leadership is the process of inspiring a number of people or teams to behave and take action in a distinctive manner in order to accomplish very specific targets.
The main focus is on approach because despite the fact that leaders may apply influence over motivational presentations, they are assessed on precisely what they carry out.
The interpretation widely used in the management and Leadership Development strategy for Northern Ireland is as follows;
“Leadership develops vision, sets future direction, motivates positive engagement in strategy/planning and generates a culture of constructively challenging convention.”
Perhaps a more realistic, if to some degree monotonous, concise explanation of leadership is given by Hannagan (2002);
“Leadership is the process of motivating other people to act in particular ways in order to achieve specific goals.”
As Bennis (1959) learned, and that is even now authentic these days, “Always it seems the concept of leadership eludes us or turns up in another form to taunt us again with its slipperiness and complexity. And as a result we have discovered a limitless expansion of terms to handle with it, yet still the concept is not satisfactorily defined.”
Gary Yukl (2006) gives a definition that involves a more collective method;
“Leadership is the process of influencing others to understand and agree about what needs to be done and how to do it and the process of facilitating individual and collective efforts to accomplish shared objectives.