Academic Writing Samples

Leaders and entrepreneurs are one in the same. While the job titles that typically accompany leaders are different from those associated with entrepreneurs, effective leaders and effective entrepreneurs must employ the same management skills. Leadership is listening to followers, learning from what has been heard, and then making a decision based on what was learned (Class Notes, Week 2). Entrepreneurs are defined as someone who uses resources to make change (Class Notes, Week 2). But followers are a resource to a leader and using what you learn from them to make a decision, effectively makes change. The reason classes and majors are being created to teach leadership and entrepreneurship show the growing demand for college students to learn something new. Consider Oprah Winfrey and Mahatma Gandhi. Oprah is thought of as an iconic entrepreneur and Gandhi is one of the greatest political leaders of all time. Yet, neither of them would have succeeded had they not used both entrepreneurial elements with adaptive and team leadership styles. Therefore, the education for future leaders and entrepreneurs should be integrated into one field of study. 

Both leaders and entrepreneurs need to be able to quickly adapt to new surroundings and circumstances. Adaptive leadership comes from “people’s demands for trustworthy leadership” (Northouse 196). Adaptive leadership theory can be defined three different ways. First there are intrapersonal leaders, who “incorporate[] [their own] self-knowledge, self-regulation, and self-concept” into how they lead (Northouse 196). Second are interpersonal leaders, who find that “authenticity emerges from the interactions” because of the relationships created between the leaders and followers (Northouse 196). Lastly, the developmental leaders see “authentic leadership as something that can be nurtured” over a lifetime of events (Northouse 196). In general, authentic leadership theory “focuses on whether leadership is genuine and ‘real’” by using two approaches (Northouse 196). First there is the practical approach where internally authentic leaders follow five internal values – purpose, values, relationships, self-discipline, and heart – that are then reflected outwardly onto their followers in the forms of passion, behavior, connectedness, consistency, and compassion (Northouse 198). Next is the theoretical approach where critical life events create personal reflection within a leader causing self-awareness, internalized moral perspective, balanced processing, relational transparency (Northouse 202). These internal feelings then guide how a leader chooses to interact with their followers. What is beneficial about educating people in adaptive leadership is that “authentic values and behaviors can be developed over time” (Northouse 207). So, there is an ability for any person to become an authentic leader; but research about the success of authentic leadership is not yet proved completely effective (Northouse 207). The theory does give “board guidelines” making it easy to both follow and teach in the future (Northouse 206).

Today, team leadership is pivotal to the success of an organization. Instead of hierarchies and ladders, every team member is expected to take charge when necessary; using “lateral decision making as opposed to the traditional vertical decision making” (364). This is a strength of the team leadership theory because it has a better understanding of the changing roles of leaders and followers (383). Meaning, members “need a wide repertoire of communication skills to monitor and take appropriate action … [and] actions or skills to meet the team’s diverse needs” (364). This is a common leadership style seen in the entrepreneurial start-up culture where teams tend to be smaller with fewer resources. A team-based structure keeps an organization competitive by giving them the ability to respond and adapt quickly to changes (364). Team leadership starts with leaders deciding if they should or should not take action within their group or outside of their group. If they decided to take action within their group, they need to decide if they are intervening on behalf of a task or member relationships. The success of team leadership is measured by the team’s performance and development. Performance is measured by clear goals, a results-driven structure, competent team members, unified commitment and a collaborative climate (369). Whereas development is measured by the standards of excellence, external support and recognition, and principled leadership (369). Now, this can be difficult to accomplish because the theory requires all team members to have the leadership qualities, instead of a traditional theory which would only require the leader to hold leadership qualities. This is an example of why teaching leadership and entrepreneurship is important for future generations to be successful.  

Gandhi is thought of as the iconic political leader. Yet, he was also an innovator. He was involved in policy work, yet he would not hold political office like a true policy entrepreneur. He traveled across the world advocating for the rights of his people while keeping his followers “involved… in his exploits directly” (Willner 118). He believed in lateral decisions and uniting as a group, like a team leader. Gandhi had a clear goal and he found a way to achieve it, by creating satyagraha. Satyagraha was “ a novel concept in the history of political protest [at the time,] … [it was a] set of principles [for] overcoming a wrong or an evil situation by finding and holding to the truth and by refusing to submit to violence” (Willner 119). He took his personal experience and lead others with it; while also finding authenticity in training others to follow satyagraha. He found “powerful results in the absence of power” and if someone only categorized Gandhi as a political leader they would miss the creative and ground-breaking ideas he brought to the table (Willner 118). 

