Increase your leadership power to find and act on opportnities other miss

What is leadership? Developing the capability for leadership starts by helping those with leadership responsibilities build a rich understanding of what leadership actually is. Developing more effective leaders is enhanced when there is understanding of what leadership is and how it produces results. As obvious as that may sound, try typing ‘What is leadership (definition)?’ into Google and you’ll get 285,000,000 results. Clearly there are a lot of varying opinions on leadership. In addition, by the time they are in a senior managerial position, those in leadership roles in organisations will have been exposed to two or three models that represent what ‘good leadership’ is. They will have developed their own style of leadership, plus have one or two role models they aspire to emulate. So while it seems a rather simplistic starting point, for any leader wanting to enhance their capability it is a very good place to start. It may well be that leaders in a given context may require certain personality traits, ‘attributes’. But without a firm grip on the nature of the challenge of leadership, how can we know this for sure? This pragmatic approach helps avoid the leadership cliché that some are ‘born to it’. This is not how most of the popular approaches that occupy the leadership development space have come about. Instead of this ‘natural born leaders’ approach, sound understanding of leadership must start with properly considering and appreciating the context, process and systems, the ‘entities’ that are being led; namely organisations themselves.

First we help leaders understand the nature of the unique contextual challenges they face before we begin to look at what characteristics, skills and abilities are required to meet this challenge. We do this because this is where so many critical details are lost. We know from research that successful leaders do this more than less successful leaders. This habit of ‘scanning’ is a quality that many possess, but time and pressure can dull. So a predominant aim is helping provide a systematic approach that allows this to operate even when pressure is high and time is at a premium. Organisations have a profound effect on us and our productivity when we are within them. Only by facing up to how leadership will actually contribute to how well the organisation as a unique socially dynamic environment performs through the people within it, can a legitimate appreciation of the actual leadership challenge be made. What is an organisation? Once we know the source of an organisation’s and its people’s performance we can start to meaningfully ascertain what it means to influence the sources of performance. Consequently we also find out whether there are personality traits that are required in order to succeed in the endeavour. Like leadership this is often viewed as a ‘common sense’ subject, one that is ‘obvious’, but by the time someone is operating in a senior managerial role they will have acquired various notions on what an organisation is, does, how it behaves and so on. And as before this is interwoven with their personal experience. So having a systematic way that clarifies these often competing views is perhaps where the real ‘common sense’ sits? Disciplines such as psychology, complexity theory, systems thinking, neurobiology and even micro economics have provided the leadership development space with solutions that have worked within the subject matters of each discipline. However these are often applied without thought and regardless of whether the subject matter is in any way similar to organisations and the people who work in them. Therefore we propose that a well-grounded approach to leadership development must start with understanding how it is that organisations and the people working within them are able to perform as they do, in various circumstances and then to explore how this ability of organisations and individuals within them can be further enabled and enhanced by those tasked to lead.