Leadership Models & Theories

There have literally thousands of books written on this subject, and whilst it is always useful to learn from others, leadership is a factor of much more than theories.  Each person has to find a way of leading that is congruent with who they are, so it comes over as authentic.  However, I felt it might be helpful to summarise some of the more important ideas about leadership in one place.

In the last 60 years there has been a revolution in Leadership from ‘Command & Control’ to ‘Business Leadership’. A great deal of money being invested in this by both government and NGOs. The change in the understanding of leadership is as significant as the fall of communism. Change is at the root of it.

John Adair, of University of Surrey & Sandhurst, described three levels of leadership

• Team leadership (control of a single team)
• Operational leadership (control of a number of teams which make up a complete operation)
• Strategic Leadership (control of the entire business/ organisation)

Leadership is required at all levels of an organisation, and teamwork is required to bind the teams together.

A leader needs to :-

• Define the task
• Plan
• Brief / communicate
• Control
• Evaluate
• Motivate
• Organise
• Set an example

As a leader moves up this pyramid, they need to also:-

• Set a direction
• Align peoples’ efforts
• Bring out the best in people
• Act as a change agent
• Handle uncertainty & crises

An interesting question to ponder is “Why is it that one person is accepted as a leader in a group (and not someone else)?"

A Leader needs the following qualities:-

• He/she must personify the key qualities required in your field technically competent)
• Enthusiasm
• Integrity (required to generate trust)
• Toughness, fairness and being demanding
• Warmth, humanity and tact
• Humility (arrogance means you don’t learn)

These days most people recognise that there are two distinctly different types of leadership:-

• Positional: that comes from your position in the organisation, and
• Situational: that emerges from what is happening on the ground (think of the person soldiers actually follow under fire)
• Knowledge: that derives from being technically knowledgeable & competent (‘knowledge is power’)

A leader, to be effective, needs to derive his/her authority from all three sources.

Xenophon, an Athenian general and student of Socrates, asked “Why do sailors, who are undisciplined when ashore, obey the captain on board in a storm? Because he knows…”

In the 1960s, working on behalf of the US military tried to analyse & understand Leadership. They observed two types of behaviour:-

• Actions to achieve the task
• Actions to look after the ‘people’ issues.

Meanwhile in the UK, John Adair, then teaching at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst carried out some observation work on young officer cadets handling leadership tasks. He noticed that the effective leaders met three sets of needs:-

• The needs of the task
• The needs of the team undertaking the task
• The needs of each individual within the team

He shifted the attention from describing the behaviour of the leader to understanding the needs of the situation in these three key areas.

Each group, team and organisation has it own unique culture, made up as follows:-

A leader needs to establish a real partnership with the rest of the organisation to meet its aims and treat people as partners; they will respond accordingly.

There are seven qualities of a strategic leader:-

• Direction (purpose and aim of the business)
• Strategic thinking (bridging the gap between now and the future)
• Making it happen (details)
• Relating the whole to the parts
• Establishing allies & partners outside the business
• Releasing corporate energy
• Develop leadership in the others

Adair observed that there are ‘Four paths up the mountain’

• What you are
• What you know
• What you do
• What you believe

In the 1990s, Peter Senger at MIT, said that leaders needed to address 5 key areas:-

• Developing everyone’s view of the bigger picture through systems thinking;
• Developing personal mastery at all levels
• Challenging the mental models and beliefs of the organisation
• Developing teams that captured their learning
• Promoting a shared vision throughout the organisation

Yet another way of describing leaders is to describe what they do as either:-

• Transactional: People do what they do because they are paid to, or
• Transformational: Where the leader inspires them, and creates & shares his/her vision.

It used to be rather simplistically thought that leaders where one or the other. In real life most will be able to use both to some degree, however the better the leader the more they have access to both. To move from transactional to transformational a leader needs to develop the following five skills:

• Perceptual: being able to see things from many, different perspectives; seeing others’ points-of-view, seeing the ‘big picture’
• Communication: being able to persuade, listen and present well
• Displaying conviction: being passionate and committed to the agreed course of action (in times of change people need certainty… even if it is sometimes illusory!)
• Empathy: to be able to see things from others’ view-points
• Resilience: the ability to keep at it, to overcome the inevitable problems along the way, and, once you have arrived to make everyone realise that he journey isn’t over!

It has been estimated by some academics that the untapped potential of some organisations is as high as 80%! Clearly the job pf any leader is to marshal his assets and resources as effectively as possible and it really is true that ‘people are your greatest asset’! This is why modern leaders are now required to demonstrate high Emotional Intelligence (EI as opposed to IQ). The key attributes that Daniel Goleman identifies are:-

• Self awareness
• Self management
• Motivation
• Social awareness
• Social skills

In reviewing various management styles he the four most effective ways to build positive emotional capital are:-

• Using cross functional teams
• Creating a shared vision
• Coaching
• Using democratic decision making processes

Of course, this brief overview is by no means exhaustive, but I hope that you find it useful. It does capture some of the key threads & themes that leaders need to focus on. My personal summary of leadership would be:-

• Create & share a clear compelling vision
• Focus on the customer
• Bring in the best people and bring out the best that they have to offer
• Communicate regularly and clearly. Always making as much time to listen as to speaking
• Be honest, people already know three quarters of the truth!
• Be positive & enthusiastic
• Plan & measure the things that will make a difference
• Be sensitive in choosing when you need to be supportive and when you need to be hard on people
• Recognise that sometimes you need to stop, regroup and even to retreat a little, but you never stop
• Moving forward
• People will go much further with a little bit of honest praise and recognition, so never ‘hog the glory’!
• Make Change a permanent feature of your culture

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In describing today's accelerating changes, the media fire blips of unrelated information at us. Experts bury us under mountains of narrowly specialized monographs. Popular forecasters present lists of unrelated trends, without any model to show us their interconnections or the forces likely to reverse them. As a result, change itself comes to be seen as anarchic, even lunatic. - Alvin Toffler