Oprah is one of America’s best-known entrepreneurs. She broke boundaries by becoming the first black women to be a billionaire in 2003 (cite). When thinking of billionaires, entrepreneurship comes to mind. But Oprah was am much of a leader as she was an entrepreneur. She follows an intrapersonal authentic style of leadership by using her previous experiences with sexual abuse and impoverished childhood to connect with her followers (cite). She was able to maintain and grow her followers on morning talk shows because of her “open, warm-hearted personal style” of connecting with people (cite). Oprah’s followership became so vast she expanded her branding to include a television network, magazine, and a seat on the board at the company Weight Watchers (cite). Oprah would not have been able to accomplish all of this work on her own. She had to be parts of teams to work on her branding, on the board of Weight Watchers, and as a co-host on her tv shows. Her ability to grow her following is what made her such a successful entrepreneur. If she had not been a strong leader none of her entrepreneurial ventures would have found success or profit. 

Fifty years ago, leaders and entrepreneurs were on two different planets. But, with the way millennials are running companies and the start-up culture is starting to be brought into already established institutions, the lines between leadership and entrepreneurship are non-existent. Both need to be able to listen to their followers, work in collaborative environments, and make strong well-informed decisions. They both have clear goals, visions for the future, and ideas of how to accomplish those goals. The common thread between adaptive leadership theory and team leadership theory is the demand for them. Both theories are relatively new to leadership textbooks because they were demanded for by the changing workplace today. Team leadership is a logical extension from the Davidson style of education. Liberal arts schools pride themselves on collaborative learning spaces where students can work together to produce something great. Why should a team in an organization not do the same? Effective leaders and entrepreneurs need to be able to adapt to every changing situation, to remain relevant in the new economy. With globalization expanding the number of customers and clients, this also opens up an organization to more competition. It doesn’t matter what kind of job you have in the future; these skills are something any person needs to be successful. That is why it is vital students are taught about leadership and entrepreneurship together, so they learn how to utilize both for the most success instead of trying to separate them as unrelated to one another.

As an elite liberal arts institution, Davidson should focus on preparing students for jobs and roles that do not yet exist. The best way to accomplish this is by exposing students to knowledge about how others have succeeded and providing them with the tools to be able to nboth create and lead their own fields of work. Davidson should merge the education of leadership and entrepreneurship by having an Innovative Leadership Interdisciplinary Minor with the help of both the Chidsey Center for Leadership Development and the Hurt Hub for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The minor should provide basic classes on leadership theory, start-up business culture, and business ethics, while also including one required summer internship program. Along with this major, the Chidsey Center and the Hurt Hub should remain separate programs. But instead, they should work together to reach more students by providing more opportunities for learning. Chidsey should teach more than the 20-ish Chidsey fellows about the importance of leadership in all forms of life. They should have programs and workshops available to all students focusing on innovation in unconventional areas and leading through uncertain times. The Hurt Hub should continue to offer community and student evening classes about start-ups, but students should be able to get some form of academic credit or certificate for completing them. Along with that, they should expand their programs to include people who want to learn about leading teams, leading start-ups, and being active in the entrepreneurial community. If Chidsey and the Hurt Hub co-sponsor events about standing out in start-ups and intrapreneurship, then there would be a better understanding of the similarities between leadership and entrepreneurship on Davidson’s campus. Neither Oprah or Gandhi would have been able to be half as successful if they had not employed both leadership theory and entrepreneurial techniques. We should learn from them and prepare our students to be just as successful and world changing. 

PLEGED

Grace Hall

Works Cited

Bullock, G. “Week 2: Understanding Leadership and Entrepreneurship.” Davidson College. September 4, 2019.

Northouse, Peter G. Leadership: Theory and Practice. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2016.

