Leadership Philosophy

A common assignment on Leadership Philosophy is as you see below. Paper Masters will custom write your research paper on any type of leadership philosophy you need explicated.

You have been selected as the new Director of Emergency Management for XX organization (public or private). Prior to assuming your new duties you want to prepare a document to introduce yourself to your employees. This document is your leadership philosophy. This philosophy introduces you as the new leader and allows the organization staff to understand your inner thoughts, beliefs and expectations for organizational performance.

This is not a document where you will address particular issues. It is the document that establishes how you will approach and address all issues. While there is no specific format for a leadership philosophy, the following provides a general structure:

1. Personal values such as honesty, commitment, respect for others.
2. Description of how you will carry out your responsibilities.
3. What your priorities are.
4. What you expect of your people and how you will evaluate them.
5. What your people can expect of you.

Introduction:

1. Who are you?
2. Why are you here? (Why do want to be here?)
3. What do you value?

Vision:

1. What is your (our organizational) purpose?
2. Where are we going? (Where are you going to take us?)
3. What is the methodology you (we) will employ to reach our destination?
4. How will you (we) know when we get there?

People:

1. How are you going to care for me?
2. How are you going to help me grow?
3. How are you going to identify my leaders?
4. Will you embrace our differences?
5. Will I be valued for who I am and I bring to the organization?

Change:

1. How are you going to effect change?
2. How are you going to manage change?

Leadership is a complex topic and has been much discussed by philosophers, psychologists, and theoreticians dealing with business and military leadership. There is not now, and never has been, any consensus on what the term "leadership" really means. There are a host of contemporary books dealing with aspects of business leadership, but, since there is no agreed on definition of the key term, not all of these books are talking about the same thing. McGee-Cooper and Duane Trammell, for example, employ a term, "servant-leader," and define it in a way that gives it attributes that are somewhat different from the traditional set of attributes associated with leadership.

This difficulty of definition has always been a fact of life with respect to discussions of leadership. For Plato, leadership in an ideal society was to be executed by "guardians," a class of people, whose characteristic was that they were, with respect to affairs of state, "Well advised, and truly wise." Aristotle's concept of leadership was similarly elitist with leadership in particular, and citizenship in general, to be determined on the basis of occupation.

Like Plato and Aristotle we have a tendency to see leadership as requiring wisdom, but, unlike them, we tend to see leadership as more of an individual than a class phenomenon. Another aspect of the difference between modern and ancient views of leadership was created by Christian theories respecting leadership. St. Paul was concerned with obedience to presbyters and bishops and the church was always rigidly hierarchical. However, even in Catholicism-and to a greater extent in Protestantism--there was an egalitarian element. Thomas Aquinas, the most important of the late medieval theologians, believed, as Bourke notes, that "all men have a sufficient knowledge of what is morally right to be able to regulate their own actions." In Aquinas the church hierarchy was still vested with enormous power, but Martin Luther was suspicious of that power and, in his theology, it was trimmed away. The denial of papal infallibility was but one sign of this; Luther's extreme suspicion of priest administered sacraments was another. In a religious situation in which each man or woman could, essentially, function as his own priest, the power of leadership, the need for it, was diminished.