Modern corporate management is starting to stress the softer approach to leadership, rejecting the traditional authoritarian management techniques that depended on fear for empathetic motivators who practice the Golden Rule. The key to each manager's effectiveness lies in their "ability to inspire trust, loyalty, commitment, and collegiality among team members" (Eade 1996).
Comparing traditional autocratic managers to abused children who grow up to be abusers, Eade writes that this style of dealing with subordinates causes employee turnover, low morale, which in turn makes productivity suffer.
The antidote to this negative, selfish, ungrateful, blaming approach is to pay more than lip service to making collective decisions arrived at by consensus, rather than top-down directives which are obeyed grudgingly out of fear of the consequences for non-compliance. Eade goes on to list a series of traits that good leaders must both embody in themselves and encourage in others: plan; teach; delegate rather than dump; encourage independent thinking; build a team; listen; set an example; accept responsibility; and share the spotlight. The most important of all these concepts is being a teacher, one whom a shortcoming or failure is an opportunity to learn, rather than a shameful failure for which to be humiliated. The subtext of all this respectful coaching is that the leader must embody these traits in his or her actual behavior, essentially earning respect by integrity.
Under the title of "Effective Leadership" self-styled "Business e-Coach" Vadim Kotelnikov quotes former President and Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower at the top of his website:
"Leadership is the art of getting someone to do something you want done because he wants to do it" (2005).
A neat trick, but how do you do it? "By helping people to achieve a better life," says Kotelnikov rather unctuously. But he goes to mention the need to have a vision, think of ...