STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP
TRAITS OF GREAT LEADERS
How savvy leaders rule the roost by Jayashantha Jayawardhana
Although leadership is increasingly associated with wealth, power, popularity and showmanship, there’s more to it than these superficial indicators. In essence, it’s the achievement of a goal through the direction of one’s followers.
If you can persuade your collaborators to achieve particular ends, you’re a leader. And if you can accomplish this day after day and year after year, in various settings and circumstances, you’re a great leader.
In this context, a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article written by William Prentice titled Understanding Leadership notes that leaders may not necessarily possess or display power, or be popular. The author adds that their followers may never do what leaders wish out of love or admiration.
What’s more, they may not have colourful personalities or use memorable devices to dramatise the purpose of the group or focus attention on their leadership.
A leader’s unique achievement is human and social, which springs from understanding his or her fellow workers, and the relationships between their individual aims and the organisational goals that need to be accomplished.
Before leaders can motivate their fellow workers to achieve a given goal, they must know why they do what they do. What really motivates them? Is it financial rewards or are they seeking recognition or validation? Or do they work where you do simply because they enjoy working there?
Are they working to fund their lavish lifestyles or expensive hobbies, or hone their skills so they can embark on their own ventures? Are they working there because of the frequent parties and outings – or is it because of the relaxed and laid-back atmosphere? Or do they work for the organisation because its mission resonates with their personal values or ideals?
The list of possible motivators could go on and on. But the bottom line isn’t to oversimplify or generalise why people work – because it’s rarely for financial rewards alone.
As Prentice emphasises, “human beings aren’t machines with a single set of push buttons. When their complex responses to love, prestige, independence, achievement and group membership are unrecognised on the job, they perform at best as automata who bring far less than their maximum efficiency… and at worst, as rebellious slaves who consciously or unconsciously sabotage the activities they are supposed to be furthering.”
Indeed, some leaders tend to believe in the effectiveness of the ‘command and control’ approach in leadership as seen in the military. But this is where – most of the time, if not always – we find the purest example of an unimaginative application of simple reward and punishment as the motivating devices.
In defence of the military however, these two observations are noteworthy: soldiers are killed and have to be replaced, which is largely the basis for treating them uniformly and mechanically; and clarity about duties and responsibilities as practised by the autocratic chain of command is absolutely essential to warfare.
While the fairness of considering assembly line workers as being expendable is questionable, there’s no doubt that the articulation of duties and responsibilities is a clear sign of an efficient organisation. But as a leader, you should know better than to mistake the autocratic chain of command or organisational chart to be the basis for getting things done.
In reality, the organisational chart is nothing but a simplified diagram. Your role is to convince each person to fully understand his or her role in relation to the group effort, and then carry it out wholeheartedly.
If you succeed as a leader, that’s because you’ve mastered two basic lessons: people are complex; and people are different. So when you assign responsibilities, and recognise and reward people, you should be profoundly aware of this complexity and the differences in play.
Ideally, your organisation should have workers at every level reporting to people whose dominion is small enough to enable them to know those who report to them as human beings.
The golden rule for all human relationships – which is to treat others as you wish to be treated – is applicable to leadership too… but within limits. Although it’s oversimplified, this is a great improvement over the primitive coercive approaches or the straight ‘reward for desired behaviour’ approach.
Prentice says all of us have known unselfish people who earnestly wished to satisfy the needs of their fellow beings but were remarkably incompetent as executives, or perhaps even as friends or spouses, because it never occurred to them that others had different emotional requirements.
In essence, becoming an effective leader requires the adoption of a healthy mix of firmness and emotional intelligence.
