Leadership Skills and Leadership

Improving One's Leadership Skills

Using examples from sport/wellness, discuss how leadership and management might overlap in carrying out the organization's mission.

Actually, leadership and management typically do overlap when carrying out an organization's mission statement. In fact, they should overlap one another, particularly when the organization considered is part of the sports/wellness vertical industry. Leadership is the overall direction of an organization, and plays a considerable role in denoting mission objectives and tailoring them in a practical way. Management is responsible for implementing the mission statement and a leader's ideas. In sports and wellness, leadership would decide the atmosphere, nature, and personality of a particular gym. Management would supervise employees so that those goals are achieved.

Explain why strong leadership/weak management and weak leadership/strong management scenarios might be detrimental to sport/wellness organizations.

Neither scenario (either strong leadership/weak management or weak leadership/strong management) is ideal for sports and wellness organizations. Both of them are actually detrimental. In the former situation, weak management will not be able to implement the objectives of management. It does not matter how strong one's leadership skills are, if there are not proper management techniques to actuate them. Conversely, weak leadership can leave an organization floundering no matter how strong its management is. Strong leaders need to determine organizational objectives in a way that benefits a gymnasium on the whole.

3. Explain the difference between transactional and transformational leadership and how these concepts correspond to management and leadership in sport/wellness settings.

Transformational leadership is a leadership style based on wholesale organizational change. It relies on personality traits and requires leaders to motivate and get others to believe in their visions for change. Transactional leadership is based on a system of rewards and punishments. It is not predicated on change but on meeting certain goals. These concepts correspond to management and leadership in the wellness industry in that the former involves charismatic leadership and pointed interactions with others -- customers and employees. The other requires more conventional behind the scenes management and leadership that is less visible and more predicated on numbers-crunching.

The leadership survey I completed is found at http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/leader/survlead.html. It is a 50 question survey instrument. I scored 134. The maximum is 250 points, the minimum is 50. Each question detailed a different facet of leadership. Respondents had to choose an answer between 1 and 5; 1 meant one strongly disagreed with the statement; 5 meant one strongly agreed with the statement. There were three categories for scores. Scores of 175 and above mean "you are well on your way to becoming a leader." 125to 134 means "you are getting close." 124 and under means "24 and below - Don't Give up! Many before you have continued with their studies to become some of the finest leaders around." My score reflects the fact that I am in the lower half of the second of three triads for becoming a leader.

I believe that this score is accurate of my leadership potential at this time. I am still in the learning stage for becoming a leader. Many people would characterize me as shy and laconic. From the way many of the questions were phrased, it seems as though these qualities are not necessarily indicative of a leader. It appears that leaders are more engaging and talkative than I am. Still, I believe that with enough education and the proper experience, even I can become a leader. For what it is worth, there were many questions in this survey instrument that did not outright apply to me. Many of them were slated towards professionals who were already working, quite possibly in a full-time capacity. I have very limited experience working a full-time job. Moreover, what little there is was certainly not in the capacity in which I was responsible for interviewing people or even giving them feedback on their own jobs. Thus, this type of experience is what I need to gain to become an accomplished leader. I think that doing so is certainly a possibility.