For 40 years citizens are told of leadership qualities of their leaders. Do our leaders possess such qualities? Let all pause for a while in the new year of 2006 to ponder over what they want of their leaders.
What is leadership? What are leaders supposed to do or accomplish ? Are they supposed to be people with good presentations, rhetorics, concepts and assumptions ?
Are our leaders expected to be pragmatic and cut corners to serve their own purposes?
They should possess abilities or attributes required to solve diverse problems, set direction and unite people into taking collective actions to strive for maximum good of the maximum number.
In my personal opinion, the following are qualities required of the leaders:-
(1) Passion,
(2) Ability to Motivate followers,
(3) Ability to get people to work with coordination and apply knowledge.
(4) Ability to translate complex goals and ideas into implementation processes to bring about competitiveness, technology start-ups and jobs etc.
(5) Invest monies and perform tasks with Accountability and Transparency
(6) Collective leadership by core team to make major decisions,
(7) Sense of integrity free from theoretical assumptions or controls that stifle mass participation in knowledge application.
A leader should first possess the passion to serve his followers as servant with reliability, or sense of justice, empathy to attain social and economic wellbeing of all.
He should be honourable, possess integrity and not engage in artful arguments or fallacies or rhetorics or empty promises.
He should understand the needs and aspirations of people in the social and cultural sphere and the linkage between social and economic vibrancy in their respective fields to nurture and unleash their skills and talents.
A leaders should provide his people with broad-based practical education to facilitate widespread application of technology and knowledge.
He should empower people to work for results through participative processes to enable all to compete together as a team.
He should practise collective leadership among his senior staff so as to produce teamwork that is creative, entrepreneurial and proactive in every field.
A leader should avoid engaging in petty controls and regulations, or double taxing and recovering of costs to full market values that will cause hardship.
He leader should regard people as true partners so that the whole team could be totally involved in decision making and effective implementation working towards results.
Above all a leader should motivate his followers in maximizing the utilization of resources to realize innovations, entrepreneurship, application of knowledge and value-add competitiveness.
Objective-Steps Process management lays out all the leadership, processes that empowers the management team to sustain efficiency and productivity and entrepreneurship with coordination and application of knowledge at all levels to attain results and objectives.