Colin Powel and Leadership Traits



Executive Summary

Colin Powell was an important army general in the United States armed forces. After his service in the armed forces, he remained in national service by working under Presidents of the nation and maintaining an important place in the United States government.

During his many years of service, he was considered a great leader. In fact, he is considered one of the greatest leaders of all time. One reason if that he worked during war and peace times as well as in many diverse fields and department.

His work on leadership has gained worldwide attention and is considered one of the best works of modern leadership traits. According to him, leaders should always work from the forefront and never look back. They should have a vision and communicate it to their team members so that they may have a target to achieve. Another important aspect of leaders is that their learning should not stop. No matter in which stage of leadership they stand, they should never feel shy of asking questions from their team members and make decisions that are effective and do not cause the leader to lose his command.

Table of Contents

Executive Summaryii

Table of Contentsiii

Introduction1

Framework/strategic leadership competencies1

Background/Early Development3

Leadership Traits and Style5

Traits5

Leadership style8

Conclusion9

Reference11

Colin Powel and Leadership Traits

Introduction

Colin Luther Powell is a retired general in the US army. He is currently an American statesman. He was the first African American Secretary of State when he served from 2001-2005 under President George W. Bush. Powell also has the distinction of being the first African American Joint Chiefs of Staff (Magee, 1998). Apart from this, he served various positions during his military career such as National Security Advisor and Commander of the USAF command (Mufson, 2000).

Powell's has come up with various philosophies on leadership. These philosophies offer a clear understanding of senior level leadership (Magee, 1998). He states that in order to understand leadership skills, history needs to be analyzed and studied. Knowledge about history gives people a historic overview about leadership skills shown by some famous people (Powell, & Persico, 1995). History also gives a path to leaders especially senior leaders of the army to prepare for the future. These leaders influence the organization as a whole by providing motivation, direction and purpose to accomplish foreign and local missions. They also improve the organization by ensuring that everyone is trained for future missions. The thesis statement of this study is that Colin Powell is an example of strategic leadership (Harari, 2002).

Framework/strategic leadership competencies

According to the Army Field Manual 22-100, current strategic leadership principles define strategic leaders as military-political experts, war-fighters and the highest level of thinkers. It also states that certain technical skills, competencies, conceptual and interpersonal skills are possessed by strategic leaders (Powell, & Persico, 1995). This helps them to perform exceptionally at every level especially the strategic level. Such leaders offer a new vision for the future which may not be aligned to the army's culture. They also lead the change by educating people about the change ...