The Politics of Leadership

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Social networks and digital newspapers are our main source of information, and there are no curators to help us define criteria for use. The view of political leaders taking care of their bodies becomes even more necessary when you consider that the athlete has a career limited by age, but the political leader has a much longer career. There is enormous opportunity for improvement in strengthening the entire training system, as the political experience is a longer one and therefore provides more time for learning and training. Today, we can learn from the many experiences of high-performance athletes who have prolonged their competitive lives. The support of doctors, nutritionists, physical trainers, kinesiologists, and other specialties is important if one wants to avoid voluntarism and wants to take advantage of scientific knowledge and advances that continue to develop.

The spiritual and religious dimension also constitutes an important element to consider. It is important to understand how it shapes our beliefs and values, our thought process, our self-knowledge practices, and our relationship with transcendence. Although it is a more private dimension, omitting it from the analysis implies leaving out a dimension that occupies an important part of people’s lives. Our team has been working on a difficult problem for the past week. As a team leader, I believe the group is reasonably aware of the situation's problems. I tell them I'm confident they'll find a solution and encourage them to keep coming up with new ideas. Which adaptive leadership behaviour am I most likely to use?Each such incident may be treated as a discrete event in which one or more individuals have dominated in decisions about the distribution of contested values. Such domination occurs when someone succeeds in imposing, or having the greatest influence in fixing a definition of the situation or interpretation of the perceived environment among the members of the system. As Wilson and Rhodes comment in the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1997, “a leader is someone who provides a signal around which others rally” (Wilson and Rhodes 1997, 768). It is the repetition of such events that, in varying degrees, results in the informal and/or formal constitution of leadership within the system. The persistence of leadership as both role and process, which sometimes develops into formally constituted roles or “offices,” may be seen as a function of patterns of social reciprocity in which a rising frequency of deference to these individuals in subsequent incidents would play an increasingly persuasive part. Nevertheless, the essential act of leadership by an individual is best approached as a discrete incident, not as a continuous role. Resentment and disenchantment exacerbate the problem, since many see political leaders at best as a privileged group unable to solve problems and at worst as corrupt individuals who take advantage of and abuse power. So, any remuneration is going to be too high, any leisure is going to be seen as superfluous, any weakness as inability. It is a model destined to fail because nothing good can come out of that dynamic. Studying and learning about the experiences of non-political personalities who have gone through the phenomenon of fame can help to manage this situation and help when processing the emotional, psychological, and practical impact that fame brings. From this point, strategies can be learned to remain in touch with reality, such as preserving intimate spaces at times when it seems necessary to open it all up all the time, as well as working with children and family to help them manage the exposure, among many other necessary tools to manage fame’s impact. Of those political scientists who do study and write about leadership most are constrained by disciplinary predilection to focus on leadership as elite behavior within established institutional frameworks such as the American presidency. Few approach leadership, as I will do here, as a political process occurring within human societies at all levels and in almost all (if not all) forms of society. Many recognize that leadership often involves political characteristics, and, certainly, eminent political scientists have focused on leadership as a critical element in the success or failure of governmental office holders, party officials, and the like. Scholars in other disciplines conclude much the same thing in their studies of nongovernmental leaders, but no one has unambiguously argued, as I propose to do here, that the conceptualization of leadership may be redirected and refined with recognition that politics is the central, common element in all leadership. As mentioned in the leadership definition, being a leader is practicing the art of influence. CEOs don’t gain followers because they’re at the top of the organizational food chain. Customers’ and employees’ respect, admiration, and loyalty are earned based on how well a person serves them.

Bass, B. 1996. A New Paradigm of Leadership: An Inquiry into Transformational Leadership. Alexandria VA: U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences. Ideally, this would be part of the task of political institutions—mainly political parties—but for that, clarity is needed from their own leaders as to the need to invest time and resources in their seedbeds in a professional way. ConclusionThe exercise of thinking about a leadership career in a different way from that of the classic ascension on the ladder of power helps us visualize the importance of having a shatterproof strategy, of taking care of oneself more, and of keeping perspective—so as not to go blind into a career without knowing the next steps, or so as not to become dependent on structures that end up squelching our enthusiasm, leaving us wondering why we do what we do. The institutional design of the state and political organizations is old and obsolete, making it difficult to think about this different type of leadership. The very architecture of government buildings reflects a culture not even from the twentieth century, but often from the nineteenth century or earlier. All the symbols of power that continue to be used, especially in the international relations protocol, are in dissonance with a world that has advanced to another place. The current leadership model is pompous, vertical, cold, and distant. Presidents spend many hours and days in ceremonies that are often seen by citizens as archaic and somewhat ridiculous dances. Sometimes knowing what something isn’t sheds more light on what it is. While the leadership definition above is a good starting point for understanding its meaning, it doesn’t explain the common pitfalls many make when learning leadership skills. Leadership Is Not Commanding Authority