Important Features of Leadership
Contents
Important Features of Leadership¶
Leaders empower others to identify solutions and make their own decisions to address the challenges they face.
Monica Cox, an awardee of Purdue University’s Faculty Award of Excellent for Leadership, once called leadership as “the highest way of activism” (reference).
Her statement points to the leadership skill of involving the members of a group (that a leader aims to impact) in decision-making processes and not taking individual decisions for them (reference).
With this basic understanding of leadership, we discuss some essential leadership features, in contrast to management, in this subchapter.
Assigned Leadership¶
Like a project manager in a team-based research project or a tech company CEO, there are formally-assigned leadership positions.
A company CEO may undoubtedly have the power to make decisions to ensure that people in their team advance and complete their assigned projects.
However, such a top-down approach to decision making is the characteristic of being a manager. It does not necessarily make them a leader.
A good leader inspires their team members to make progress in their own right and be leaders themselves, which means leaders are not always managers. Ideally, leaders should not be managers.
Emergent leadership¶
Leadership opportunities in the context of data science often appear in spaces where human interactions happen.
As soon as there is more than one person involved, for example, in a group project, community discussions, or collaborative events like hackathons, there is always fertile ground for leadership roles to emerge.
Such emergent leadership opportunities allow individuals to explore, learn, and exhibit leadership skills and ultimately become leaders themselves.
Leadership is Granted by Others¶
Outstanding leadership is often sought and studied because teams, organizations, and people work at their highest potential, building extraordinary results when following good leaders.
Yet, one main characteristic of leadership is that it is granted by others who decide to follow someone as a leader in a specific setting.
Leaders are Made, not Born¶
As with any other human aspect, leadership can be built and learned.
There is no fixed formula for leadership that works in all scenarios with the same effectiveness.
However, individuals can learn some specific traits and adapt these traits as needed in a given situation.
Great leaders in one project or one environment, say a data science reading club, may not be leaders in other contexts such as leading a research project or the families’ group at their kids’ school.
Indeed, trying to become the leader of too many projects or in all contexts is often one of the aspects to avoid in healthy leadership as we mention in another subchapter {ref}(reference)
No matter how many books about leadership a person reads or how many (often expensive) workshops a person attends to learn how to become a leader, no method will guarantee leadership at all times in all contexts.
Learning to become a good leader is a creative process that one can also learn through practice and willingness to learn from failures.