“Oprah Winfrey.” Biography.com. A&E Networks Television, September 24, 2019. https://www.biography.com/media-figure/oprah-winfrey.

Willner, Ann Ruth. The Spellbinders: Charismatic Political Leadership. Yale Univeristy Press. 

“If you inspire, you are a leader. If you are inspired, you are an entrepreneur.”

At a glance, Wangari Maathai and Steve Jobs appear to be nothing alike. Jobs is described as abrasive and a bully, while Maathai is saint-like and a humanitarian. When examined closely, both Jobs and Maathai used their goal as a motivator for their leadership. Simply, Path-Goal leaders have a vision and use influence to get their followers to help them make the vision a reality. Path-Goal leadership produces strong results when there is an effective leader who understands how to influence their followers. Both Steve Jobs and Wangari Maathai were effective Path-Goal leaders with clear visions who followed their personal ethical code when working with followers and peers. Maathai inspired people to follow her, like a true leader; while Jobs was inspired to create, making him an entrepreneur.

The Path-Goal theory of leadership focuses on how the leader influences followers to accomplish goals. The job of the leader is to create a conducive environment for followers to accomplish designated goals. While sometimes inspired by the leader, other times followers are typically achieving goals because of the “payoff” that comes with the completion (Northouse 116). There are multiple forms of leadership behaviors. Direct path-goal leaders set clear goals, expectations, and timelines by telling the followers and leaving little room for interpretation (Northouse 117). Supportive leadership is about creating a “pleasant” working environment where followers feel respected and equal to the leader (Northouse 118). Participative leaders allow for followers to be a part of the “decision making” by integrating their opinions and ideas into how the group works (Northouse 118). Lastly, there are Achievement-oriented leaders who “challenge followers” to do the highest level of work possible (Northouse 118). The path-goal theory says that leaders are one of these four types, and that their followers all have varying levels of “needs for affiliation, preferences for structure, desires for control, and self-perceived level of task ability” (Northouse 119). One criticism of the Path-Goal theory is that it’s not a leadership theory that can be easily applied to any specific situation because of the broad definition. Leaders must be understanding of what motivates their followers, and how to use motivation to achieve goals. Thus, being an effective path-goal leader is dependent upon the understanding of how each follower works best. 

There is not an ethical leadership theory, because ethics are the values and morals that an individual or society find desirable or acceptable. Thus, ethics are relative to the situation (Northouse 330). Each person has their own ethical values that guide how they interact with themselves, other people, and the world; and when it comes to leader’s ethics, they tell “what leaders do and who leaders are” (Northouse 330). Kohlberg developed the six stages of Moral Development, where a person can grow both forwards and backwards through the stages. The six stages are grouped into three levels; preconventional morality: “reasoning based on self-interest, avoiding punishment, and rewards,” conventional morality: “reasoning based on society’s views and expectations,” and postconventional morality: “reasoning based on conscience and creating a just society” (Northouse 331). While this study has flaws because it was measured with an all-male group that focused on justice, it still has merit with leadership theories because it helps explain ethical reasoning (Northouse 333). The Kohlberg theory puts path-goal followers exclusively in the Level 1 morality, because of their attention to rewards, with no opportunity to grow. This is a flaw in the path-goal theory because it doesn’t give follower the opportunity to grow morally or in a corporate-like leadership ladder. Lastly, Northouse concludes with the 5 basic principles of an ethical leader: respect others, serves others, shows justice, manifests honesty, and builds community. 

Maathai never lost her vision for enacting change in her home country of Kenya. Her end goal was to bring “drinking fresh, clear water” back to her hometown (Gettleman). She realized that the environment was being hurt because the spring she used to get water from had dried up. Women needed money for their families, so Maathai knew she could pay women to plant trees (Maathai); this would both help the environment and there would be demanded to help because she understood how to motivate her followers. After receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, in her Nobel Lecture she told the audience she believed that leadership needs to be exemplified in every relationship (Maathai). Everyone could be a leader and lead by example. These two ways of understanding leadership show how Maathai was a both a direct and supportive path-goal leader. She was direct because she knew how her followers could help the environment; by giving them the supplies, told them how to plant the trees, and set an expectation of paying them for completing their work. At the same time, she was a supportive leader because she believed followers and leaders were equals and could work together to accomplish her goals. Her clear vision made this style leadership possible, because it drove everything Maathai did. 

