The Conviction To Lead

Leadership and Management
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Leadership and Management
Introduction
Management and leadership are different concepts. While management requires diligence, organization, determination, and abstraction, leadership is about human contact and motivation. The distinction between the two is easy to miss, mainly since managers often occupy leadership positions. Since the outcomes of management depend on effective leadership, most managers master leadership skills. The importance of leadership also rises to self-perception because most people have a natural inclination towards leadership. By offering characteristics of leadership and its effects on the leader and the audience, Dr. Mohler shows the practical differences between leadership and management.
Summary
The book The Conviction to Lead: 25 Principles for Leadership That Matters by Dr. Albert Mohler explores the characteristics of good leadership practices. Dr. Mohler is coming from a background of the strong emphasis on leadership and management. Consequently, the book’s purpose is to transform the reader’s perception of leadership. Initially, the approach includes a demonstration of the overabundance of leadership books in all settings from religious institutions to airports. From the observation, Dr. Mohler notes a strong affinity in the community to read about leadership and improve personal leadership approaches. In particular, Dr. Mohler notes that the American golden age of management increased the emphasis on leadership skills.

The reference to management in a leadership context, including the failure of managers to transfer successful business strategies into national leadership, shows a big gap between leadership and management. Dr. Mohler shows that regardless of exceptional management skills, transition into leadership is not straightforward. From the revelation of the complexities of leadership, Dr. Mohler continues to reveal effective leadership strategies, applicable for all individuals. The leadership strategies revolve around conviction, passion, and communication.
Strengths
Dr. Mohler shows that a good leader needs to have good communication skills because leadership entails connectivity. For example, Dr. Mohler defines a conviction as an inspirational and robust belief. An individual with a conviction is passionate and dedicated. The definition reduces the role of leadership to merely inspiring conviction in followers and the self. A leader without conviction does not inspire confidence in followers because, without conviction, the leader loses a vital ingredient of appeal when speaking to an audience. Mostly, a good leader is passionate and uses the passion to inspire attention and teach. Regardless of the relevance of an issue to a listener, passion inspires a captive audience. In return, the captive audience gives a leader the opportunity to encourage convictions.
Critical Interaction
A good leader is inspirational. Convictions are beliefs because each person believes in their convictions. For example, if an individual is convinced that Christianity offers a path to ideal life, the conviction is the truth, at least in the eyes of the subject. The power of conviction is so high that it defines personal value in life and the scope of interpersonal relations between the subject and their community. Inspiration correlates with passion. If a person carries a conviction without a passion, the person does not understand the conviction. The role of the leader is to increase understanding of the conviction such that the subject develops a passion. In a leadership context, Dr. Mohler is showing that an inspirational leader creates convictions in followers and actively maximizes the convictions to generate passion. Leadership requires passion because an effective leader channels the passion to productive means. The theme of passion and inspiration is transformational, especially the leadership components requiring informed convictions.
In the inspirational theme, management does not require a passionate application. While passion may be necessary for guiding and motivating individuals, the role of management in increasing the levels of efficiency, rather than personal empowerment, means that managers do not need to inspire passion and convictions. In a workplace, a manager would use information as a tool for maximum efficiency rather than building convictions and passion. The outcome of management increases the scope of managerial leadership. For example, the highest organizational echelons are administrative because they need an overview of the entire organization. The implication is that a leader needs interpersonal contact with the follower to maximize utility. The manager merely needs to delegate responsibilities.
Towards the end of his book, Dr. Mohler appears to dispute the relevance of interpersonal contact in leadership. Dr. Mohler claims that an effective leader diversifies the interaction platforms to suit the audience. For example, social media is an ideal platform to interact with the young demographic, hence a critical leadership tool in the present society. While the theme of social media and other forms of virtual interactions appears contradictory, it is an exposition of a much broader subject; contextual changes in leadership.
Leadership varies to accommodate contextual settings. A good leader knows that a motivational speech that works in one group will not work in another. Therefore, the leader adjusts leadership strategies to maximize outcomes. Consider a leader who, knowing there is no chance of success, needs to deliver a motivational speech. For example, a law enforcement leader who knows it is impossible to solve a crime will tell subordinates to keep going and appeal to concepts such as “heart,” mainly when addressing a young audience. To address an older audience, the leader would need to contextualize the speech because past experiences reduce expectations in that demographic. Here, the leader uses knowledge of the contextual differences between the two demographics to optimize the utility of a speech.
