I cannot overstate my belief in the importance of leadership in the functional
effectiveness of groups of people. These groups include the greater society,
organisations and teams. Organisational and team effectiveness, for me, needs
to be measured both as quality and output of the group, and employee
satisfaction (I nearly used the word happiness but that is so hard to define
that I avoided it, but the idea is in the mix somewhere given people spend so
much of their life at work-I think it should be as good an experience as
possible).
Now, you’d be thinking that I am stating the obvious. The problem is that
I don’t think it is obvious to a lot of leaders in organisations or in any
social setting where leadership might exist. This is based on years of seeing
atrocious leadership where organizational/social dysfunction is a result.
One of the key problems that organisations (and people electing leaders
in other social setting) make is that they often don’t differentiate between
leadership attributes and leadership skills. There are some people who will
never be able to learn and apply effective leadership skills because they have
the wrong attributes. The latter are not readily learned later in life given
they are embedded in our genes, body chemistry and brain structure, or are
habituated.
Those with the right attributes are worth all the training that can be
thrown at them because they have the right ‘DNA’, so to speak. Let me expand on
this by briefly describing a model of leadership for the 21st
century that I developed a year ago and that was published by a colleague (Lisa
Marue Blaschke from Germany) and I in a book on learning.
The capacity to accept and manage
ambiguity
Attributes
Low need for control
Openness to Experience (one of the
Big 5 personality traits)
Moderate on perfectionism scale (Big
5)
High Stability (low anxiety) (Big 5)
Capability
Honesty and integrity
Flexibility and adaptability
(The Big 5 personality traits are acknowledged
in the psychological research as being excellent and stable predictors of human
behaviour)
Skills
Reflexivity and review
Flexible project management skills
Effective communication of ideas
Creativity and innovation
Fostering an adaptive organization
or team
Developing high performing teams
The ability to foster engagement
Attributes
Empathy
Optimism
Flexibility to change approaches as
circumstances change
Skills
Interpersonal effectiveness
Ability to self-regulate
Understanding of how to motivate
others
Ability to foster a shared purpose
and vision
Performance review and corrective
action
Skilling the workforce
Maintaining direction
Customer focus
Conflict resolution and negotiation
The capacity to learn
Attributes
Willingness to change own ideas or
beliefs
Courage and integrity
Skills
Reflection, reflexivity and action
learning
Ability to research and learn
Having wide and accessible networks
Ability to share openly with others
Knowledge management skills
The ability to foster collaborative
learning
Ability to apply learning
Technical capability
Growth and development
The ability to use open systems
thinking
Attributes
Willingness to empower others
Skills
Decision-making
The capacity to frequently scan the external
environment
Ability to foster participative
democracy/collaboration decision-making and
process
Capacity to work in a team as leader
and member
Ongoing internal and external
analysis of effectiveness (continuous improvement)
The ability to filter information
(research skills)
Customer focus
Action orientation
Business awareness
Hopefully,
the reader can see the difference between attributes and skills, even though I
have not expanded much on the dimensions. I think it is necessary to employ on
attributes in the first instance, given appropriate technical skills to perform
the work. However, technical skill deficits can be made up through training.
Selecting a leader with the wrong attributes can be very expensive. So, the
emphasis on employment or promotion should be on attributes. Clever
organisations get this. Many less than clever organisations do not. The
election of leaders in social contexts, including our politicians is also less
than clever in many instances. In short, we need to get the selection process
right.
