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Our need to understand leadership usually starts from being placed in charge of a group of people or perhaps needing to accomplish some task with a team. Your approach typically, initially anyway, may tend to be rather functional. That is, we might just focus on achieving the goal and ignore the people or human side of influencing. Perhaps too, when asked about 'leadership' your views will be homespun ideas colored by personality and organisational culture, and embellished by previous experience as a subordinate or perhaps by images picked up from movies or books that you may have seen or read. The problem is this subject like the world itself, for both novice and experienced, is richer than it is possible to express in any single language. Moreover, to use a golfing analogy, old or young, novice or experienced, we can all do with regular practice and feedback to work on your swing (leadership). If you don't play golf, you're saving yourself a bit of angst but in terms of what I'm trying to say, insert any activity involving soft skills like focus, judgement, sensing cues and balance, to get my point. Now, if you're reading this, the issue might first be to decide what is leadership and perhaps at the same time, to ask what makes it effective. What Makes an Effective Leader? The answer to this question is neither easy, nor obvious. Part of the challenge is agreeing on what is 'leadership' and that's something like trying to describe a hippopotamus. Suffice to say, you'll know it when you see it. Just what is this 'it' though? Well, in trying to offer an answer, some small insights first from psychological literature: - first, little things can make as much (perhaps more) of a difference as big things,
- second, non-verbal cues are important, and these cues need to be seen in conjunction with
- (third) the contextual circumstances surrounding how we say and do things - which are most important and govern what we do.
And here is a primary difficulty in determining effective leadership actions - people looking at what you do when somewhat removed from the context will never really understand fully why you did what ever you did. For the same reasons, it does it make sense to try and emulate others when the context is likely to be very different. However, there are some principles that can guide your actions or general strategies. I said a primary difficulty... there are other issues too, but lets keep it simple for the moment - context is crucial.
If you are a golfer and I should add I'm no golfing tragic, you might agree the golfing analogy works with all three dots points above: little things like those distracting thoughts (flies) in your head; the contextual impact of an earlier mistake and slightly sweaty palms as you stand over your short putt; plus the more general need for what is called 'course management', which means playing to suit the conditions. Now to the question specifically, note I used the word 'effective'. Earlier research (albeit on 'managers') makes a distinction between good and effective managers: paraphrasing loosely, the former did more networking and got promoted quicker, the latter did more communicating and achieved better results with their team. |
Annie Leonard’s “