Skilful Persuasion: The Art of Good Leadership

Skilful Persuasion: The Art of Good Leadership

An American Team Leader, working for a firm that employs a multi-lingual staff speaking 25 languages, manages a team of eight workers (customer-service representatives). This group speaks four languages: English, French, Russian, and Spanish. The manager is tasked with implementing a database to increase the ease of accessing destinations for clients planning vacations. In the end, he and his team accomplished this making all the customer-service representatives' lives easier in booking vacations for their customers. How did he do this, given the fact that he dealt with differences in personalities and cultures?

The art of good leadership requires skilful persuasion. The leader needs skills in managing his staff and establishing a good balance in completing company objectives. If the leader can successfully manage personalities or traits, behaviours, and cultural differences, he creates the possibility of success and demonstrates sound leadership. People cannot be forced into a decision, condition or situation; they must be guided and persuaded by their superior to accept the decision, condition, or situation.

Gamage and Pang understand the importance and art of leadership, because "...[it] is a significant managerial factor in any organization. There is no topic which has received more attention in the management literature or in the speeches of organizational leaders than the concept of leadership and its relationship to productivity and satisfaction or organizational commitment (International Journal of Academic Research, pg. 1,293)."

Pamela Shockley-Zalabak, an author on organizational communication, says "the approaches [to leading people] are thought to be based on the leader's assumptions about what motivates people to accomplish goals (Fundamentals of Organizational Communication, pg. 216.)" Using this style of approach to managing personalities or traits, is wise for the American team leader, in relations to, completing the database with the assistance of his multi-cultural staff. Through careful observation of the personalities of each staff member, the team leader can learn what motivates his employees. The fact-finding mission can produce fruitful results: accomplishing the task and edifying and enriching staff. Also, Gary Yukl, author of Leadership in Organizations, discusses how this team leader can accomplish the management of individual traits as a change agent: a key person committed to change with great communicative abilities demonstrating sound abilities in implementing change within his organization (Leadership in Organizations, pg. 317).

Behavior is a component of a person's personality; if the team leader is able to influence his staff's behaviors, it can lead to success in completing the database for his firm. Ijaz Tatlah, et al., argues "...that leadership behaviours are developed to humanize and renormalize the workplace (International Journal of Academic Research, pg. 1,293)." In other words, leaders or managers are trained to get the most out of their employees. It was mentioned earlier that observation is needed, also, to create and increase productivity. It can be assumed that influencing behaviour can augment teamwork, thus creating a good opportunity to finish the task at hand: a database. Shockley-Zalabak