Leadership has been described just as "the process of influencing others". It is most likely accurate to say that leadership has been a characteristic of all cultures right through history. It has definitely been an essential quality in all cultures that have survived and flourished. Despite its ubiquitous nature, on the other hand, a full understanding of leadership remains elusive. Military leadership is defined as "the art of direct and indirect influence and the skill of creating the conditions for organizational success to accomplish missions effectively." In common, junior leaders exercise their influence directly, at the same time, as senior leaders must employ both direct and indirect influencing methods. Even though this definition is an abstraction, closer examination helps discover some important aspects of military leadership. Influence can be direct (i.e., personal contact) or indirect (i.e., sending orders down the chain of command, regulations, standing operating procedures). Leadership must focus on an object, or mission. The process of leading relies on creating conditions so that an organization may function. With the exception of the term "mission," which has military connotations, the definition of leadership could apply equally to business and industrial leadership and to political leadership. It should be distinguished that whoever coined the foregoing definition did so by relying on a base of knowledge and by applying reasoning to some sort of theoretical construct, whether they realized it or not. (Bass, Bernard M (1998)
The body of familiarity that exists, that forms the foundation for courses on control and evaluations of leader performance, provides a priceless point of departure for developing and expressing a hypothesis of military leadership that should be generally appropriate. Whether it will prove accurate or not, a lot of the constructs that presently exist in leadership course literature in the United States have been applied.......
