Leadership and Teams (Research Paper Sample)

Leadership and TeamsName
Institution
Date
Leadership and Teams
Introduction
Leadership styles that are essential in improving and transforming educational sectors in various ways as the study discuss. The study discusses in details the personality approaches needed to leaders that includes self-assurance, credibility and passion towards working. These characteristics are advantageous to leaders through keeping away from obstacles that they face during their course of duties so as they can accomplish greatness. Some of the leadership styles in the educational sector include democratic, autocratic, directional and transformational. This study provides a proposal on to what procedures and policies can be taken in order to develop better quality in leadership.
Leadership Styles and Traits
A study into leadership approaches allows educational stakeholders to be in a position of choosing the right leaders that can lead them to different aspects influencing education. Recent studies on leadership by Fairholm (2009) have shown that institutional success or development is highly dependent on how it is governed and policies put in place. Analysts too have agreed that leaders take part in decisive duties in directing and coordinating of activities in an organization or teams. Leader's responsibilities include managing people in order to achieve objectives. According to Fairholm, quality leadership seeks to manage their followers without applying force, and to take synchronized routes so that set goals are attainable.
Self-confidence
On the other hand, leaders are subject to rigorous tasks that can result to anxiety amongst their followers. The aptitude of being peaceful especially when things get out of control is a key trait that distinguishes leaders. Team leadership hence needs to handle tense situations bravely and calmly. Self-confidence is an important trait that enables leaders to portray their capabilities on different responsibilities while followers are inspired by an assurance that difficult times can easily be handled and managed. According to Puryear, self-confidence leaders can influence and instill confidence in people through their confidence and knowledge about difficult situations ahead of them.Persuasive:
Persuasion through leadership is the ability to persuade people through communicating efficiently and in desired direction. They must be able to convince and influence people to follow them and their commands without coercion. This is the ability to influence people through the use of communication skills in a clear, attractive and confident manner.Integrity and honesty:
Integrity is a trait of being honest, telling the truth and being sincere which builds trust between followers and their leaders. A good leader must build trust and credibility by keeping their promise and words.Sense of humor:
Team Leadership requires the leader to make humorous statements that are meant to diffuse tensed environments to a friendlier environment. For example, school management may be experiencing harsh environment especially when students are on riots depending on new policies. Therefore, leadership must apply humorous environments that attract dialog and calm and eventually lightening the moods of rioters.Passion of work
Many educational leaders attribute their association and success with students through having passion about the work. By being passionate at work, leaders have a deep commitment and spending extra hours for job sacrifices in order to achieve desired results (Pearson, 2012).Transformational Style: According to Pearson, 2012, Leadership allows leaders to commit and create strong leadership between them and their followers. The leader created a long lasting mutual trust with the team members.Democratic style: This is a governing approach that allows for direct or indirect leadership involvement of followers. This style of administration provides leaders with opportunities to gather opinions from followers in order to move forward in making required decisions.Autocratic style: The style allows leaders to have the authority of making key decisions, communicating them to followers, and expecting the followers to be subjective to policies without resistance. Follower's outlooks on lay down policies are usually assumed by those on tot to be of less importance and therefore, leaders’ choices through decisions are not subjected to further debates.
Directional style: it is a leadership allows leaders to achieve more than politics where team has a clear goal and vision of the future. A leader is required to manage the team so that they can achieve desired goals. The style allows leaders to make changes in the goals of the team that gives them an opportunity to achieve more than predetermined goals. As a result, democracy and direct contact with leaders is exercised where more experience is gained by leaders by taking balanced control amongst team members through trusted educational structure (Baporikar, 2009).
Influence of Leadership in Education
The capability of a leader to wield influence on other people and influence the effectiveness of a team can be considered an important element in education that can further be explained in terms of policies, management strategies and programs practices. They examine effective measures important to the institutions and how they can impact on team members (Claes, McMahon & Preston, 2008). Staffs are the only assets in educations that generate value.Team’s Effectiveness measures
The following are the measures for determining employee performance that include-
* Traits
* Behavior
* Outcomes
School’s management can concentrate on observing the personal traits such as loyalty but it is not advisable to depend on the character trait of an individual. People tend to be good where they are not. Team effectiveness is measured by observing the behavior of individual or the team. Behavior observation focuses on observing what employees do. The last measure used to measure the employee performance is the outcomes of the activities carried out. The outcomes are the accomplishment achieved by the employee during a specific period (Berard, 2013).
Institutional Measures on Leadership
Leadership and togetherness in team members influences organizational performances such as labor productivity, the cost ratios, productivity of revenue and improvement in the curriculums. Hence, measures implemented by management are important factors that determine the performance in a learning institution. The following four approaches can be used to measure institutional performance through its leadership in terms of goal attainment and include Productivity, Education quality, Perceptual goal attainment (Townsend, 2007).
How leadership style could affect team member associations and their unity:
1 Carrying out an ample and detailed research with interested parties both inside and outside the organization by understanding educational ideals.
2 Increasing the levels of both internal and ext...