While leaders need contextual awareness, managers rarely need such intimate detail. To a manager, the essential aspects are relevant to productivity rather than personal preferences. A manager would simply instruct subordinates to get results without attempting to add motivational value to the statement. If a manager uses motivational speeches and makes an active effort to understand contextual differences between the audiences, the individual qualifies for a leadership classification. Here, leadership and management are interconnected concepts.
A good leader draws inspiration from their worldview. Without a powerful and motivational worldview, a leader becomes an individual in a leadership position. Such a leader does not have a sense of direction and the followers easily lose their faith in the leadership. According to Dr. Mohler, if a person does not have a firm conviction and passionate application, the leader is unlikely to inspire others. From this assertion, it follows that a leader can only be appropriate when the leader approaches leadership passionately. It is important, therefore, for leaders to make sure that they are set in an optimal context. A Christian leader cannot lead thieves, for example, because the leader does not have conviction in the issues. The importance of inspiration explains the tendency for experts to hold leadership positions. Due experiences and expertise in a field, an expert has conviction and inspires confidence. In the field of medicine, a patient can lose faith quickly if the physician is not experienced. The loss of confidence shows the relationship between authoritative voices and holding an audience’s attention.
Passion is an essential part of all vocational applications. Without passion, a job becomes a means to an end, something an individual does because there is no choice. Leadership does not require a deep level of passion at all time. Occasionally, a leader will harbor internal doubts. The lesson from Dr. Mohler is that when these doubts are there, the leader will eventually transfer them to the rest of the team and consequently affect results. Management, on the other hand, uses passion differently. A manager would place individuals in regions that maximize their skills. Managers do not have time to develop skills, especially if there is a choice, they should instead channel existing skills and prefer to hire experienced individuals.
An ideal leader draws motivation from organizational vision and mission. The inspiration of the mission is critical to leadership because if mission inspires conviction in the leader, it follows that the leadership strategies will come from passionate belief. Consequently, a leadership approach would require adjustment of vision and mission statements such that the leader has passion and can inspire emotion in the entire organization. In a way, the relevance of vision and mission statements resonates with the contemporary idealized role of organizational culture in maximizing productivity.
Limitations
The book assumes religion as a common background in the reader. The setting in the American culture of mixing leadership with management is also problematic from an outside perspective. What happens when a leader does not have passion? The scope of passionate leadership appears to restrict the leadership essence into interpersonal contexts alone. Also, a leader needs to have interpersonal inspirational skills to increase the chances of optimal utility. In a way, the assertions resonate with an ideal world. In an ideal world, a subject can control all variables. However, monitoring all variables is not a realistic aspiration in life. People will ultimately suffer disappointments, especially when the issue does not attain a practical level of conviction. On the background of religion, the book is transformative because it relies on faith and other sources of internal motivation. On the other hand, a reader can only apply the concepts from the book in a professional setting directed internally.
Conclusion
After reading Dr. Albert Mohler’s The Conviction to Lead: 25 Principles for Leadership That Matters, there is an impression that leadership is a role rather than a position. All people are leaders when they are in their element. Unlike management, leadership entails practical communication skills and knowledge of the subjects. A good leader is inspirational because of passion, conviction and excellent communication. The lesson is that all people are potential leaders. Rather than seek positional placement, the best approach to leadership is integrating effective leadership practices in personal and professional contexts to maximize positive outcomes from communicative interactions. In particular, the leadership approach is applicable in religion because of the reference to conviction and communication. The community-themed presentation also suits a religious setting because diversity can attract different perceptions of ideal leadership, the role of an individual in a community and perceptions of positive outcomes. Regardless of the limited application, the book is compelling reading for management students because it highlights the distinction between a manager and a leader.
Questions: can technical proficiency and expert leadership develop without passion? Is leadership a cultural construction? Are the propositions of passion and convictions applicable to all cultures?
ReferencesMohler, Albert. The conviction to lead: 25 principles for leadership that matters. Bloomington, Minnesota: Bethany House Publishers, 2014.