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What are the essential characteristic of an effective leader? Explain.
As Tom Landry (a football player and coach) once said “Leadership is getting someone to
do what they don’t want to do, to achieve what they want to achieve.” This quote goes for people
that tend to dream big, but they also know it’s not easy to get to where they want to be. Like
getting a college degree doesn’t happen automatically or overnight, you will have to work hard
to obtain the skills required to perform at such level in today’s competitive society. If you want to
get in a professional field, you must show the ambition to keep moving forward or else you will
fall behind. The characteristics one must have to be an effective leader in today’s society include
the ability to communicate properly, ability to manage time, and to respect others.
First of all, the foremost important characteristic is the ability to communicate properly
with others. Without communication, the leader will not be able to exchange ideas and be able to
communicate with his followers, which in return doesn’t make that leader effective after all. An
effective leader must also be a great listener, but that comes hand in hand with communicating
properly. The Civil Rights movement would never be effective if communication didn’t take
place. Leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, and
etc would never have spread their words about African American Rights. Without
communication; it is almost impossible to be an effective leader.
