Dr. Bell: Well, hello again, I am glad to be with you. I'd like for you to think for just a moment about a great leader you know, someone you have personally interacted with. What makes them great? Go ahead and think for just a second about someone you really respect as a leader.

Leadership is a process. It's a process of influencing other people, and influencing them towards accomplishing organizational goals. It can work in a school system, it works in a business organization, it can work in a fraternity or a sorority or a church, or any other kind of volunteer organization that you ever interact with. Leaders also interact with people in rational ways, or sometimes irrational or emotional ways. Leadership is both rational and emotional. Leaders use logic, and planning, and there is certainly a business side to leadership, even if it's in a church organization. But there's also an emotional side. They work through relationships. Leaders come in all shapes and all sizes. I am the president of an organization that has about 1000 employees, and about another 1000 part time employees, about 10,000 customers that we interact with pretty routinely, and about a $93 million budget. There are a lot of leaders in this organization; some are tall, some are thin, some are heavier than others, some are quiet and reserved, and some are quite extroverted. They come in all shapes and all sizes, but they have all developed into leaders. They have built upon their talents, their skills. They have learned, and they have acquired new abilities as they have learned. They have cultivated the ability to influence other people, and that is what leadership is all about. A leader does not act in a vacuum or in isolation, they interact with other leaders, and followers, and with lots of other people, and they live in a real and changing situation. The followers are people too; they have their own values, their own habits, their own sense of what's right and what's wrong, and their own work ethic. They may include individuals from differing ethnic or social backgrounds than the leader comes from, but they are people, too. And the situation, they environment that the leader operates in, will present many different challenges each day to that leader.

Time may be short, in some circumstances; actions have to be taken right now. Budgets may be tight, the organization might be under dramatic pressure to change; there might be a labor union, or some other organization that also acts as a representative of some of the employees in the organization. So, leadership involves interaction between the leader, a diverse set of followers, and the situation or the environment in which the leader finds himself or herself. We are going to be talking a lot about supervision, and supervision is an element in leadership, but leadership is a great deal more than supervision. Not all of the leader's followers will be subordinates. Great leaders seem to be able to develop strategy, a sense of where the organization needs to go, and what it needs to get done, and then they influence others, and they turn them into followers, they bring them into the team, they build and refine that team over time. Leaders tend to weave in and out of a lot of different influence processes, and there are at least four types of influence relationships that they use to achieve their strategies and their goals.

One form of influence, and the one you probably thought first of when you thought about leadership, is downward influence. It is influence downward in the hierarchy of the organization, and it's directed toward subordinates. A second kind of influence that's vital to the leader is lateral influence, the kind that is intended to impact peers, and others inside the organization, the people that don't report directly to the leader. The third kind of influence is outward influence, an attempt to impact people who may be customers, or suppliers, or some other kind of stakeholder, perhaps community members, to get on the team and to jump on board with the strategy the team is trying to pursue. And last, one of the most important forms of influence is upward influence. Effective leaders find ways to get those to whom they report involved in the process. They get them to follow, to buy in to the leader's strategy, and into the goals of the organization that the leader leads. Now, if you would, take a moment, and think about the skills and the aptitudes that effective leaders need if they are going to work in all four dimensions: upward, lateral, outward, and downward influence. That's quite a challenge, and that is what makes the leader's job fun, and exciting, and stimulating, and I hope that is what is going to make this course interesting to you. We will focus some more on leadership and influence, primarily in formal organizations, businesses and governments and government agencies, like the Army, schools, and we will focus primarily on downward and lateral influence. But, we will use all four forms of influence.

So let's summarize. Leadership is a process of influencing others toward accomplishing a set of goals. It's both rational and emotional, and leaders come in all shapes, and all sizes. The leadership process is a complex one, involving many different kinds of relationships. That's why it is exciting, and interesting, and challenging, and that's what the journey is all about: I look forward to seeing you next time.