Leading by example
Leadership is essentially a process in which one individual, or sometimes a small group of individuals, influences the efforts of others towards the achievement of goals in a given set of circumstances. Most people, at some points in their lives, are leaders. They assume leadership in family situations, on the sports field, and in many other situations, including work. Leadership is not just about the qualities of an elite few, although the leadership skills of chief executives and their teams are of fundamental importance.
There is no single definition that satisfies everyone. John Adair, the leading British authority on the subject, says ‘leadership, like all personal relations, always has something unknown, something mysterious about it’. However, before people can become successful leaders, they do need certain attributes:
- General intelligence, although not necessarily being very much brighter than the people they are leading
- Technical or professional knowledge and competence in their particular fields – how otherwise would leaders be respected?
- Personality: leaders should be energetic and committed, maintain contact with their people, and understand their strengths and weaknesses
- The ability to inspire, although this quality may be rarer than some of the others and is perhaps the most difficult to develop
- Listening, sharing and delegating skills (and not interfering unnecessarily), because in groups of more than around five people it becomes impossible to know all the necessary detail
- Self-knowledge, to understand their own strengths and weaknesses, which in turn will enable them to turn to others in their group to compensate for their own biases or deficiencies.
All these attributes will help to develop trust, without which leaders will not command loyalty. The last four, ‘softer’, non-technical attributes might be summed up as ‘emotional intelligence’, a subject which now seems to be gaining a place on management and leadership development programmes.
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