Leadership Skills - Developing Leaders

Summary of Chapter of Fred Luthans, 12th Edition.

One list of suggested leadership skills  includes the following:

1. Cultural flexibility. In international assignments this skill refers to cultural awareness and sensitivity. In domestic organizations the skill can be managing diversity. Leaders must have the skills not only to manage but also to recognize and celebrate the value of diversity in their organizations.

2. Communication skills. Effective leaders must be able to communicate—in written form, orally, and nonverbally.

3. HRD skills. Leaders must have human resource development (HRD) skills of developing a learning climate, designing and conducting training programs, transmitting information and experience, assessing results, providing career counseling, creating organizational change, and adapting learning materials.

4. Creativity. Problem solving, innovation, and creativity provide the competitive advantage in today’s global marketplace. Leaders must possess the skills to not only be creative themselves but also provide a climate that encourages creativity and assists their people to be creative.

5. Self-management of learning. This skill refers to the need for continuous learning of new knowledge and skills. In this time of dramatic change, leaders must be self-learners. They cannot expect others in their group  to help them to learn.

This list is as good as any other. However, as an academic analysis, Whetten and Cameron provide a more empirical derivation of effective leadership skills. On the basis of an interview study of more than 400 highly effective managers, they identified 10 skills mentioned by many. 

1. Verbal communication (including listening)

2. Managing time and stress

3. Managing individual decisions

4. Recognizing, defining, and solving problems

5. Motivating and influencing others

6. Delegating

7. Setting goals and articulating a vision

8. Self-awareness

9. Team building

10. Managing conflict

Statistical techniques identified the following four categories of effective leadership skills from the skills listed by managers:

1. Participative and human relations (for example, supportive communication and team building)

2. Competitiveness and control (for example, assertiveness, power, and influence)

3. Innovativeness and entrepreneurship (for example, creative problem solving)

4. Maintaining order and rationality (for example, managing time and rational decision making)

Whetten and Cameron note three characteristics:

1. The skills are behavioral. They are not traits or, importantly, styles. They consist of an identifiable set of actions that leaders perform and that result in certain outcomes.

2. The skills, in several cases, seem contradictory or paradoxical. For example, they are neither all soft- nor all hard-driving, oriented neither toward teamwork and interpersonal relations exclusively nor toward individualism and entrepreneurship exclusively.

3. The skills are interrelated and overlapping. Effective leaders do not perform one skill or one set of skills independent of others. In other words, effective leaders are multiskilled.

The personal skills of developing self-awareness, managing stress, and solving problems creatively overlap with one another, and so do the interpersonal skills of communicating supportively, gaining power and influence, motivating others, and managing conflict. 

Leadership skills development through career development have become more critical than ever.

Organizational behavior and human resource experts are now being asked to identify methods to train and develop leaders.  Zand suggests that the three primary areas to be developed are knowledge, trust, and power, which he refers to as the “leadership triad.” (Dale E. Zand, The Leadership Triad, Oxford University Press, New York, 1997).

A recent panel of leadership experts agreed that leadership can be taught and learned.

About 30 percent of both male and female leader emergence can be attributed to heritability. Thus 70 pcerent of one’s leadership is open to experience, learning, and development. In other words, the research evidence on whether leaders are born versus made greatly favors that they are made, developed. Management/leadership education is certainly based on the preponderance of the role of development since about two-thirds of the 50 top-ranked business schools offer leadership courses and they also offer leadership courses to executives as part of their management development programs.

About Leadership Programs

Some believe an entire new leadership development system should be used. Believing that most traditional leadership programs fail because they start with competencies and focus on individuals, one group of trainers recommends a different approach. They advocate beginning with business results and working back to abilities to be developed. In other words, it is more valuable to clarify the business purpose and desired outcomes first, and then move leader trainees toward methods of achieving these outcomes and in the process develop competencies.

Contemporary Leadership Development Approaches

One current  approach to leadership development is centered on competencies. In this approach, there are  competencies required have been derived from three ways: (1) research based, (2) strategy based, and (3) values based. Research-based competencies are from behavioral data gathered from successful leaders. Strategy-based competency models derive competencies from top manager informants regarding strategic company issues and directions. The values-based model focuses on the company’s cultural values, as interpreted by company leaders. 

