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What Makes A Leader? Essay

Decent Essays

Daniel Goleman’s article “What Makes a Leader?” was very insightful into what makes a person a leader. It proved to provide relationship between emotional intelligence and the effective performance of leaders in organizations. In 2010, I was taking my first Undergrad Degree class at Liberty University in Virginia. The class was a Professional Business writing class that was a requirement for all degree seekers. In the first lecture, the professor noticed about half the class was made up of military professionals. He stated “The highest grade you will receive in this class will be a B if you are a military person”. He went on to explain the phenomenon of that “military speak” is very passive in nature. I am not sure of the other students but it was a real eye opener for me to learn to break the habits I had learned in the military and was rewarded with a “B” grade. In my experience, success was based on how one conformed to the system. A person who conformed to the values and goals of their superiors would be rewarded with higher performance evaluations than their peers. In the military, where promotions are linked to these evaluations, along with tenure (or tie in rank), many people abandon their own needs and drives to maintain promotability. As for Goleman’s second component, Self-Regulation (in the Robbins text it is also referred to as self-management), I see eye to eye with his analysis. In many organizations, leadership does not demonstrate apposite self-regulation. We

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