Business English | Leadership and Management Styles

Disclaimer

I am using an automatic transcript service as it is not possible for me to do it on my own and I cannot afford human transcription at the moment. The service claims to have about 95% accuracy, which means there will still be some mistakes, so my apologies for having a less than perfect transcript, but I hope I can afford human transcription soon and I will solve this problem. However, the service is pretty good, and the transcript is almost perfect.

Transcript

Welcome to a new episode from English plus podcast. Today’s episode is about business English, and we will talk about leadership and management styles. We will try to answer four questions in today’s episode. The first question is can leadership be taught? The second question, what makes a great leader?

[00:00:27] The third question, how have management styles changed in the last few years? And the final question, what exactly is empowerment? So we have four questions to answer and I will try to give you what I think the answer to these questions can be. Of course you can disagree with me, but here we’re learning business, English, leadership and management styles, and it’s a point of view after all.

[00:00:51] You might agree with it. You might disagree with it, but regardless. You will learn a lot of useful ideas and concepts regarding leadership and management styles. So now without further ado, let’s start talking about leadership and management styles. So let’s start with a very first question. Can leadership be taught that traditionally the model for leadership in business has been the army?

[00:01:16] Managers and army officers give orders and their subordinates carry them out in a system of command and control managers. Like army officers may be sent on leadership courses to develop their leadership skills, but I think they must have a basic talent for leadership to benefit from this. Some people say that the only real leaders are born leaders.

[00:01:40] Now you might agree with this, you might disagree, but let’s go back to this answer and try to talk about some of the important words and concepts that we used here. So now, first I said that traditionally, the model for leadership in business has been the army. And this is true, even for some companies nowadays, they’re still following this method of leadership, just like the army managers give orders to their subordinates.

[00:02:06] What is the meaning of subordinates? Subordinates are people who are working under you. People who are working under you are your subordinates. So managers give orders to their subordinates and the subordinates. Carry them out in a system of command and control orders and people following orders, command and control, not in this system managers.

[00:02:26] Like army officers may be sent on leadership courses to develop their leadership skills. But I believe that yes, leadership can be taught, can be learned actually, but these people must have a basic talent for leadership to benefit from this. Now, some people say that the only leaders are born leaders.

[00:02:45] You might disagree with that. And to be honest, I kind of disagree with that, to the core of that. Nobody can be a leader if the he or she is not a born leader. Not really, you can learn that, but you must have something. You must have a little gift and then you can work on that and you can become a great leader.

[00:03:05] So that answers our first question. Can leadership be taught? And of course you are allowed to disagree. And if you have anything you would like to share with us, you can share your thoughts on our social media, or as a comment on the post, on our website, English plus podcast.com, which you will find the link to in the description of this episode.

[00:03:25] Now let’s move on to talk about the second question. What makes a great leader? Well, there are a lot of things to be talked about when it comes to a great leader and it is different from one person to another, from one culture to another. But let’s talk about some of the general characteristics of great leaders.

[00:03:42] The greatest leaders have charisma. And when we talk about charisma, we’re talking about this attractive quality that makes other people admire them and want to follow them. A charismatic leader, like this may be described as visionary. No, a visionary person is a person who has the power to see clearly how things are going to develop in the future.

[00:04:06] Think of Steve jobs, for example, he’s one of the most famous examples of visionary leaders. Maybe he was called by some people as a dictator, and I’m not in the place to say whether that was right or wrong. I didn’t work for the man, but whether he was a dictator or not, he was described by almost everybody as a visionary.

[00:04:25] Visionary having the power to see clearly how things are going to develop in the future. Someone like this is a visionary. We can use that as a visionary and is set to have vision. So here you can say visionary as an adjective and noun, or you can say that this person has vision and leaders are often described as having the following drive dynamism and energy.

[00:04:50] And what do we mean by drive dynamism and energy? First thing, drive, that means blend effort to achieve something that is an important thing to have. If you want to be a leader, you must have planned effort to achieve something. Dynamism. You must have a lot of ideas and enthusiasm and energy, the power to be physically and mentally active.

[00:05:11] These three are the three pillars for a leader. But again, these are general things. These are just general ideas about what makes a great leader, but great leaders are different. Great leaders are different based on what they do or the business they’re running or the culture they’re in. So you might again disagree with me.

[00:05:31] And please, if you disagree with me, share your thoughts on our social media or in the post. And now let’s move on to talk about the third question for today’s episode. And that is how have management styles changed in the last few years, I, before leaders were distant and remote, they were not easy to get to know or communicate with.

[00:05:51] They were distant and remote. That’s the meaning of distant and remote, but now managers are more accessible and approachable. These are just the opposite of distant and remote. They are accessible and approachable. They are easy to meet and talk to. This is a completely different management style. They want to involve employees in the process of consultation consultation.

