Book Review on: The Leadership Challenge - By:Kouzes and Posner

The Leadership Challenge

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Abstract

The Leadership Challenge remains a leader in leadership literature Five important leadership issues contained in the will be discussed herein . Among the issues includes challenges faced in leadership positions and what individuals do to overcome . Indeed , those tasked with the responsibility of leading face daily challenges regarding best practices that would motivate the others to undertake their obligations with zeal , and thus result to rapid and continued increase in individual and collective productivity . Kouzes and Posner

calls on leaders to see the challenges in terms of opportunities that should be exploited . Leaders have to therefore embark on developing and implementing experiment that make overcoming challenges possible

The second issue regards inspiring a shared vision within collaborating individual . Leaders have to be in positions of seeing where respective establishment should be placed in the future . This long term vision needs to be easy for the others to comprehend and incorporate its factors in day-to-day activities . To make the development of commonly agreed vision possible , leaders need to incorporate rest of stakeholders , especially employees , in the development of organizational vision . This could be done at the departmental level , where department heads collect views from employees , analyze and forward to vision development teams for harmonization . Organizations that lack vision development capacity could employ the services of well qualified and experienced consultancy firms

Third is the challenge of providing rest of stakeholders with opportunities to act upon the developed vision . This measure leaves employees feeling more appreciated in respective establishments . One way of achieving this goal is improved collaboration between individuals at various levels of organizational hierarchy . An open communication channel throughout the practicing organization is the surest way of achieving this goal . Another important route is strengthening the ability of individual employees ' ability to deliver , mostly achieved through delegation of duty to the lowest and most efficient level in respective organization

The fourth challenge involves the development of achievable objectives that are well understood and shared in the practicing establishments Leaders are faced with the challenge of setting best examples as they undertake regular duties . Indeed , it is from such best examples that employees and other stakeholders get better understanding on ways of applying the objectives in their jobs . In addition to the objectives leadership is encouraged to set time limits of when the set goals are achieved . Achieving the goals within the set time limit serves as morale booster to stakeholders

Fifth , leaders need to develop ways of encouraging stakeholders to contribute to various improvement processes . Among the ways of achieving this goal is recognizing individual stakeholders ' contribution to business processes . Acknowledging employees ' best efforts helps improve morale and therefore increase productivity at both individual and collective level when done at the corporate level . In addition to this leaders are encouraged to embark on celebrating and rewarding accomplishments . This calls for organizational leaders to have systems of weighing individuals ' employees ' success in achieving the set goals Rewarding best achievers would result to...