What Constitutes Good Leadership?
It is noted (Mukunda, 2012) that some of the best leaders without much experience such as Steve jobs and Abraham Lincoln make a conspicuous figure with their distinctive decision-making, while competitors who own extensive experience may act just like the same as each other. Thus leads to an idea that the best leaders do not need experience. The essay will analyse the topic and figure out the relations between leadership and experience, exploring a better way of selecting great leaders. First of all, it will illustrate the important role of experience in improving leadership. Second, it is going to point out the fact that there is no absolute evidence to prove the necessity of little experience for great leaders, since quite a few experienced leaders achieve their outstanding success as well. Next, the reason why those relatively less-experienced leaders perform differently and better than some insiders will be exposed. Then it will indicate some invisible but valuable experience which those so called outsiders actually own, and further discusses which kind of experience a great leader should have. Finally, the essay is to make suggestions about how to promote and make a choice between those two kinds of leaders appropriately. The Center for Creative Leadership (2012, cited by Brotherton, 2013) reported that 52% of C-Level executives take the view that experience creates a leader. Whether people believe that leaders are born or made, they never ignore the significant influence of experience to a great leader. On one hand, the common traits owned by great leaders such as sensing the situation and stress the difference are typically gained by process of learning from experience (Goffee and Jones, 2004). Faced with all sorts of challengeable situation, using critical thinking to find out the cause and effect of the problems and possible solutions undoubtedly will improve individual’s leadership skills. Working and
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