through experience, education, and diligence to acquire it. However, the plausible definition, as Obama’s experience demonstrates, is that leadership is both innate and acquired. It is innate through physical and psychological traits, and acquired through experience and good education.

To put all in a nutshell, it is worth-saying that good leaders are those who, no matter how hard the circumstances are, have a vision and work diligently to bring this vision down to earth. They are those who manage to align people to line up with a change by exerting influence among them and be their model to follow. They are those who juxtapose their initial endowment with what they acquired throughout life as Obama’s experience demonstrated.