Critical Book Review: Understanding Leadership” by Tom Marshall
Introduction
The book “Understanding Leadership” written by Tom Marshall is one of the most remarkable literatures on the understanding of leadership. Aiming at spiritual leaders, this book explains what leadership entails, and how to become a leader in the true sense. It starts its discussion with the general description of a leader. He describes, what differentiates a leader from managers, administrators and ministry.
This book provides guidance to Christian leaders regarding many topics, which include, foresight, criticism, caring, timing, failure, and also regarding dangers of power. He continues laying out the characteristics that he thinks a leader should possess. Tom Marshall with his experience identifies the problems and solutions that leaders face.
The author Tom Marshall is a writer of multiple books including “Healing from the Inside Out” and “Living in the Freedom of the Spirit”. His work has always inspired many and his followers keep on increasing.
Summary of content
The book Understanding Leadership is a guide for individuals with a spark of leadership in them, and teaches very well. Starting with the concept of leadership, this book ends up explaining why leaders fail.
In between, all the concepts in precise and coherent manner are described relating to leadership, including the foresight, caring, goal setting, dangers of power, abilities of a leader, relationships of a leader, staying in touch with followers, relating the leadership with instincts, the right goal setting, spiritual aspects of a leader, what elements leaders share with prophets, and what differentiate the leaders from other people like manager and administrator.
Analysis and evaluation of the book
This book starts with the general description of what it means to be a leader. Tom, on the basis of his extensive experience including that of bible colleges, youth and mission schools sum up the essence of leadership in his book. He says that first characteristics of a leader that separates him from others is that they are going somewhere; that is; they have a direction aiming towards goals to accomplish in the future. He presents the first element of leadership as, foresight. He says that leaders lead by anticipating, they look towards future and identify their goals. This portion which marks the start of the book, clearly represents the style of writing. The words are easy, and concepts catch the attention of reader at once. Tom strikes the mind of reader by asking questions, and then a sudden answer to it, keeps them at the same understanding level. I mean that he never lets the reader think of the future; he ensures with the flow words that reader stays with him.
The sense and reflection of his teaching skills is perfectly reflected in this book. The way he differentiates the leaders draws a clear line between the different people in an organization. He says that, anticipation is closely related with the vision. A vision enables the leader to see beyond the clouds of ambiguity and gives an insight into what future holds. That's what makes a leader set his goals and create a path to follow for others. As the leader stands for a person, who influences others towards the accomplishment of goals (Daft, pp. 514).
He points out that foresight includes the spiritual aspect as well; it somehow links with the prophetic gift. His understanding of literature of scholarly and religious literature is reflected throughout his philosophy.
Tom identifies the ability of leader to anticipate, identify, understand, and break the problem into components and then come up with a solution. He emphasizes that Prophets task was to see the future and present a certain way as to how it will be solved.
Tom further points out that, there are two distinct abilities that organizations seek, operational and conceptual abilities. He says that conceptual skills are fundamental to leaders. The anticipation of the future is useless if it does not translate into goals that are meaningful and achievable. The timeliness and relevance of goals is of particular importance.
One of the qualities of leaders, that is universally recognized, is that leader are found among people. They stay in touch with those whom they lead. Staying in touch with them is the key to understand the ground reality. Managers sitting in their offices going through the reports can never get that sense, that leaders achieves by dwelling among their followers. Studies also confirm this that, leaders orientation towards employees in the organization contributes in their motivation and performance (Robbins & Judge, pp. 390).
In this book, tom emphasizes that whether the goals are short, medium or long term in the time frame, the point is whether they advance in terms of long term objectives. If the objectives are set too high and too long in their time frame, it is likely to demotivate the followers.
The most important thing in making a decision regarding the future is perhaps the availability of timely, accurate and reliable information. As we know, no such source can provide information regarding future in an absolute manner; Tom suggests, that, at this point the leader brings out his ability of insight. The leader abridges the gap created by data missing. The decision the leader make are with surety and confidence. If, the leader is not sure himself; he can never gain the belief of his follower. Leaders also bring change with the powers they hold (Dessler, pp. 318-319).
Then he jumps to Danger, power at work. Again, the experience of Tom Marshall speaks as he writes on this topic. He says leaders handle power. Leaders are distinguished from others in the sense that they decide what is to be done, and how. It requires the use of their powers to accomplish the goals they set earlier. He says that knowledge is power, and power is dangerous as it can bring ego in a person. The remedy for such problem is to distribute the power and/or impose checks and balances. Another solution to this problem, as suggested by Tom, is that frequent replacement of leaders. Ego starts to develop, when people think they are superior to others, and they cannot be replaced so the introduction of this approach is likely to solve the problem.
Conclusion
As it is evident from the preceding discussion, that Tom's experience of teaching and relation with literature is clearly highlighted in his way of expression. The book Understanding Leadership is truly a guide, not just an expression. It presents the concepts and differentiates a leader from similar looking people, and guides individuals to become a successful leader in life. This is truly a book that spiritual leaders should refer to.
Understanding Leadership with Tom Marshall is very interesting, easy and clear. This books is one of the renowned literature of our time.
Work Cited
Daft R., Leadership in Organization,South Western Educational Publishing 6th edition, (2003), Pp.514.
Dessler G., Human Resource Management: Training and Developing Employees, Cenage Learning (2009), Pp. 318-319.
Robbins S. & Judge T., Basic Approaches to leadership, Organizational Behaviour Prentice Hall,13th Edition, (2010), Pp.390.
