Leadership Skills

Yesterday my father advised me to read Develop your leadership skills . I started reading today and I couldn't stop myself in between. It is a great book written by John Adair.
Leadership skills have now been universally recognised as a key skill
It is possible to develop your own abilities as a leader. All this book is about How to do that.
I just want to share few points that I found intresting about leadership
Nobody can teach you leadership. It is something you have to learn. You learn principally from experience. But experience or practice has to be illuminated by principles or ideas.
A) PERSONALITY AND CHARACTER : Personality and Character are important qualities of leadership.
A Leader should possess, exemplify and perhaps even personify the qualities expected or required in his working group. Without it he will lack credibility. (Incidentally, here is one of the first differences between leaders and managers: the latter can be appointed over others in a hierarchy regardless of whether or not they have the required qualities.)
Qualities Of Leadership:
1. Enthusiasm. Can you think of any leader who lacks enthusiasm? It is very hard to do so, isn’t it?
2. Integrity. This is the quality that makes people trust you. And trust is essential in all human relationships – professional or private. ‘Integrity’ means both personal wholeness and adherence to values outside yourself – especially goodness and truth.
3. Toughness. Leaders are often demanding people, uncomfortable to have around because their standards are high. They are resilient and tenacious. Leaders aim to be respected, but not necessarily popular.
4. Fairness. Effective leaders treat individuals differently but equally. They do not have favourites. They are impartial in giving rewards and penalties for performance.
5. Warmth. Cold fish do not make good leaders. Leadership involves your heart as well as your mind. Loving what you
are doing and caring for people are equally essential.
6. Humility. This is an odd quality, but characteristic of the very best leaders. The opposite to humility is arrogance. Who wants to work for an arrogant manager? The signs of a good leader are a willingness to listen and a lack of an overweening ego.
7. Confidence. Confidence is essential. People will sense whether or not you have it. So developing self-confidence is always the preliminary to becoming a leader. But don’t let it become overconfidence, the first station on the track leading to arrogance.
Some may question the inclusion of integrity in this list. Are there not good leaders, such as Adolf Hitler, who totally lacked integrity? There is a useful distinction between good leaders and leaders for good. Whether or not Hitler was a good leader is a debatable matter – in some respects he was and in others he was not – but he was certainly not a leader for good. But this is all a bit academic. For leadership that does not rest on the bedrock of integrity does not last: it always collapses, and usually sooner rather than later. Why? Because that is the
way of human nature.
You can see that what you are is an important strand in your leadership. Remember the Zulu proverb, ‘I cannot hear what you are saying to me because you are shouting at me.’ This strand in your leadership is also one of the three main paths up the mountain, the three lines of answering those core questions
‘What is leadership?’ and
‘Why does one person rather than another emerge as the leader in a group?’
Review your progress as the profile of your strengths and weaknesses (in terms of personality and character) begins to unfold and change in the positive direction. Always remain open to feedback on that score, however painful it may be.
B) SITUATIONAL APPROACH : Some Generic leadership qualities are situation-related, but others – such as enthusiasm, moral courage and stamina – are found in leaders in widely different situations.
The main contribution of this situational approach is that it emphasises the importance of knowledge in working life; and knowledge is linked to authority. There are four forms of authority among people:
1. The authority of position and rank – ‘Do this because I am the boss!’
2. The authority of knowledge – ‘Authority flows to the one who knows.’
3. The authority of personality – in its extreme form, charisma.
4. Moral authority – personal authority to ask others to make sacrifices.
Knowledge creates confidence in others. For this reason your acquisition of technical and professional knowledge is actually part of your development as a leader.
But don’t imagine that having the appropriate technical or professional knowledge in itself qualifies you for leadership. Again, it is necessary but not sufficient. All the main strands of authority – position, knowledge and
personality – are important.
C) GROUP APPROACH : A third line of thinking about leadership focuses on the group. This group approach, as it may be called, leads us to see leadership in terms of functions that meet group needs: what has to be done.
Again we have three important areas in this approach
Task Need
Team Maintenance need
Individual Needs
These three areas of need overlap and influence one another. Leadership is essentially an other-centred activity – not a self-centred one.
D) VISION : Leaders at all levels should stimulate and focus a sense of direction. ‘Vision’ literally means to see where you are going. Allied with some creative thinking, it can provide a new direction for a group or an organisation.
E) PLANNING : Planning means building a mental bridge from where you are now to where you want to be when you have achieved the objective before you. But the key issue is how far you should make the plan yourself or how far you should share the planning function with your team. It depends on several key factors, notably the time available to plan and the competence level of the team members.
Planning requires that the what, why, when, how, where and who questions are answered.
F) BRIEFING : Briefing is the function of communicating objectives and plans to the team. It usually involves standing or sitting in front of the team and briefing them in a face-to-face way.
Like all functions, briefing can be done with skill, for there is a right way to brief a group and a wrong way. Briefing, in fact, is part of a much larger communication skill: effective speaking.
Here are some guidelines:
a. Be prepared. Rehearse and practise. Make sure that you have some professional-looking visual aids: ‘A picture is
worth a thousand words.
b. Be clear. Double-check that what you are saying is not vague, ambiguous or muddied – leave talk like that to the
politicians!
c. Be simple. Reduce complicated matter to its simplest form without oversimplifying. Avoid technical language or
jargon that your audience will not understand.
d. Be vivid. Colour your message with enthusiasm, confidence and humour. Make it live – make it exciting and challenging and fun.
e. Be natural. You do not need to be a great orator. Just be yourself – your best self.
Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood. -- By William Penn
Briefing is not something that you do only at the outset of a project and then forget about. Most probably, especially if the team is new or inexperienced, you will have to repeat the objective and plan as work progresses. It is always a function waiting to be performed.
But again remember that listening is co-equal in importance. You need to be a listening leader.
G) CONTROLLING : Controlling is the function of ensuring that all the energy of the team, and the resources at its disposal, are turning wheels and making things happen.
Success at directing, regulating, restraining or encouraging individual and team efforts on the task (and in meetings) is the criterion for testing a leader’s effectiveness as a ‘controller’.
H) EVALUATING : Performance has to be judged in relation to those values, which are usually implicit in the organisation’s purpose.
As a leader, you should have a relationship with each member of the team – an equal but different relationship – as well as a relationship with the team as a whole. That will involve you in talking and listening to each individual. Your observations and conversations may lead you with some of them to take the role of a coach and counsellor.
I) MOTIVATION : As a leader you must understand needs in individuals and how they operate, so that you can work with the grain of human nature and not against it. You can refer
A H Maslow’s concept of a hierarchy of needs
Fifty per cent of our motivation comes from within us, as our unique pattern of individual needs unfolds inside ourselves and points us in certain directions. But the other 50 per cent comes from outside ourselves,
and especially from the leadership that we encounter. Therefore as a leader you can have an immense
effect upon the motivation of those around you.
Key principles for motivating others
1. Be motivated yourself. If you are not fully committed and enthusiastic, how can you expect others to be?
2. Select people who are highly motivated. It is not easy to motivate the unwilling. Choose those who have the seeds of high motivation within them.
3. Set realistic and challenging targets. The better the team and its individual members, the more they will respond to objectives that stretch them, providing these are realistic.
4. Remember that progress motivates. If you never give people feedback on how they are progressing, you will soon demotivate them.
5. Provide fair rewards. Not easy. Do you reward the whole team, or each individual, or both? Either way, the perception of unfair rewards certainly works against motivation.
6. Give recognition. This costs you nothing, but praise and recognition based upon performance are the oxygen of the human spirit.
J) ORGANISING : Organising function concerns more than structuring or restructuring the architecture of organisations. Systems, Admin and TimeManagement also come under Organising.
H) PROVIDING AN EXAMPLE : ‘Leadership is example,’It may take many shapes and forms, but it has to be there.
A short course on leadership.
The six most important words…
‘I admit I made a mistake.’
The five most important words…
‘I am proud of you.’
The four most important words…
‘What is your opinion?’
The three most important words…
‘If you please.’
The two most important words…
‘Thank you.’
The one most important word…
‘We.’
And the last, least important, word…
‘I.’
The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu summed it up in the sixth century before the Christian era:
A leader is best
When people barely know that he exists;
Not so good when people obey and acclaim him;
Worst when they despise him.
Fail to honour people,
They fail to honour you.
But of a good leader, who talks little,
When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,
They will all say, ‘We did this ourselves.’
You cannot avoid being an example of some kind or other, simply because the people who work with you will always observe what you are and what you do as well as what you say.
One very powerful form of leading by example is sharing fully in the dangers, hardships and privations experienced by the team.
and finally....
Never be afraid of failure. The path forward will be strewn with the results of your failures as a leader. For the only way you can move from being a good leader – where you are now – to becoming a very good leader, even an excellent or a great one, is by aiming higher. And that is bound to generate shortfalls. But persevere. In the end they may say of you that you are a born leader!
About the Author
John Adair is the world’s leading authority on leadership and leadership development. Over a million managers worldwide have taken part in the action-centred leadership programmes he pioneered.
John had a colourful early career. He served as a platoon commander in the Scots Guards in Egypt, and then became the only national serviceman to serve in the Arab Legion, where he became adjutant of the Bedouin regiment. He was virtually in command of the garrison of Jerusalem in the front line for six weeks. After national service he qualified as a deckhand in Hull and sailed an Arctic steam trawler to Iceland. He then worked as an orderly in the operating theatre of a hospital.
After being senior lecturer in military history and adviser in leadership training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and Associate Director of the Industrial Society, in 1979 John became the world’s first Professor of Leadership Studies at the University of Surrey.
Between 1981 and 1986 John worked with Sir John Harvey-Jones at ICI, introducing a leadership development strategy that helped to change the loss-making, bureaucratic giant into the first British company to make £1 billion profit.
John has written over 40 books, translated into many languages. Recent titles include How to Grow Leaders and Effective Leadership Development. Apart from being an author, he is also a teacher and consultant.
From St Paul’s School he won a scholarship to Cambridge University. John holds the higher degrees of Master of Letters from Oxford University and Doctor of Philosophy from King’s College London, and he is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Recently the People’s Republic of China awarded him the title of Honorary Professor in recognition of his ‘outstanding research and contribution in the field of Leadership’.
Some of the Great Leaders
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3821/is_200806/ai_n25418613
Leadership developement
http://www.leader-values.com/Content/detail.asp?ContentDetailID=795
Some of the great Leaders about leadership
A leader should know how to manage failure by Former Indian President APJ Abdhul Kalam
http://arunbansal.com/video/president-apj-abdul-kalam.htm
The Essence of Leadership by NarayanMurthy
http://www.rediff.com/money/2005/jan/04spec.htm
‘It is easy to find a thousand soldiers but very difficult to find a general,’ says the Chinese proverb.
Then why cant you be the one...
Hope ths article helps you to excel your leadership qualities.