Abstract

Leaders are people who have the ability to discern what the group they are part of need and decide to help them meet those needs; they set goals pursuit of which help to accomplish the aspirations of group members. Some say that leadership skills are learned and others say that they are part of the individual’s psychological makeup. Whatever are its roots, what is empirical is that effective leaders quickly discern what needs to be done and go about helping to get them done. They have the ability to organize people to accomplish group goals. Group goals are accomplished through humSan and capital resources. Leaders are able to coordinate human beings activities and manage capital resources in the pursuit of set goals and monitor and account for how those resources were utilized. Effective leaders trust the people they lead and the people in return trust them; effective leaders are optimistic and have hope for a better life and future for the people; the people bloom in the presence of effective leaders, for in them they see hope for living; people relish the sense of direction towards a better future that pervades the ambience of effective leaders. Having delineated the nature of leadership the paper used those as criteria to look at leadership practices in rural Alaska. It delineated some of the problems with exercising effective leadership in rural Alaska, such as the different conception of leadership by native cultures and mainstream American culture and suggested heuristic ways to overcome those identified problems. Keywords: Leadership, Rural, Challenges.