Lead the Way God Made You: Discovering Your Leadership Style in Children’s Ministry
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With the crisis of leadership in the western democracies, there has been a growth of interest in how leaders outside of the west emerge and consolidate their positions. This book analyses the communication strategies of six charismatic non-western leaders: Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro, Ayatollah Khomeini, Mohammed Mahathir and Lee Kuan Yew. The book addresses the following questions in order to arrive at a better understanding of communication and leadership:
- How do leaders communicate?
- Do leaders communicate more by words, or actions?
- Do leaders have unique communication strategies?
- Are leaders moral beings, or impostors?
The book describes how each of these leaders designed a unique style that integrated verbal and non-verbal modes of communication. It argues that leadership style is performed through the cumulative interaction of non-verbal modes – dress, body language, physical possessions, symbols and symbolic actions – with verbal strategies for communicating visions, values and legitimacy.
In order to understand how each of these leaders undertakes a dramatic ‘performance’ of leadership, Jonathan Charteris-Black uses Erving Goffman’s notion of ‘Front’. Noting the inherent similarities between the mutual dependency of actors with audiences and leaders with followers, the book suggests that leaders – like actors – use metaphors and symbols to satisfy followers’ psychological and symbolic needs and that leadership is communicated through impression management, metaphor and media choices.
A fascinating and well executed study, this book will interest students and academics working on leadership, applied linguistics, communication studies and politics.
The Communication of Leadership: The Design of Leadership Style (Routledge Studies in Linguistics)
As Americans choose and install a new president for a new century they could do no better than to read this work by one of our keenest observers of the modern presidency. Drawing on a quarter-century’s immersion in the presidential record and scores of interviews, Fred I. Greenstein provides a fascinating and instructive account of the qualities that have served well and poorly in the Oval Office from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first hundred days to the end of the Clinton administration.
Greenstein offers a series of bottom-line judgments on each of his eleven subjects and a bold new explanation of why presidents succeed or fail. Previous analysts have placed their bets on the president’s political prowess or personal character. Yet by the first standard, LBJ should have been our greatest president, and by the second the nod would go to Jimmy Carter. Greenstein surveys each president’s record in public communication, political skill, vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. He concludes that the last is by far the most important.
According to Greenstein, FDR provides endless positive lessons but is a source of warnings. Truman let his bizarre readings of history lead him astray. Eisenhower was wise but failed to communicate a vision. Kennedy had no vision. Reagan was Carter in reverse. It is Ford who is most unappreciated and genuinely interesting. Ford balanced many conflicting demands, kept his poise, and left the office much stronger than he found it.
Presidents can avoid failure if they are willing to accept the warnings of failures past and act accordingly. But it is not only presidents who should read this book with care. Some flaws cannot be overcome no matter how otherwise talented the man. Only three of Greenstein’s eleven modern presidents were “fundamentally free of distracting emotional perturbations.” When we choose our presidents, we will do well to listen to Greenstein and “Beware the presidential contender who lacks emotional intelligence. In its absence all else may turn to ashes.”
The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from Roosevelt to Clinton
From George Washington’s decision to buy time for the new nation by signing the less-than-ideal Jay Treaty with Great Britain in 1795 to George W. Bush’s order of a military intervention in Iraq in 2003, the matter of who is president of the United States is of the utmost importance. In this book, Fred Greenstein examines the leadership styles of the earliest presidents, men who served at a time when it was by no means certain that the American experiment in free government would succeed.
In his groundbreaking book The Presidential Difference, Greenstein evaluated the personal strengths and weaknesses of the modern presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Here, he takes us back to the very founding of the republic to apply the same yardsticks to the first seven presidents from Washington to Andrew Jackson, giving his no-nonsense assessment of the qualities that did and did not serve them well in office. For each president, Greenstein provides a concise history of his life and presidency, and evaluates him in the areas of public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. Washington, for example, used his organizational prowess–honed as a military commander and plantation owner–to lead an orderly administration. In contrast, John Adams was erudite but emotionally volatile, and his presidency was an organizational disaster.
Inventing the Job of President explains how these early presidents and their successors shaped the American presidency we know today and helped the new republic prosper despite profound challenges at home and abroad.
