Can leadership be taught?
9th January 2009
My belief is that most people have the capacity to lead and for as many who want to lead, there will be an equal number of those who do not. However, whilst there a many strategies that help build the skills, I feel that you do need an element of innate ability to inspire others as a foundation to build on i.e. you need both nature and nurture.
I was thinking about this on a recent workshop where my group of delegates were exploring the differences between being a ‘manager’ and a ‘leader’. One of the key elements they had identified was the ‘ability to persuade other people to want to do what they want them to do’. I thought about the character needed to do this and a charismatic person with sound judgement would appear to be important. After all, if you are to stay in business, they need to understand what is needed to meet your goals otherwise they could lead your people up the wrong path very quickly. On the other hand, the charismatic person could be dangerous is they are able to persuade others – Hitler springs to mind! The all conquering alpha male has appeared regularly in companies I have worked with historically, and whilst they do achieve short term results, the team often develop low morale and then follows issues with absenteeism and poor productivity in the longer term.
So what is needed? The old competitive style of management is not popular these days; a more collaborative approach is needed, where leaders are good at working with their teams and sharing their knowledge. All of these are skills that can be developed through training, coaching and experience. My own approach is to develop the leader as a coach or mentor to those within their span of control. This takes time, but does reap rewards. The key element is the ability to listen to people in order to involve them in taking judgements. Modern technology has made many managers poor in this area as it encourages them to avoid face to face contact.
On the same workshop, the delegates asked who would be a modern model of great leadership. We explored a few examples and their choice was Richard Reed who co-founded the Innocent Smoothie brand (who incidentally have just introduced a range of vegetable based products, which are great for a quick hot supplement in this cold weather!). The company is growing very fast – it started just eight years ago with three people and now employs 194. Richard role models the principle that a clear vision is critical to the teams understanding of the way forward and to focus them on making clear judgements. He encourages decision making at all levels and feels staff have the knowledge and experience to implement meaningful change. He also believes in the KISS principle – and stays true to his own principles consistently.
Happy New Year to you all.
