Theme
What are the different kinds of leadership?
What are the ingredients of leadership?
How do you inspire people to become leaders?
What is a conscious leader?
In times in climate crisis, global pandemic, financial crisis, rising nationalism, what kind of leadership do we need? Gender and leadership?
Panelist
Dr Margaret J. Burnett
Dr. Burnett specializes in the development and implementation of stakeholder engagement, the role of trust in governance, risk communication and strategies for awareness raising on matters of sustainability she has worked directly with organizations to demonstrate the benefits of sustainability initiatives. She has worked with clients, partners and stakeholders in the community to address corporate sustainability and responsibility challenges and opportunities. She has also developed and delivered training, workshops and lectures to a variety of audiences. More recently moving into the area of executive education in order to support the bridge between theory and practice. She is now the programme director of MSocSc in Corporate Environmental Governance (CEGP).
Questions from students
- If your teammates is passive and reluctant to take up tasks, how do m empower or stimulate them?2.Can I take it that leadership combine decisions making and management , executing?
- some says that the quality of leadership is also dependant on the people following and is rather a conversation than a monologue, do you agree with this?
- .Can we classify leadership into different categories, like someone is familiar with decision making, somebody focus on management and interacting, can they choose different focus when leading others?
- With the changing technologies, such as AI, how do they influence our change our strategies of leadership, such as which skills will be more useful than others?
- What if you need to lead but don´t feel like a charismatic person?
- How do you think social and political factors affect leadership styles?
- Is a leader necessarily a good coordinator or communicator? Or this task can be done by different group members?
- Should we strike a balance between leadership and management, so as to raise the incentives for people to carry out the tasks?
- Is it better for a leader to decide on a goal for the team, and get the team to agree to it, or try to get everyone’s mind together and derive a common goal amongst themselves?
- Can everyone be equipped with certain skills to act as a leader?Or does leadership require some gifts?
- Do you think technology adds fuel to the synergy between management and leadership in the business world nowadays?
- what if people all want to govern being a leader,is it possible to have more than one leader
- How should a leader reach a consensus with others "peacefully" ?
- How do you build leadership skills and should leaders just give orders to the team or work together with them
- How should leader “lead” the team instead of just giving commands to the teammates. Or is there any difference actually.
Margaret's responses
A few quick answers to the questions: Good leaders do need to develop their management skills, and if you wish to be an effective manager it would be good to develop your leadership skills. Skills that include listening which is the first step to being a good communicator. Good communicators also take the time to understand their audience. Also, leaders are not necessarily the loudest one in the room, there are people who are quietly charismatic and leaders don’t have to lead from the front, they can also lead from behind. Leadership skills can be learned as can ethical behaviour. The question about technology is an interesting one and could be seen this way - technology is a tool and we can use that tool responsibly or unethically. Our mobile phones are incredibly useful and can be used for good or can cause a great deal of harm. So the interaction between the user and the tech comes back to the integrity of the user and the developer of the tech. Cheers Margaret