One of the most important challenges for current and future business leaders involves finding the thinking space and courage to keep the long view in mind for their organisations.
Leaders are increasingly in the public eye, with numerous stakeholder groups enforcing their entitlements. This challenge becomes increasingly important and difficult as business practitioners rise through the ranks of their organisations and take on more general management and strategic leadership roles.
In this week’s Key Concept Exercise, you will continue further exploration of the ideas and issues you studied in previous weeks. You will explore challenges and opportunities to improve leadership practice and analyse the advantages of effective leadership practice. You will also evaluate how leaders manage teams and how teams shape the requirements for effective leadership.

To prepare for this Key Concept Exercise:
• Reflect on the specific challenges of global leadership.
• Identify and retrieve one peer-reviewed academic journal article and one professional or trade journal. These articles should be related to leadership theories and frameworks (the academic article) and leadership practices (the professional or trade journal) that you think are relevant to one of the global challenges you chose to address in Week 5 (Week 5 we covered Cultural Intelligence) . The articles must have been published within the last two years.
• Consider how each of your chosen articles discusses the meaning, influence and importance of leadership.

To complete this Key Concept Exercise:
In an approximately 500-word response, address the following issues/questions:
• Analyse the challenges and opportunities to improve leadership practice with regards to your identified global challenge. In your analysis, explain the advantages effective leadership practice would bring to the meeting of that challenge. Additionally, explain how each of your chosen articles relates to your analysis.
• In formulating your Key Concept Exercise, consider the following questions:
o Why did you choose this global challenge and these two articles?
o What specific leadership practices and behaviours might help you overcome those global challenges and create opportunities?
o How do the two leadership articles relate to the challenge you have identified and how can they help meet the challenge?
o How can leadership practice be improved in general?