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Leadership Today - are modern leaders born? Do they need development or should we give them training?

Leaders get others to want to do things that they believe should be done. They make the difference between average and excellent performance. They deliver the bottom line.

However, leadership is not as straightforward as it used to be. The reality today is that many managers have to lead teams that operate across countries with different languages and cultures and even sometimes conflicting government regulations.

The risks to managing these teams remotely are considerable. Communicating across cultures, languages and time zones means that these types of teams are more likely to fragment and fail than traditional ‘face to face’ teams.

So what is it that will make a modern leader effective? What skills and approaches are needed that go beyond those familiar from managing conventional work teams?

Are view is that Leadership today is analogous to a puzzle, because while great Leaders demonstrate some common characteristics, each leader is different; they have to interact with their environment in their own way, and have therefore become effective for different reasons. Leadership is therefore not simply about being ‘born’ or being ‘made’, it is also about personal choice, the choices and decisions that a leader makes, and at the very heart, whether or not they have the desire to take responsibility and choose be a great leader.

We believe at the very heart of a great modern leader there are six key ingredients that need to be in place. These are as follows:

 Choice – An individual’s ability to choose their response, to make intelligent judgements and decisions and to take the leadership path.
 Integrity – Having a conscience and sound ethics. Having clear principles and willing to stand up for them.
 Will – The desire and determination to lead and succeed.
 Confidence – The appropriate self awareness and display of self belief.
 Influence and communication – The ability to encourage others to follow, to lead by example as well as by persuasion.
 Survivability – The resilience to keep going despite obstacles and to see things through.

We see theses six ingredients as the ‘backbone’ of the modern leader, and as such are also the ‘backbone’ of our leadership puzzle.

Essentially, these ingredients are personal attitudes and traits, and therefore are particular and specific to each leader. They are difficult to teach, but can be learned and developed. They can also be assessed in a number of ways:

 By the end product that someone achieves – assessed against the size and nature of the challenge that a person takes on.
 By the behaviour (and words and congruence) that a person demonstrates in the process of leading.
 By what they model to us and to others – particularly by what their team think of them/how they respond to them.
 By how they act at times of critical incidents or activities or crises.
 By how well they use their intelligence and the judgements and decisions that they make.
 Through psychometric profiling.

We believe that in addition to the ‘backbone’, there are eight further components to effective leadership. These are as follows:

 Authenticity - Acting naturally, being true to oneself and ones beliefs.
 Communication -. Ability to listen and understand others. Ability to be understood by others both, verbally & in writing (communication appears as twice – underlining its importance)
 Challenge - Not accepting the status quo. Taking on the difficult things, and encouraging others to do so.
 Collaboration – Working effectively with others, team, peers, boss, stakeholders.
 Flexibility - Adjusting and adapting to changing circumstances. Learning from mistakes as well as successes.
 Growth Learning, developing oneself and others.
 Motivation - Ability to get others to want to do the things that need to be done well.
 Vision - Capability to imagine the future. To communicate a compelling future state, better, bigger, more exciting, and inspiring.

In the main the above characteristics are skills and competencies that can be taught and readily developed.

Some are characteristics which depend upon the inter action with and the response from others and which therefore require a level of intelligent judgement and interpersonal skill to produce an effective outcome e.g. growth, motivation, challenge, collaboration, influence.

In summary, modern leadership (i.e. The Leadership Puzzle) is therefore a blend. It is the development and use of the key ingredients and characteristics that produces an effective leader – and the best combination will be different for different people and the environment that they operate in – hence the Leadership Puzzle. Generally, the characteristics cannot easily be taught – but they can be learned by people through exposure to a series of opportunities, experiences and challenges. They can be learned by failure and one’s response to it as much as by success.

Above all they come from within the individual and are developed from within – to be a truly effective leader we have to want it, to exercise our choice about taking it on and seeing things through in the medium and long term and not just in the short term.