Introduction

Leadership is a skill of power and depth, often present in our favorite literary heroes, and found throughout all of humanities’ stories and histories. What makes an effective leader or a great leader, will vary depending on the culture, time, and place; but the reality is that for teams to work cohesively to accomplish their tasks they need an effective leader. An effective leader provides the team with organization, timelines, encouragement, constructive criticism, and communication skills that move the team forward towards its intended goals. 

Statement of Competency

I have had many courses and work experiences that prepared me to understand this competency. One piece of evidence is my work experience which includes: my time as Dr. Loertscher’s student assistant, my time as Chair of the ALASC at SJSU, and working as management in the food industry for the last ten years. Course work that specifically prepared me to understand leadership and communication were INFO 204’s infographic project on what makes a “good” leader, and INFO 282’s Project Management where I explored the essential nature of soft skills in a project leader. I know I will be able to transfer these skills to the real world as I have been utilizing them in real world work environments for the last two decades of my life. 

Theory

Leadership

As someone who has worked in a myriad of different fields I have seen a variety of different leaders, some were also managers who were in official positions of leadership, other times they were coworkers or someone on the sidelines who held the understanding and skills necessary for the team to function at its best. That is what good leaders do, they improve the overall functioning of their team, and the final product produced by their organization is better due to their influence. Leaders often have refined technical and organizational expertise that they combine with different leadership modalities, my favorite of which is transformational leadership. Bradberry et al. (2022) states “transformational leaders do more than simply lead - they stimulate others to transcend their own needs and interests for a common goal.”  Transformational leadership is closely tied to emotional intelligence, with conscientious empathetic approaches to teamwork, and a desire to motivate teams to work well together for final success (Doan et al., 2020). What leadership looks like will vary based on the needs and situation, from technical tasks, to advocating to outside stakeholders or keeping everyone accountable to scheduling or budgets. When teams feel supported and free to voice their concerns, leaders build trust through work challenges and can harness these trusted relationships for quality outputs and long term organizational sustainability (Lewis & Boucher, 2012). Monitoring progress, coping with change while maintaining the organization's mission and vision requires leadership and many soft skills for decision making with empathy and strategy to assess risk factors and overall scope with industry standards (Wong, 2019). The best leaders have this big picture mentality combined with individual relationship building empathy and compassion.

Communication 

As former presidential speechwriter James Humes said, “The art of communication is the language of leadership.” To be a good leader you must know how to communicate, how to set up pathways of communication and structures with clear expectations, checkpoints, and resources to support a strong productive team and create a healthy work culture (Watt, 2014). The best leaders can listen, interpret, implement and manage relationships, with awareness of conflicts and a willingness to resolve disagreements (Rajhans, 2018). The better a leader is at building relationships, the better the team’s motivation and final product. These relationships will be as varied as the people of this earth; but with a desire for strong team work and interpersonal communication skills leaders can build trust over time (Damayanti et al., 2019). Communication is what leads to strong relationships and healthy conflict resolution. Once there is trust, new opportunities grow along with a teams’ motivation, transparency and engagement (Lewis & Boucher, 2012). Without communication teams can end up with duplications, missed milestones, misallocated resources, scope creep and project failure while the organization suffers the lack of employment retention (Watt, 2014). As Rania Al-Abdullah said, “We are stronger when we listen, and smarter when we share.” Good leaders know how to communicate, and also how to listen. They then take this process of communication to develop deeper communal understanding and produce a stronger, more unified team with a cohesive final work product. 

Conclusion 

A good leader is a strong empathetic communicator who employs organizational and technical expertise with flexibility and different adaptable leadership modalities depending on what is required and needed. They will encourage a healthy work culture with a shame free space to communicate between team members, while managing stakeholders, timelines, budgets and the logistics necessary for their organization to thrive. 

Return to MLIS Index

Next Comp N