Inventing the Job of President: Leadership Style from George Washington to Andrew Jackson
How do world leaders make decisions in important foreign policy encounters? James Goldgeier argues that modern leaders come to power trained not as diplomats but as politicians, and their experiences as the most successful politicians at home provide the “schooling” for how to deal with friends and foes in the international arena. In Leadership Style and Soviet Foreign Policy, Goldgeier explores this important and understudied connection between key domestic political experiences and foreign policy decisions in case studies of four Soviet leaders of the Cold War era–Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mikhail Gorbachev.
Drawing connections between the domestic political experiences of these leaders and their behavior toward the United States during key foreign policy events, Goldgeier offers fresh interpretations of the Berlin blockade crisis of 1948, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the Middle East war of 1973, and German reunification in 1989-90. He argues that the defining moment in the development of a Soviet leader’s style came during the period when that leader acted to consolidate power and neutralize adversaries in order to succeed a dead or deposed leader. Success in this period confirmed the effectiveness of the leader’s first truly independent political action and shaped his distinctive political style–a style that reappeared in international bargaining. While the past may be arational guide in helping leaders reach foreign policy decisions, Goldgeier concludes, it may also be a poor one: lessons from home can backfire in foreign policy, as they did at several key moments for these four important world leaders.
“James Goldgeier offers an imaginative and original argument: leaders’ bargaining style, developed in domestic politics, affects the way they bargain and manage international crises. This analysis is significantly different from other `domestic politics’ arguments that focus on coalition-building, log-rolling, or cooptation of representatives of powerful domestic groups.”–Janice Gross Stein, University of Toronto
Leadership Style and Soviet Foreign Policy: Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev (Perspectives on Security)
Leaders of all kinds, in all fields, need to be methodical and logical, but also strategic, innovative, and intuitive. Yet the two different styles require different modes of thinking, or what author Mary Lou Décosterd describes as shifts to right brain, or left brain, thinking. Those who operate in what she explains as the left brain mode develop strong logical, rational, and analytical abilities, but they may downplay the value of right brain thinking, which spurs intuition, subjectivity, and creativity. And those who operate primarily in the latter mode lose the value of the former. A leader who is habitually a right-brainer sees only the big picture, rather than its parts, is creative but not usually analytical, is an emotional far more than logical. So who is more effective? Veteran consultant Décosterd shows how those with maximum success are leaders who understand both styles and have the ability to switch between the two at certain key moments to broaden their overall effectiveness.
In the language of leadership, this pragmatic guide provides an all-encompassing view of how to maximize brain power and get to next-level leadership impact. Through case examples, simple assessment and unique learning tools, this book takes the reader through a new process for examining his or her current leadership style and skill sets, and framing a plan for greater success. Décosterd explains how, through use of popular leader exemplars, leadership examples and concise steps and summaries, every person can, at virtually any stage of personal and professional accomplishment, become a more consummate leader.
Right Brain/Left Brain Leadership: Shifting Style for Maximum Impact (Contemporary Psychology)
Effective Leadership Management is about theory and practice of integrating styles, skills and character of today’s chief executive officers. It is about what a leader or a manager does to bring about staff efficiency and effectiveness. A leader or a manager is effective when he or she brings about the desired results for the organization by using different approaches to the development of personal and interpersonal effectiveness of the staff by daily decision making, staffing, planning, forecasting, nurturing, coaching, directing, organizing, marketing, encouraging and controlling quality. Effective Leadership Management emphasizes leadership as the intersection of character, knowledge, skill and desire. Management supervises tasks but leadership deals with people who supervise tasks. In other words, management is doing things right, while leadership is doing the right things. Effective Leadership Management styles are achievable by using mixtures of different styles as situation arises. Each leader has to choose style(s) that suits his or her personality and that best represents the values of the organization. In all, a leader has to be transparent with all daily dealings, communicates effectively, be honest with staff members, showing an unbending integrity, at the same time be knowledgeable or skillful about the tasks at hand, and be easy to follow. When an employee is encouraged, motivated and positively appraised, his or her performance will be enhanced. This book strongly emphasizes theory Z by Dr. Ouchi in which a management or leadership style focuses on a strong company philosophy, a distinctive corporate culture, long-range staff development, and consensus decision making. When decisions and policies that relate to customers are being made by an organization, it is important to understand that others such as customers, community, staff, suppliers and stake holders opinions should be considered. This is called a holistic view approach to
Effective Leadership Management: An Integration of Styles, Skills & Character for Today’s CEOs