Steve Jobs is regarded as one of “America’s great innovators” because of his dedication to his vision, making him an entrepreneur (Issacson). Jobs had an intense focus on his goals; he believed in simple products that worked flawlessly. Yet when it came to the execution of his vision, Job’s was a “bully” (Gladwell). He was a difficult man who did what felt best to him, with little regard for how other people would feel. His goal was integral to how he functioned at every moment, and this influenced the way he interacted with people. In true Path-Goal leadership style, Jobs was a fantastic leader because of the goals he accomplished. He was known for being able to “push people to do the impossible” because like an achievement-oriented leader he expected the highest form of level of success from his followers (Issacson). Jobs would give his group a lofty and almost unattainable goal and say how do you achieve this goal, like a participative path-goal leader (Issacson). He was both a participative and achievement-oriented leader because Jobs “had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what [his followers] weak point [was], [and] know what [would] make [them] feel small” (Gladwell). He believed in his followers and gave them responsibilities but influenced them by understanding what would push them to help. Where he gets a bad reputation is how he reacted when his followers did not perform at the level her expected. He was harsh, yet his abrasive “personality was integral to his way of doing business,” very successful business (Issacson). He never took his eyes off the goal of creating a product, which makes him less of a leader, because he was not trying to inspire others but instead produce results.

Wangari Maathai is known as “one of the most widely respected women on the continent” because of her commitment to her vision (Gettleman). Yet, just because she was a humanitarian that doesn’t mean she was always sweet and kind, she was also strong and dedicated. She was a “thorn in the side of Kenya’s previous president;” and she was once “beaten unconscious” at a protest (Gettleman). She did all this because she cared about people, and this inspired people to join her. She was recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize for her ability to unite people, and in her Nobel Lecture she called on everyone to lead by example and fight for “justice, integrity, and trust” (Maathai). When explaining his own beliefs, Jobs criticized Bill Gates for “never invented anything. … He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas” (Gladwell). Jobs had an ethical belief in honestly in the form of intellectual property. He condemned Gates for stealing ideas and acknowledged how humanitarian work was better for Gates, seeing as how he was not a true entrepreneur (Gladwell). Jobs believed in trust, trusting his followers and family and company. He believed in working on new projects in continually producing better versions of his visions. With the language we hear comparing these two leaders, Maathai comes off sounding inspirational because of her dedication to an issue that is so vast it cannot simply be fixed. Knowing that producing mass-scaled results is unlikely is hard for people to commit to, so when someone does it is inspirational. While Jobs is spoken about as a visionary in one specific field because of the tangible products he produced. Jobs’s success did end up inspiring people, so there is not a definite truth in his role as only an entrepreneur. Similarly, Maathai used motivations like financial benefit to entice people to participate in her vision, which is less inspiring and more incentivizing, like an entrepreneur. Thus, both Maathai and Jobs had leadership and entrepreneurial elements in the way they lived and led, and the quote at the beginning cannot be taken as absolute truth.

PLEGED
Grace Hall

Works Cited

Austen, Ben. “The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?” Wired, July 23, 2012. https://www.wired.com/2012/07/ff_stevejobs/.

Gettleman, Jeffrey. “Wangari Maathai, Peace Prize Laureate, Dies at 71.” The New York Times, September 26, 2011, sec. Africa. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/world/africa/wangari-maathai-nobel-peace-prize-laureate-dies-at-71.html.

Gladwell, Malcolm. “The Real Genius of Steve Jobs,” November 7, 2011. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/11/14/the-tweaker.

Isaacson, Walter. “The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs.” Harvard Business Review, April 1, 2012. https://hbr.org/2012/04/the-real-leadership-lessons-of-steve-jobs.

NobelPrize.org. “The Nobel Peace Prize 2004.” Accessed October 31, 2019. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2004/maathai/26050-wangari-maathai-nobel-lecture-2004/.

Northouse, Peter G. Leadership: Theory and Practice. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2016.