Lesson 1 Summary

Congratulations! You have completed the introductory lesson for this course on leading organizations. As you can see, leadership is multifaceted, and many approaches will be defined, investigated, proposed, and tested. But rest assured—with your dedicated study of the lessons in this course, you will be in a position to formulate your own personal leadership styles, implementing them at the right time in the right situations.

In summary, in this lesson, you learned the following things:

• Management and leadership, while dramatically different skill sets, both are required to be effective in leading today’s complex engineering businesses.
• Most definitions of leadership appear to reflect the assumption that leaders exert intentional influence over followers.
• Whether leadership is innate or acquired has been debated for centuries (and continues to be). Sufficient evidence is present to show that hard work and careful study can nurture leadership skills (Forsyth, 2009).
• You can control your future success by developing the traits and skills to be an effective leader.
• Psychometric tools are available to increase self-awareness of your inner state and its potential impact on others.
• Psychometric analyses may not agree in total with your own expectations. Such differences are normal, reflecting some of the uniqueness of each individual.

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References

Avolio, B. J., & Gardner, W. L. (2005). Authentic leadership development: Getting to the root of positive forms of leadership. Leadership Quarterly, 16(3), 315–338.

Dinh, J.E., Lord, R. G., Gardner, W.L., Meuser, J.D., Liden, R.C., & Hu, J. (2014) Leadership theory and research in the new millennium: Current theoretical trends and changing perspectives, Leadership Quarterly, 25(1), pg. 36–62.

Drucker, P. (2001). The Essential Drucker. New York, NY: HarperColins.

Forsyth, D. R. (2009). Group dynamics. New York: Wadsworth.

Lipman, V. (2013, January, 18). Why are so many employees disengaged? Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/01/18/why-are-so-many-employees-disengaged/#3409d17a1e22

Taylor, S. (2008). Redefining leaders' self-awareness by integrating the second component of self-awareness. Harvard Business Review, 86(4), 57–68.