Briscoe and Hall argue for a new approach, that advocates continuous learning that emphasizes flexibility in responses, and the individual leader is enabled to “learn how to learn” and therefore adapt to continually changing circumstances as found in today’s environment. Many competencies are  learned in this learning and knowledge-acquisition-based approach.

Avolio and Luthans’s promote authentic leadership approach, They emphasize that one’s life course of events plays a big role in authentic leadership development (ALD). Life’s  planned  “moments that matter” can be accelerated. Avolio and Luthans define ALD as:

The process that draws upon a leader’s life course, psychological capital, moral perspective, and a “highly developed” supporting organizational climate to produce greater self-awareness and self-regulated positive behaviors, which in turn fosters continuous, positive self-development resulting in veritable, sustained performance.

The ALD process can be proactively accelerated by starting with a desired end-point, enhanced self-awareness (both understanding your actual self and your potential best self) and self-regulation. A key to ALD is bringing the future to the present.

Another recently emerging method of leader development is coaching.  Tactics that support effective coaching include accessibility, attention, validation, empathy, support, compassion, and consistency. A supportive coach can reduce the loneliness of the CEO’s role by creating bonds that help the leader renew energy levels and provide new challenges. Also, effective coaches clarify boundaries and expectations for leaders, limiting leaders’ efforts to definable targets and time frames for learning. To obtain the greatest value from a coaching approach to leader development, some of the more important practices include a strategic focus for coaching efforts, integrating coaching into existing HR systems, building reliable “pools” of coaches, and systematically evaluating the results.

Other Indirect Techniques for Developing Leadership Effectiveness

Besides the leadership skill development programs, other more indirect techniques involving training, job design, and behavioral management can also be used. For example, leaders can undergo personal growth training that may involve a combination of psychological exercises and outdoor adventures. This approach is aimed at empowering participants to take greater responsibility for their own lives and ultimately their organizations.

The same goes for cross training and the newer “pay-for-knowledge” approaches that an increasing number of U.S. firms are beginning to implement.

Besides training, job redesign is another important technique leaders can use effectively. This approach attempts to manage the job rather than the extremely complex person who holds the job. From enriching the job by building in more responsibility, the more recent approach is to concentrate on the characteristics of identity, variety, significance, autonomy, and feedback identified by Hackman and his colleagues. 

There has been a stream of research to support the concept that when employees perceive these characteristics in their job, they do high-quality work. Leaders need to give special attention to the autonomy and feedback characteristics of their people’s jobs. Autonomy involves empowering their subordinates to make decisions and solve their own problems, in other words, giving them more control over their own job. Feedback can be built into some jobs, but leaders also must provide specific, immediate performance feedback to their people.

The behavioral management approach,  can also be effectively used by leaders to meet the challenges ahead. The organizational behavior modification (O.B. Mod.) techniques based on the principles of operant conditioning and social cognitive theory were shown  to have excellent results on human performance in organizations. It is important to note that O.B. Mod. interventions have used mainly nonfinancial rewards—feedback systems and contingent recognition/attention—in both manufacturing and service organizations.

Besides drawing from the established job design and behavioral management approaches, the search for effective leadership practices has recently gone to some unusual sources for leadership wisdom. Various books and case studies are made available to learn leadership lessons. Besides marketing books, these titles should remind researchers and practitioners of the wide variety of approaches to leadership development that have been underused or yet to be explored. One such example is the increasing use of so-called E-Tools that assist in leadership development online via the Internet.

For example, we  (authors of the book) were able to develop a broad cross-section of managers’/leaders’ positive psychological capital, which is an important dimension of authentic leadership, in a short online training intervention.

Leadership is clearly important in a wide variety of settings beyond business and industry.  There are also many similarities between the capabilities of effective business leaders and political leaders, including  the tendency to be a visionary with strong communications skills, even though there are also key differences. The question remains, however, as to whether or not one set of skills (business) can be readily adapted to the political world.