Leadership is an essential component of successful business management. Everything that is done in companies is carried out by people. The more complex an organization becomes, the more significant the coordination of these activities becomes. However, value creation activities must not only be coordinated within the organization, but must also be aligned against the background of technological, market, social, legal and political conditions. Leadership should be understood as both: Thought Leadership, to give strategic orientation to an organization in the market, and Personnel Leadership, to lead teams operationally.
In this extensive chapter, we will first work out the relevance of leadership before placing the topic of leadership in the management spectrum.
Those who want to lead others should first employee leadership.
Leadership can and should be situational. In some environments, agile working is possible or even necessary. Here, agile leadership is also necessary, if only to create the conditions for agile working. In a rapidly changing business world, organizations must be able to manage change. This requires change management qualities in leadership. Many companies are moving towards implementing more and more projects in addition to the usual classic line organization. Projects have to be managed. That is why project management is becoming increasingly important.
Leadership always addresses people who should remain healthy and unharmed while performing their work. “Healthy” refers not only to physical aspects, but also explicitly to psychological aspects, which are to be ensured by occupational health and safety and ethics has always been significant in leadership, but has only been systematically addressed during the last decades.