Do you have what it takes to be a leader? Could you excite, inspire, nurture and command your staff to follow you into a wall of blazing fire? A true-blue leader is indeed a unique, highly motivated and charismatic individual - but did they emerge from the womb with a hell-bent mission to lead, or can leadership skills be cultivated? We asked a group of leading management consultants and executive search representatives whether there is such a thing as a cookie-cutter leader.
According to Petr Bernat, a consultant with the Prague office of Korn/Ferry International, leadership is a combination of special skills - some of which you were born with, some of which you learn.
Most of the world's best leaders were born with certain highly developed characteristics, such as an extraordinarily high level of ambition, a special entrepreneurial instinct and disarming charisma. But generally, says Bernat, developing leadership qualities is a life-long process that begins at infancy. "If you follow children in kindergarten, you'll see that some of them automatically take the leadership role. They're the ones that say things like, What if we do this?' and the other children follow. A good child leader then hones his or her skills in the workplace, working with a mentor, on the sports field, and then during academic studies and special workshops and studies geared towards leadership."
Viktor Popovič, managing partner of McKinsey & Co.'s Prague office, argues that most leaders share a group of common characteristics that have everything to do with personality and nothing to do with position. "If you look at the current political scene, there don't appear to be too many leaders."
One of the main marks of a good leader, says Popovič, is competence. "This competence comes in two flavors," he says. "It's not just knowing what to do that counts; a good leader is also able to demonstrate in front of others that he or she knows what they are doing." It's this competence, together with an ability to learn quickly that Popovič labels "Technical Competence." The second kind of competence is more of a personal or behavioral competence. It's a special kind of empathy, a built-in ability to listen and to influence people without hurting their feelings. "This for me is really the biggest difference between a leader and a manager - leaders care. Managers think of other people as instruments. Leaders think of them as people. For example, it's extremely easy to fire people if you don't care. Managers think of non-performers as dead weights. Leaders think of them as valuable people in wrong places."
Another great distinction between a leader and a manager is that leaders are more apt to think of their roles as that of nurturer, educator and developer of their human resources. "Leaders have that special quality that encourages their staff to grow," says Popovič. "It's the ability to excite his or her staff in what they're doing - get them to open up, take risks, learn. It's getting them to achieve more than they ever thought they were able to do. I see this as one of the hardest aspects of leadership, especially if the manager in question is not natural, or jealous about other people taking the credit."
When a manager is too afraid to allow their staff to take the credit, then he or she basically lacks another of the most important characteristics of a good leader: courage. And natural courage is something that cannot be learnt.
When Popovič talks about courage, he means demanding unreasonable goals. "I'll give you a nice story. Many years ago Mr. Yamaha was told by his marketing people that the global demand for musical instruments was declining due to a number of factors - falling enrollment numbers at music academies, et cetera. Mr. Yamaha put this question to them: If you had 25 years and unlimited resources, could you reverse that trend? He clearly had the courage to think outside the box, outside the current situation and challenge the process."
This special leadership courage can be witnessed in other areas of management, according to Donna McCormally of Coopers & Lybrand in Prague. Most great leaders possess a highly developed sense of teamwork that enables them to step away from the limelight and allow others to take the credit. "Leaders don't feel as if they have to control the whole show themselves." They delegate, and they take responsibility for their delegation of decisions without stepping in at the first sign of a problem. "Some people can lead from the back," she says. "They open doors, build bridges and then get out of the way."
Courage also enables great leaders to surround themselves with strong personalities, says Steven Záruba, consultant at Andersen Consulting. "Watch great leaders, and you'll see that they often create an unusual coalition around themselves, a coalition that reflects the organization and not the leader him or herself. That's why the most effective coalition comprises very different people." Managers tend to surround themselves with "yes men" - people just like themselves.
A good leader, on the other hand, knows that a central coalition has to reflect the diverse opinions of the company itself, says Záruba. A good leader knows that if his central coalition is made up of similar characters, it will miss something. "Leaders have the strength to surround themselves with strong characters and not feel threatened by that."
One frequent mistake managers make when they try to develop their own leadership skills is to ignore the needs of the company, says Záruba. In a sense, it's the company that dictates how good the leader is at his job, he says. "If the company is going through big changes, or a crisis, it takes a very special strong personality to lead it. Someone who makes quick decisions and is good at crisis management. Someone who is good at baby-sitting, comforting, making people feel safe and reassuring them - basically, someone who can stop a volatile situation from escalating, because then you're into damage control." However, a very different kind of person is needed to lead a company going through a stable period of structured growth. "The leader has to recognize that his approach must be dictated by the needs of the organization."
In fact, there's nothing worse than the wrong person in the right place, says Steven Kelly of KNO Worldwide's Prague office. "Some leaders are stuck in roles where they should be in management. Others are in the wrong place in other ways. But there's no such thing as a cookie-cutter leader. Some people might tell you that all great leaders are born great. But the fact is, they're trained."
The things managers say:
The things leaders say: