What is a Leader?

From some of my previous posts, comments and responses to questions on various forums, you will see that I define a leader in a fairly loose fashion.  Indeed, if you think about it, leaders do come in many shapes, sizes and forms and appear to be all things to all people.

Leaders appear to embody the Barnum Effect – “You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people, some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time”.

• A leader can lead some of the people, all of the time.  These are their core followers.
• A leader can lead all of the people some of the time.  In certain circumstances a leader can attract support from most people, if not all.
• But leaders cannot lead everyone all of the time.  That is human nature for you, fortunately, because we need to be able to doubt our leaders from time to time and question their motives and actions.  Otherwise they may fall victim to the dark side of human nature.

This embodiment of the Barnum Effect lies at the core of leadership effectiveness.  A leader has the ability to manage themselves and show an exemplary role model;

• They need great Personal Strengths that will attract the respect of their followers.
• They will need great Inter-Personal Strengths that can manage relationships across the great range of personalities they need to influence and gain the respect of.
• They need to have a Strong Vision or Objective that they are deeply committed to and which they can communicate with great enthusiasm and clarity that represents a set of commonly accepted principles that people will value.  That vision will be one that will represent a better place for people.

At THG Ireland we have been working on Leadership Development utilising the Self Development Reports (SDR) from The McQuaig Word Survey.  We have found that the SDR is a highly effective coaching tool that helps managers cross that line that divides managers from leaders.

We have found that the SDR identifies those behaviours and provides the guidelines that develop the flexible behavioural self management that underpins Emotional Intelligence, that magic ingredient common to all effective leaders.

The Need to Lead, The Need to be Led

In most classifications of personality we see the division of people into two broad classes, Leaders and Followers. Throughout the history of mankind we have seen evidence that this basic classification is universal. A need for power and a need for affiliation.

We see tribes and clans everywhere we look. In National affinities, football teams or musicians and their fans, political and religious followers. The need for leadership is everywhere. We see it in global branding also, Coke Cola and Pepsi Cola, Nike and Adidas, Apple and Microsoft.

Leadership appeals to human nature. We can have many different types of leaders from Robert Mugabe to Mother Theresa, from Bill Gates to Jack Welsh and there are even a few good political leaders whom I admire like …. There are good leaders and bad leaders, not to mention the downright ugly. However, for every leader there is a loyal band of followers. Without followers, there can be no leaders.

Given the innate need for direction and guidance in our human nature, it can be relatively easy to gather followers. All you need to do is to tap into your followers desires. You can be the leader of a small group or a large following. You can lead for good or evil or somewhere in between.

In difficult and challenging times, it can be easy to rouse people into action, if you have good leadership skills. However having good leadership skills tells us nothing about your values.

In the past and even at present, we have seen some very good leaders with very poor ethics and values who have created strife and chaos.  A certain Mr. Hitler or Pol Pot just to mention two. The ability to lead does not always mean you are right or just or honest.  We have seen a bit of that in the world of high finance recently.

The ability to lead places an onus on the leader. The leader has a responsibility not only to their followers, but also to society and the world at large. The leader must possess an honest and sustainable vision as their own guiding light.

In business and politics the quality of leadership has not been so important in quite some time.   Most of the world is crying out for leaders.  I’m not too hopeful that they will emerge from the world of politics.  Politicians and politics just do not mix.  Politics is about getting elected, it’s a power play and it never fails to take people’s eye off the mission of democratic service.

Will the next generation of leaders come from revolution or evolution?  Will they arise out of chaos or will they arise by peaceful means?

Leadershift – The Concept is Easy – Getting there is Tough

Leadershift – That’s what I call the move from ordinariness to Leadership.  Leadershift is about climbing up a short flight of steps to become the true leader.

But what is a leader?  There is a simple definition – A Leader has Willing Followers.  If your followers are not willing, then you are simply a manager.  Something else is making them follow you.

The Leader is defined by their followers.  If your followers are a troublesome lot, but follow orders, you may simply be a gang leader.  Indeed, there are many kinds of leaders.  You can be a leader for a day or you can be a leader for a lifetime.  You can be a leader in your field of expertise, or you may lead a team of experts from differing backgrounds to form a business or a government or an army.

Leaders are shaped by their environment.  If you come from a downtrodden background, you may become a revolutionary leader, you could be a Che Guevara or a Mahatma Gandhi.  Middle classes tend towards business leadership or politics.

The learning in that environment is critical.  You may become an accidental leader if your environment is not supportive of your learning.  Most of the revolutionary leaders travelled that difficult path.  But somewhere in the background there was a hero, a mentor, a coach.  There was one particular person who shone out as their role model.  If they were lucky, it was a close and interactive relationship and the learning was quick.

Leadership competence takes a long time to build.  A short course will achieve nothing.  If the course is successful, your participants were already leaders.  All the course achieved was to pull the last remaining pieces of the jigsaw together and provide the confidence to break out of their shell.

The quality of the leader is a product of their environment.  In business, that environment is the workplace, and in particular the existing leadership or management.  In politics it is the political environment, in the community or in the home, it is their social and family environment.

A leader is a complex animal.  They have a great many facets.  A true leader, though, has grown beyond their environment.  They stand above those around them and see a bigger picture.  What they do with that picture is shaped by their learning in getting there.  If they have seen corruption or brutality, they may well be moulded by it and use it in their leadership style.  We may see the arrival of a dictatorial leader.  Not a true leader.

Leadershift is about this pathway.  It is travelling along a much sought after path, a search for the holy grail.  But that journey defines the leader.  What they experience on that pathway sets up a particular facet of the leader.  What they learn and how they learn and who they learn from and with sets the scene for their future as a leader.

In my next post I’ll explore these many facets and we will see how they define the leader for good or bad.

It is easy to be a Leader – Just GROW UP!

Well it’s not quite that easy and as anyone who has ever been a teenager or is still a teenager will tell you.  Growing up can is a right pain in the …  Of course, there is a huge step from being a teenager to becoming an adult. But that step is mostly driven by parents, peers, hormones and hard lessons.

The problem is, that most of us have had such a tough time making it to adulthood, that we leave off growing up, settle down into a normal life and wait for old age, grandchildren and death.

There is much more to life than waiting to die and in between times we manage to pack in a lifetime of experience. But just what is that experience? We know from ability and aptitude testing that people tend to peak in these work related skills around their mid thirties and for the majority, it is all downhill from there.  For many a lifetime’s experience is just a few experiences repeated over and over, for some it is the same old mistakes, but for a select few, it is an opportunity to keep growing and learning.

After we reach physical maturity we still have a lot more growing to do.  Mental maturity is still out there for the taking.  There is more to the body than flesh and bones.  The greatest challenge in life is to achieve maturity in all of the other areas, spiritual, social, intellectual, interpersonal and intrapersonal to name but a few areas.

What happens to people in their mid thirties that leads to this decline for so many. We see the decline, not just in mental capacity, but also in health and fitness. People tend to become more set in their ways. Their circle of friends begins to contract, best friends become strangers. We become more set and stubborn about change. Younger people and new music begin to irritate us. Technology and change in the workplace becomes a chore where in the past it was a fun challenge.

Is it just a coincidence that by the mid thirties most people have settled into their career and their family life, the back is broken on the mortgage and they have the obligatory 2.5 kids, the dog and 2 weeks in the sun every year? Have we lost our hunger for life?  Or is it that the job has become a means to an end?  Just an ATM in the corner that feeds the family and the mortgage?  Is the next step up the ladder, just too far away?

Many of us reach a kind of life plateau once we have achieved what we set out to achieve and resort to dreaming about what might have been, but taking no action.  Fortunately many more set their sights on higher targets.  Some may park their jobs to one side and become active in their communities, using the skills they have learned in the workplace, or more often, using skills they have that are not being utilised on the job.  They become sports coaches of local teams, they become active on residents committees or local clubs, some even go into politics.

The point is that most of us are driven to find an outlet for our natural or acquired abilities.  Some find it in work, some in family life and some in their communities.  Occasionally frustration may set in along with some other social factors and people may be driven to find their outlet in crime, but I’m not going there yet.

My focus is on growing up in the workplace.  One of the problems it that the vast majority adopt a parent/child relationship with their employees, or even a Theory X approach.  To enable the development of Leaders in the workplace, organisations need to learn to change their culture.  Unfortunately, while many have tried to do this, their short-term focus has gotten in the way.  It takes a little over a few weeks to turn a child into a functional adult as many of us have found out.  Likewise, achieving leadership ability is a bit beyond a course or programme, otherwise we would all be leaders by the time we leave school or college.

Developing leaders is like nurturing your children, it takes time, sometimes a lifetime.  On a more practical basis, there are ways of speeding the process up, if you know what is going on and how it works.  However even at best, you are looking at 12 months or more.  The great thing is that the outcome is a sustainable performance that will also include in the role of the new leader the nurturing of the next generation of leaders and a fundamental change in the way people look at growing up.