[00:06:16] What does that mean? That means getting everyone to participate in making decisions that will affect them. Now, this management by consensus, what does that mean? When you say management by consensus, that is a situation where most people agree with the decisions taken ancestors. They have to agree that is management by consensus.

[00:06:36] That is different from the past the past. It was just like the army. As I said, orders and people who are carrying out the orders. Following orders, that’s it. But now it’s a little bit different. There is management by consensus, a situation where people, or most people actually, not everybody where most people agree with the decisions taken.

[00:06:55] The old style was to impose decisions in a top down approach. When we say imposed decisions in a top down approach, what does that mean? That means forcing people to accept ideas that they did not agree with. It was different. Now, will this trend continue? Well, I guess, yes, there are more women managers.

[00:07:16] Now I would say that they are more consensual. That means they are more able to build consensus than traditional authoritarian, male managers. Now some of you might disagree with me here. Some of you might prefer male managers and you might have your reasons. I don’t actually have a preference here. I prefer a good manager.

[00:07:37] I prefer a good leader, whether male or female doesn’t matter, but we have to agree that women managers are different and they are more consensual. They create an atmosphere in which they seek to have people agreeing on things, agreeing with the decisions taken. But regardless of this fact, Everyone has a preference.

[00:07:57] Everyone has an opinion, and I respect everybody’s opinion. My opinion is a great leader is a great leader man or woman. It doesn’t matter. We have great leaders who are women. We have great leaders who are men. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you can take your company, your business, or the organization you’re leading to a better place while everybody working for you is as happy as possible.

[00:08:21] Because the happier they are, the happier the customers will be. And the happier everybody will be. That’s my opinion. You might disagree again, share your thoughts if you want. And now let’s finally talk about the last question that we have for today, and that is empowerment because all that leads to empowerment.

[00:08:38] So what exactly is empowerment? That is encouraging employees to use their own initiative, to take decisions on their own. Without asking managers first, this is empowerment. Decision-making becomes more decentralized and less bureaucratic. What does that mean? That means less dependent on managers and management systems.

[00:09:00] Remember the word is very important. Decentralized. It’s not centralized the decision. Doesn’t always have to come from the top management. No, it is decentralized and less bureaucratic. That means less dependent on managers and management systems. This is often necessary where the number of management levels is reduced and we end up with a flatter organization.

[00:09:23] Now, of course, this cannot happen on its own. This is related to the ability of managers to delegate, delegate and delegation. This is a very important thing. What is the meaning of delegate? That means to give other people responsibility for work, rather than doing it all yourself, you have to delegate a good manager, a good leader, always delegate, always find somebody to trust enough to do the things that you usually do.

[00:09:50] You might think to yourself that I’m the best person to do this job. Maybe you are, maybe you are not, but you can’t do it all on your own. You have to depend on people. You have to trust people to do the things that you used to do, and you have to coach them to do it as well. And of course, better than you do.

[00:10:08] The good leader is not the person who can do everything well. Now this is the person who can lead people to do well. And to get the best out of people. That’s a good manager. You don’t have to do it all on your own. Delegate, give other people responsibility for work, rather than doing it all by yourself.

[00:10:26] Now of course, with empowerment and delegation, the problem is keeping control of your operations. One of the key issues of modern management styles. We’re not saying that it is perfect. No, it is not. Some people might take advantage of this and in a bad way, of course they might abuse this power that is given to them.

[00:10:45] I’m talking about the employees here. Yes. You might find some people like that, but ask yourself, is it worth it? The overall outcome am I taking the company forward? My leading the company forward, even if I have a couple of outliers, people who will want to take advantage of this new management style is the effect positive.

[00:11:06] So these people don’t matter. These bad people that you can find everywhere. Of course don’t matter. But if it is the majority of employees that are taking advantage of your management style, so no, you have to think about another way. Have you going back to command and control? Who knows? Maybe going back to the army style.

[00:11:23] But with that being said, that’ll be everything that I wanted to share with you about today’s episode, we talked about forming questions. Can leadership be taught? What makes a great leader, how have management styles changed in the last few years? And finally, we answer the question, what exactly is empowerment?

[00:11:41] So I hope you found the information I shared with you useful, and I hope you’ve learned a thing or two about business English and the concepts of business that we talk about every week in our business, English episodes. Remember, that’s not everything we have other premium episodes. We have our business English marketing mini series that came out last week.

[00:12:01] That is premium. Of course, if you want to access this and access, all of our other premium episodes, go to our Patreon page, you can find the link in the description, become a patron of English. Plus you will be supporting us and you will get. All the premium episodes that were released. And now we are releasing two premium episodes every day.

[00:12:19] So he will get a lot, some of them are going to be about the English language. Some of them are going to be about history, culture, et cetera. So we have a lot of things we believe you’re going to enjoy. Now, that being said, this is your host, Danny. I would like to thank you very much for listening to another episode from English plus podcast.

[00:12:37] I will see you next time.