What is an Effective Leader?

If you Google the word leader, you get more than 300 million hits. On Amazon, there are 480,881 books today whose topics have to do with leaders. It doesn’t help to go to Wikipedia to get a clearer definition because, right off the bat, 11 different types of leaders are named, from bureaucratic to transformational, to laissez-faire. In the field of leadership, there are as many opinions as there are writers, and there is also a lack of common language and tools. So it’s no wonder that if you ask any roomful of leaders or potential leaders what effective leaders need to be, know, or do, you get as many answers as there are people in the room.