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Today’s business executives may come in many shades and colours: sales executives, marketing executives, key account executives, human resources (HR) executives, account executives and scores of others. They seem to have little in common. They differ in sex, age, educational standards and experience. They employ vastly different styles. Yet, despite their differences, these executives share one common trait. Each of them has a goal of moving up the ladder and becoming a leader in his or her dedicated field.

If you are an executive aspiring to grow up, this series starting today will help you to achieve the goal by educating yourself about the practice of leadership.

Leadership traits

According to Warren Bennis, a professor at the University of Southern California, there are two ways of doing things: ‘either you can do things right or you can do the right things’. Doing the right thing is a better philosophical concept and makes one think about the future, about vision and dreams: this is a trait of a leader.

Leaders are concerned with fulfilling their vision and therefore, consider it natural to encounter problems and barriers that must be overcome along the way. They are generally more comfortable with risk and therefore, accept that the direction needed to reach their vision is not always the easiest path. A leader can turn problems into opportunities and will happily break rules in order to get things done.

Leadership roles can be applied to any situation where you are required to take the lead, professionally. Ideally, such leaders fast-tract their way up the corporate ladder because they have credibility and because people want to follow them.

CAN LEADERSHIP BE TAUGHT?

Many people also wonder if leadership can really be taught. People with vested interests (academics and those offering leadership training or literature of some sort) are convinced that it can. Many successful leaders, however, have never had any formal training. For them leadership is a state of mind and it is their personalities and developed skills that make them successful leaders.

You can, of course, learn about effective leadership skills and practices but being able to implement them yourself may require an altogether different set of skills and attitudes. The question “Can leadership be taught?” has no simple answer and we do not want to argue for one side or the other, but rather keep an open mind on the subject and provide information about the skills good leaders need.

SKILLS LEADERS NEED

John Hamm in his best-seller, ‘Unusually Excellent’ puts forward eight necessary skills required for the practice of great leadership.

1.  First, ‘be authentic’. Know who you really are. Hold true to yourself in the most difficult moments. There are situations that test your ability to stay true to your core values in the face of tremendous temptation to take the easy way out. Accept the disappointments in your past actively seek feedback from your team.
    
2.  Second, follow your commitment to authenticity with a determination to ‘be trustworthy’. Build a track record of honesty, fairness and integrity that creates a leadership equity within your circle. When it becomes necessary to make unreasonable demands on your team, this is the currency you need. People who are authentic and trustworthy are generally good and fair. They act like good friends. But these two virtues are insufficient to create committed followers. An important characteristic of leader is that they have not just friends or admirers but ‘followers’.
    
3.  Almost any version of success needs ‘committed action’ toward goals. And action requires teams of people assembled around leaders aligned with a shared vision. Become a ‘compelling’ leader by creating your committed followers that is different from one of believers. Leaders inspire followers who commit not only with their hearts but also with time and energy.
    
4.  Most organisations are propelled to success primarily by the quality of the people on the team. As David Ogilvy says, “Hire people who are better than you are, then leave them to get on with it. Look for people who will aim for the remarkable, who will not settle for the routine.” High performers set a different standard. They raise the bar for everyone. So, hiring great people is the highest leverage activity that leaders undertake. They know payoff can be substantial for the investment they make on people.
    
5. Competence is a three-legged stool: leading people, leading strategy and leading execution. ‘Leading strategy’ is equally important as the other two disciplines. To make a dream or a strategy come true, you must visualize it, but then you must make a plan – only then you can build it. Smart leaders do not initiate complex projects without a real plan and strategy.
    
6.  Next comes, ‘leading execution’. At the end of the day, leaders are held accountable. They get paid to produce the agreed-upon results. Execution is when race starts. From that moment onwards, preparation yields to the event itself and finally, winners and losers are determined. In most organisations, every day is a racing day. A day may start from the staging of the next move to the ongoing recruiting of the right talent to the hurried training that take place on the sidelines based on the new moves by the competition.
    
7.  If you accept a role of a leader, you implicitly agree to ‘be a communicator’ for the organisation. It is not a responsibility to you can opt out. The ability of a leader to communicate effectively is perhaps the highest leverage activity in his set of responsibilities. When you do it well, things work, smoothly and effectively.
    
8.  Your primary job as a leader is not to make most of the decisions that arise every day. You must lead the people in such a way that they will make decisions, or better decisions, than they would alone. But, of course, you need to make real-time decisions, in urgencies under pressure. Those are the ones that make your real career and set legacies.

In the next few weeks, we will be discussing in detail these eight points.

Leadership is really a mindset. To lead others with real impact, you must think through as many issues as you can, ‘from a leader’s view point’; never forgetting that you are a leader of a set of people. When you are a leader, you might be pressed into service as a battlefield commander, negotiator, strategist or any other role. But, if you hold the ‘mindset of leadership’ with the skills of a good leader, you will never fail but definitely do well.  

(Lionel Wijesiri, a corporate director with over 25 years’ senior managerial experience, can be contacted at [email protected])