Soft Leadership Summary

Topic

Critically review an article on leadership.

Rao, M. S. (2013). Soft leadership: a new direction to leadership. Industrial and Commercial Training, 45(3), 143 – 149. doi:10.1108/00197851311320559

There are many great leaders all over the world such as Prophet Muhammad, p.b.u.h, Mahatma Gandhi, Alexander the Great, and Tun Dr Mahathir bin Mohamad. All these leaders have their own style in leading their countries or communities. Prophet Muhammad, one of the most influential people not only from the religion that he leads which is Islam but also from his leadership style, at least to the Muslim all over the world (Encyclopedia Britannica, c2014). He is one of the most soft and gentle leader that have been known. Apart from Prophet Muhammad,

The 11 C’s are character, charisma, conscience, conviction, courage, communication, compassion, commitment, consistency, consideration and contribution. The leadership codes are strategists, executors, talent managers and human capital developers. In his paper, he also includes some questions asked by the leaders from several organizations that are interested in his concept. The questions are asked and answered during the ILA webinar. From the paper, he mentions that to become a soft leader, ones does not require to possess all C’s, enough to have majority of the C’s as others can be developed over time. He also adds that Mahatma Gandhi is one of the leaders that possess all 11

Reading through the paper, readers are delivered with the author’s promises to elaborate on the soft leadership concept as well as provision of the questions and answers from the ILA webinar that had greatly helped for those that had missed the webinar to clearly understand the soft leadership concept. Few examples of leaders that possess several C’s of leadership will help readers to understand more on the concept of the 11 C’s of leadership. In addition, the mention of the name Mahatma Gandhi is helping readers to envision the soft-leader.

Another criticism that can be made is this paper can be considered as relevant to the current situation. The modern world is not suitable era for leadership with force and strength. Although power in terms of force and strength are also important, they do not play an important role as in the World War I and World War II era. Nowadays, people tend to prefer leaders with great empathy and really concerns about the followers or partners in context of soft leadership. In addition, although Mahatma Gandhi, whom is considered as a soft-leader by the author, the term soft-leadership itself is relatively