Elements of Leadership is an article that provides an overview of some of the basics of leadership that make it what it is. The article takes on leadership at an ideological level, breaking down some of the expectations that go along with it and concepts that make it desirable. Specifically, the author discusses leadership in terms of people rather than positions. While some might discuss leadership in terms of the power of a political office or the power of a person working at the top of a company, positions do not have any leadership qualities. Rather, leadership qualities belong only to actual human beings, and they are the people who make sure that people are led.

The author focuses on the idea of power, which is implicit in the elements of leadership. Power and leadership go hand and hand because a person in a position of authority will necessarily have some power over the people around her. Leadership and power, as the author notes, is about the willingness of people being led to adhere to the wishes of a leader. This is what leadership is at the end of the day—the ability of one person to exert her will on another person in order to achieve a stated goal, usually for an organization. While leadership includes many other things, and it is sometimes a concept that requires finesse, at its core, leadership is all about the ability of one to get another person to do something.

There are various other types of power that helps to complete the profile of a leader. For instance, “representation power” is that force that allows a person to be the external representative of a given cause to the outside. This occurs when members of the group decide that one person possesses the qualities they want to represent them or the skills needed to represent their interests in some ways. The author’s explanation of influence power is perhaps most interesting. The perceptions of people being led are quite important to the overall development of leadership and how a leader’s power actually works in real life. Ultimately, when people perceive that a person is their leader, they are going to be much more likely to bend to the will of that person. The person who succeeds in getting people to call him a leader has a heightened capacity to actually act in that leadership role.

In business today, many focus on developing personality power. A person’s personality can go a long way to determining whether other people choose to follow them. A personality can in some cases be highly magnetic. This means that a person has the kind of personality that people want to be around and listen to. This is where human psychology makes a major difference in leadership. People are influenced in ways that they often do not even understand. Personality power allows that to be true.

As the paper notes, there are many more forms of power, and they all come together to determine the ultimate authority of the leader. The leader is defined by the various ways in which her followers see her. This might be a combination of forces, as people never truly take power unless they are able to command the attention and respect of their followers on many different planes. At the end of the day, the ability to retain power, as the author of this article suggests, is all about a person’s ability to leverage the things that make other people bend to her will. Leadership can come in many forms, but the ability to use various tools to exert influence is at the core of leadership.