Assessing the Quality of Leadership

To understand if leadership is effective within your organization or not one must know the meaning of leadership. According to the University of Notre Dame (2010) leadership is a process by which a person influences others to accomplish an objective and directs the organization in a way that makes it more cohesive and coherent (p.1). Within my organization working as a CASA (Court Appointed Specialist Advocate) for the San Jose Juvenile Courts the leadership is very effective because the leaders are trustworthy, and use effective communication when they our revealing what things they want us as employees to do. According to Lamb & McKee (2004) trust and confidence in top leadership were the single most reliable predictor of employee satisfaction and an organization running effectively. Another factor was a leader having effective communication. Effective communication by leadership has three critical areas that our key for winning organizational trust and confidence:

1. Helping employees understand the company’s business strategy.

2. Helping employees understand how they contribute to achieving key business objectives.

3. Sharing information with employees on both how the company is doing and hot an employee’s own division is doing relative strategic business objectives (p. 5).

So a leader must be trustworthy and be able to communicate vision of where the organization is going so that they can lead others to accomplishing the goal of the organization.

Another thing that a leader must do in order to help their organizations be effective they must possess these eleven principles of leadership:

1. Know yourself and seek self-improvement. Here the leader must know themselves. They also need to be seeking self-improvement techniques which can continue to strengthen their attributes. This can be done by self-study, formal classes, reflection, and interacting with others.

2. Be technically proficient. As a leader one must know their job and have a...