Leadership is part of growing up.  It goes beyond achieving your goals.  It is about realising your unknown and untapped potential.  It all there lying dormant beneath layers of ignorance and the conditioning of a lifetime.  The time is ripe for mankind to move onto the next step in evolution.  The fuller utilisation of the brain that makes us what we are.  Leadership ability has some interesting side benefits that go well beyond work.  Leaders make better lovers, parents and friends.  Real genuine leaders that is, not just modified managers.

This has been a slightly longer post than intended, but then, the issue is a pretty serious one.  I’m planning on putting almost a whole lifetime of studying human nature into this thread.  Become what you can become, just grow up!

What happened to REALITY

I’m a subscriber to HR Magazine online and get regular news updates from them by email. The link below takes you to an article I received yesterday. It’s a short article, but worth a read, as long as you don’t get too distracted on the site.

In summary, it says that some 70% of the Irish workforce claim to be disengaged with their job and 60% indicated that they plan on leaving Ireland within the next 5 years. One of the key causes of this disengagement is that 46% of employees feel that the wrong people are being promoted within their organisation. Interestingly I came across some research some years ago that suggested that HR Directors would not re-hire a similar percentage of their current workforce.

The scary thing about that is that it reflects the reality of the selection process in general. Most organisations have no better than a 50/50 success rate when it comes to hiring or promoting the right people. It is really frightening for the future of our economy when you see just how aware most managers and employees are of the weakness of their selection processes and the competence of their hiring managers, and yet continue to do nothing about it.

Yet, the research in selection procedures suggests that; not only are there better ways to hire people, but that the cost of getting it right first time can be recouped within the first year of the successful hire’s employment. Many years back, the HR Consultancy Watson Wyatt produced evidence that investing in people produced the best return on investment a Board of Directors could expect. Only the smart businesses listened.

The link below went on to highlight another glaring rip in reality’s fabric by finding out that Irish managers rated their employee engagement levels at 7.8 on a zero to ten scale. That points to one glaring gap in business in Ireland, a lack of leadership. A manager could be expected to get it wrong, but a leader would never make that mistake.

http://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/news/bulletin/weeklyupdatebulletin/article/986817/?DCMP=EMC-Dailynewsalert

On that note, I shall finish this post, but watch this space for a short series of comments, ideas and provocations on leadership and the Irish economy’s lack of it. Thanks to Right Management for the research.

New THG Ireland Website

THG Ireland has an updated website.  We are very glad to have finally gotten to grips with the www and managed to figure out how to build and maintain a website, as we plan on updating it on a regular basis.

At the moment we have a bit about our Consulting Team, a few pages outlining The McQuaig System and our other services.  We have also added a Library page, where you can find out more information or read about our approach to solving some key business issues.

Over the coming months you can expect to see a lot about Leadership, Entrepreneurs and Change Management.  Our economy needs to recover quickly, mature and learn some key lessons from the past.  We have some ideas about how to get there.  You’ll also get some summaries on this blog, so if you find something thought provoking here, you’ll find further information on the website.

At THG are also planning on growing our Partner Network here in Ireland so that we can offer more to our clients.  We have our own areas of expertise, but dealing with people in the workplace goes well beyond our narrowly defined field.  For example, once you have picked the right people, you are heading into a minefield of Employment Legislation.  Likewise, during periods of change there may be Employee Relations issues, either with your employees on an individual basis or through a representative Trade Union.  Once again you are into an area of specialist protocols and skills.

While we may be experts at identifying training and development needs, our own training expertise is in the area of soft skills.  There are others, for example, who could do a much better job for clients in the area of hard skills training, or in the area of Health & Safety.

So check back with us from time to time.  New Partners will be announced both here and on our website at www.thgireland.ie on our Partner Links Page.

Welcome to the THG Ireland BLOG

Here on this page you will find comments, news, opinions and ideas about the people side of business.  Some of them may be informative, some provocative and some of them humorous.  We will do our best to keep our blog updated and relevant to CEOs, Entrepreneurs and HR People.  You might wonder why CEOs and Entrepreneurs along with HR, but trust me, there is a very vital connection.  Over the coming months as the posts build up, you will begin to see the clear link between the people side of a business and its success.

Organisations are not successful, only people can be successful.  If you hire the right people and  manage, develop and motivate them in the right way, then as a CEO or Entrepreneur your job is almost done.  You can move on to your next challenge.  A thorough understanding of the value of people is essential to the success of the CEO and the Entrepreneur as it is to all managers.

For HR People, we hope to provide the insight to help you help the rest of the business and keep the people on side.