How do you define leadership?

I think that the basis of leadership is competence,
integrity and ambition. One needs to be competent in what it is that they are
doing, one’s concept and explanation of integrity needs to be congruent with
what it is that they are doing and one needs to have ambition to reach for a
vision and follow through with it. The world is constantly changing and many
times organizations can clearly see that change is coming but they refuse to
act and they are put in a manufactured crisis because of this refusal to act
when the change is forced upon them. A leader with ambition can avoid a crisis
of this type. A look at the administration of the healthcare industry over the
last 40 years can illustrate this point. Competence and integrity are a necessity
if one wants to inspire and lead people. Transparency can also be listed but
that goes along with integrity. One can say that competence and integrity are
the basis of management.

Leadership is about vision while management is about administration.
An organization needs both to function and often times a leader flows through a
continuum between being a leader and a manager. The question now is how to lead
people? There are many schools of thought on this, some focus on the tasks at
hand, some focus on the people being lead and some focus on the traits of the
leader. There is no clear winner but the evidence points to the school of thought
focusing on the people as being more effective. For changing organizations the
winner seems to be transformational leadership. A summary of this type of
leadership can be found at this link below.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cutting-edge-leadership/200903/are-you-transformational-leader