Purpose, Direction, and Motivation are the three things that a leader MUST provide to the team in order to have success. Leave any one of them out, and the results of the team will suffer.
This material should be included in all high school curriculum at some point instead of just in the MJROTC courses, because the fundamentals of leadership are simply a requirement to achieving ones goals.
The leader must provide Purpose, so that the team knows what it is supposed to accomplish. They must understand the goal so that they can act in the absence of the leader. They must have a understanding of the objective, of what is expected of them and by what standard they will be judged in order to set for themselves an idea of what accomplishment means.
The leader must provide Direction, because the team needs also to know HOW the objective is to be reached. In some cases the objective is enough and the direction that is given is to use best judgement, rely on past experience etc, but in this case Direction has still been given, and the team members will perform well because they have been given this trust. It is unwise to do this all the time, or the leader will never shape the team the way he or she wants, and will never have demonstrated the kind of thinking required, resulting in the team feeling insecure when they use their own judgement. So Direction then is first used as a training aid, and ensures that the team delivers the result in the manner expected, and then later as a means of ensuring that the team members will call upon experience and grow in their own leadership skills because they have been given the direction to do so, once that place in the development of the team has been reached.
The leader must lastly provide Motivation to the team. The team can understand what is expected and how the expectation is to be reached, but not having an internal drive to accomplish the task, they will perform only at low levels, and the team morale can suffer. The leader MUST take it upon him or herself to provide motivation in whatever manner the team needs most, and which will result in the highest performance. If the leader thinks that the team should self motivate, or that having a job is enough – it is just LAZY thinking and the results will nearly always demonstrate this.
So while these things to not in and of themselves make a great leader, in order to effectively lead, these basic fundamentals must be provide to the team, and it is the leader… who must provide them.
Purpose, Direction, and Motivation