 We can hear a lot about leadership without really understanding what it is Because there are a lot of different definitions and people look at it differently Some people look at leadership and think charisma that you have to have charisma to be a good leader So and certainly there are examples of charismatic leaders people who employ charisma to great effect in their leadership You know style and ability, but that's maybe too narrow an approach Some people think inspiration leaders have to inspire and they do inspire us and that's that's true, too There are lots of good leaders who do use inspiration and inspire people to great effect And and that's a big part of their leadership style yet other people though think of leadership as a management structure When they think of leadership, they think of their corporate structure and just you know What's the line of report? But I think we can all imagine that we've had Bosses that may have been in charge may have had that Authoritative power over us, but weren't necessarily great leaders, right? Not somebody would call leader as much as a boss really just a boss or a manager and not a leader So, you know, what is leadership? Where do we end up on all this and and how do we define leadership? Well? That's really the purpose of these next few videos And and the start of our discussion in leadership and we're gonna begin really with the foundations of leadership By defining what we mean by leadership and that will carry us through as a definition Through this series of videos on leadership and communication So let's start off by defining leadership Leadership is the ability of an individual or group to influence and guide others Toward the achievement of a goal That's the definition we're going to use for our purposes in our discussion of leadership here The ability of an individual or group to influence and guide others Toward the achievement of a goal So let's take a look at some of the individual components of this and dig a little deeper there first of all Leadership involves influencing and guiding note that we're not saying that influence that leadership involves You know bossing others around or using that authoritative power There's certainly a role for power in leadership and different ways that leaders can gain power But but leadership as opposed to something like management or that corporate structure Doesn't rely necessarily exclusively on authoritative power the ability to Reward or to to punish people it involves influencing and guiding so we're really just almost more nudging people or or Instructing them and helping them grow. We're serving alongside them or we're we're giving them the The ability to do these things on themselves or for themselves So we're influencing and guiding as leaders rather than you know, just using that authoritative power Secondly leadership involves others By definition if you are a leader then you should have followers or that's a part of leadership It's hard to lead anyone but yourself unless there are others who are willing to follow you so so leadership involves others and that Reminds us to be others focused or others minded That leadership involves other people and we need to be aware of that. It's not just about what the leader wants or needs or Feels like we should do there. There are others involved in this equation. So we need to to bear that in mind as well Leadership also is about the achievement of a goal You know when we play follow the leader as a kid That's that's okay as kids, but there's no real purpose there, right? You're just following somebody around and trying to do what they do But there's no real goal There's no real winner or loser in that game, right? But but leadership in the real world involves the achievement of a goal that people are working together Toward something that's how a leader is leading people specifically to something and in the achievement of that goal So that's our very simple definition of leadership and what we're going to use here So as we continue our exploration into the idea of leadership, we're going to break it down into a couple of different broader Categories if you will so first we're going to start with a few videos on the fundamentals of leadership starting with this one And going into a couple of other areas as well defining leadership versus management And some other things so we'll start with the fundamentals of leadership Then we'll take a look at some leadership styles and we'll break those down a little bit the idea of You know that there are different styles for leaders. There's not one way to be a leader So we'll take a look at some of the the major leadership styles that have been identified and and categorized Then we'll look at some leadership communication strategies some things that influence communication as a leader things like power And and a few others here that we're going to take a look at but some of these different types of communication strategies and some major communication skills and premises that we need to keep in mind As leaders in order to lead people effectively And then finally part of our discussion will will center on performance and appraisal systems as a leader It's a big part of our responsibility to provide feedback On somebody's performance and to appraise how they're doing Again not necessarily to to boss them around or to chastise them but to to help them to improve We're working towards this goal and as leaders it's our responsibility to make sure everybody's performing In a way that's appropriate for the group and appropriate toward the achievement of that goal So that's going to be the focus of our discussion on leadership as we move through this series I hope it'll be helpful to you in Growing your knowledge of what leadership is and also your your skills and your abilities as a leader yourselves If you have questions about anything related to leadership, please feel free to email me I'd be happy to chat with you about that and in the meantime I hope you'll really start to dig in to this idea of leadership and the broader context of leadership And what we can do to become more effective leaders