Leadership is an essential aspect of today's business. Leader can be described as a person who guides and supports his subordinates to achieve a common goal. Leader should possess a number of specific skills that may help him to organise and direct a group of people. Successful leadership requires a range of special qualities, such as communication skills or an ability to work under pressure.

Three recent articles (Cappelli et al. 2010, Ladkin and Weber 2011, Useem 2010) have analysed a variety of characteristics of successful leaders. However, all three authors analyse this topic from the different perspectives. While the reflection by Useem is related to the military view, the reports by Ladkin & Weber and Cappelli et al. focus on the …show more content…

All the authors concur that leaders should know how to make the right decisions and provide an opportunity to their subordinates to solve the problems. Although Useem argues that the fundamental requirement for any leader is a capability to make good decisions quickly, he also acknowledges that there is no reason to 'shoot from the hip' as well as to wait for ideal resolution (p. 3). Similarly, Ladkin & Weber outline such crucial qualities for successful leaders as determination and perseverance, which could help them to make important decisions even though they are complicated (p. 281). At the same time, the second critical factor for outstanding leaders is not only a skill to solve problems by themselves, but also willingness to foster employees' improvisation. Useem provides an example from a military history, where a Union commander sent one of his subordinate officers to protect the left flank of battalion. The officer succeeded in this operation without any instructions and for this apparent reason Useem claims that the confidence in people's ingenuity is the necessary condition for goal achievement as well as clear objectives (p. 4). Contrary to this example, Cappelli et al describe how Indian leaders contrive to convince their employees that solutions were made by leaders actually belong to team members (p. 95). Even though the staff feel a significance of their contribution into the common