Monthly Archives: September 2015

September 15, 2015 · 8:16 pm

Let’s Start at the Beginning–What is Leadership?

What is Leadership?

This is the most important question in any discussion on  how to build your personal leadership skills.  It is also the most difficult to answer.  Leadership is a behavior.  Leadership is a perception.  Leadership is a process.  Leadership is a set of skills.  Leadership is a position.  All of these are true.  And all of these are inadequate to define leadership.  Most importantly, leadership is in the eye of the beholder.  What you believe about leadership shapes your belief about how leaders should behave.  What the people who behold you as a leader believe about leadership shapes what they require of you as a leader.  What is happening at the time–the circumstances–shape what is required of you as a leader.  So . . . what you believe about leadership is only one small element of what should be shaping you as a leader if you want to be an effective leader.

So How Do You Figure This Out?

You start any investigation of leadership by examining your own experience.  When you think of the best leaders you have ever known, what characteristics did they have?  What behaviors?  What knowledge? How did they make you feel?  How did they communicate with you and others.  Was there a difference?  How did they delegate?  How did they handle the big picture?  How did they handle the detail?  Were they outgoing or were they introverted?  Were they smart?  Did the people who worked for them like them?  Did they get along with their peers? Whatever your answers to these questions, chances are that is what creates your concept of a “good” leader.

Your “good” leader had some negative characteristics too, though.  What did s/he do wrong?  Or, just not right?  What were the flaws, character, career or leadership, that your ‘best’ leader had.

Now, make a similar list of characteristics, behaviors, skills, knowledge of your “worst” leaders.  Why were they such bad leaders?  What did they do wrong?  What was it that set you on edge about them?

Now—put your “honest” hat on.  For the “bad” leader to actually have a leader role, s/he must have done something right.  What were the good qualities of your “worst” leader?  If you still have your “honest” hat on, the good and bad characteristics/skills/behaviors of both the “best” leader and the “worst” leader are likely to have some overlap.  If not, go back and adjust your “honest” hat and look again.

How People Become Leaders

Combinations of skills, traits, experiences, behaviors, and circumstances come together to put people in leadership roles.  One of my favorite stories–possibly apocryphal, but it makes the point nonetheless–is that Winston Churchill was a failure as a leader until World War II came along and the English people needed Churchill’s specific combination of skills.  True?  I’m sure there is another version or two of this story.  However, there are specific circumstances that call out for specific skill sets from leaders.  A leader who is great in a steady state, leading a large stable organization is not necessarily the right leader for a small entrepreneurial organization, or vice versa.

Baking a Cake

Becoming a leader is like baking a cake from scratch–a little of this, some of that, stir it up and bake it at the right temperature for the right length of time.  Becoming a leader is a lot more complicated than that too.  Becoming a leader requires you to be a learning machine.  It requires you to evaluate yourself in a richly open and objective way.  It requires you to push yourself to have experiences and to reflect about those experiences.  It requires you to try things that don’t work and learn from them.  It requires you to learn to listen and trust and experiment.  It requires you to remain flexible throughout.  There is not a leader anointing body that picks you and says “thou art a leader.”

If you want to be a leader, then I invite you to stay tuned through this series of posts on leadership.  I invite you to challenge yourself to answer the questions and reflect on your own knowledge of leadership.  I challenge you to talk to others about leadership.  It’s up to you.

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September 13, 2015 · 5:03 pm

Are You A Born Leader?

Are Leaders Born or Are They Made?

I recently had someone ask me if I believed that leaders could be created.  I actually was very surprised.  I thought everyone knew that leaders could be developed.  Haha.  Note to self:  EVERYONE doesn’t know anything.  Second note to self:  Just because you believe something, that doesn’t mean it is a fact to be known by everyone.  Third note to self:  Never, never, never forget that your “facts” aren’t everyone’s facts.

Born or Made, Other Things Are Involved

OK.  I’m done with my lectures to myself.  Let’s look at whether leaders can be developed.  First of all, I’ve spent a reasonable amount of my life teaching Leadership at the graduate level, and I’ve developed and implemented Executive Development programs.  I’ve WATCHED people grow leadership skills.  Were they born with nascent skills that became more dominant?  In other words, were they born leaders?  Maybe.  But they weren’t great leaders, and then when they were exposed to ideas, to new ways of thinking and interacting, when they practiced, they became better leaders.  In fact, frequently, they began to see themselves as leaders and began to consciously behave as leaders.

The Center for Creative Leadership, which does great research and training on leadership, recently asked C Suite leaders whether they believed that leaders are born or made.  Fifty eight percent of those asked believe, like me, that leaders are made.  Nineteen percent believe that they are born and twenty nine percent believe that it is both.  If leaders are born, then there isn’t much we can do to grow leaders.  However, if they are born with potential, then of course there are things that can be done to make them better leaders.

Let’s start with what creates a leader.  If a leader is born, then it is his/her personal characteristics and traits that makes him/her a leader.  Presumably these folks would show leadership capabilities at a very young age.  What is interesting about that, though, is that how children are judged as “leaders” is very different than how adults are judged as “leaders.”  I once participated in an effort to develop “leaders” at the middle school level.  We surveyed their teachers as to what characteristics demonstrated leadership and the results were eye-opening.  Most teachers thought that the best leaders in the class were those who behaved themselves, were quiet and did their work.  Imagine that being the criteria in an Executive Development program for a corporation.

I think most people would agree that these personal characteristics are a part of what makes a leader. The dispute is just about how much these characteristics matter.  The other things that contribute are leadership training and experiences.  The same Center for Creative Leadership  (CCL) Survey, asked both those who thought leaders  were born and those who thought leaders were grown how much these other factors played in leadership development.  Interestingly, both groups thought all played a role–they just varied in how much of a role.  Those who believed in the ‘born’ method thought that traits were  31%, learning  28%, and experiences were 38% of the development of leaders.  Those who believed in the ‘made’ method thought that traits were  20% , learning 34%, and experiences were 46% of the development of leaders.

The bottom line–whether leaders are ‘born’ or are ‘made,’ your own self development can have quite an impact on your leadership capabilities.

It’s Up to You

You can sit around and wait for your organization to “develop” you.  You can mourn the fact that you aren’t “one of the chosen high potentials” in your organization.  You can decide that you can’t afford an MBA or an Executive certificate.  OR you can get to work on developing yourself.  What do you know about leadership?  Have you read about Situational Leadership?  Have you read the Leadership Challenge? Do you know the theories of leadership? Do you understand power?  Do you know when to use which kind of power? What role does charisma have in leadership? What experiences can you add to your resume that will grow your leadership abilities?

Stay Tuned

This is the first of a series of posts focused on growing your leadership knowledge, practical knowledge, skills and confidence.

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