Management Blog

Can Leadership Be Learnt - Nature or Nurture?

A question frequently asked is can leadership be taught and learnt or are leaders born? We certainly believe so  - it’s part of what we do at Call of the Wild. I refer not to the vast raft of leadership and management theory that is taught in business schools, but to the development of your own innate ability to create a dream that others are prepared to help you achieve. Leadership is not a gift given to the select few it is a skill that can be developed, the most liberating thing is that we can choose to become a leader and to begin a journey of self-development.

 

Broadly speaking Call of the Wild work within  there main areas of leadership development:

• Leadership of self
• Leadership of others
• Leadership of vision/goal

Leadership of Self

We have all at some point in our lives been in a situation where we felt in complete control, a situation where you know exactly how to achieve your goal and more often than not success has followed. It is in these times that you are at your most resourceful.

Leadership of self is all about accessing this resourceful state in moments of your life when it is needed most, tools like NLP will help to develop this resourceful state by using techniques such as anchoring. Call of the Wild' s expertise lies in the use of carefully designed and facilitated leadership ‘tasks’ . These tasks take participants on a journey of self-discovery in a safe and controlled environment. Real tasks performed in real time will enable people to discover their current leadership abilities and begin to develop strategies that bypass any perceived or real limitations. It is the development of self-reliance and self-assurance that is the first and most important step on the leadership journey.

Leadership of Others

In order to make someone want to pursue your vision, you first need to see the world from their perspective, it is only then you can appreciate the implications of your actions. Do you have the strategies and flexibility in place to ensure that your team pulls in the same direction? Again NLP provides a sound set of principles from which to develop the ability to maximize these interpersonal skills. These skills are best developed in a real-world environment, as it is here that cause and effect is most obvious. Call of the Wild’s training takes place in an environment that places great emphasis on leadership and team-building, decisions need to be made quickly and success depends on the whole team pulling together- does this sound familiar? It should because it is fundamental to success in the workplace.

Leadership of Vision/goal

The responsibility of leaders to the success of the organization requires clarity of purpose. A premium is placed on the ability to think strategically in order to determine what is important, how to achieve it, and how to overcome any obstacles that may prevent a successful outcome.

 

Call of the Wild's programmes place delegates in situations that require both goal setting and problem-solving skills which will enhance and develop this critical aspect of leadership.

Reddin's 3-D Leadership model

Bill Reddin made the breakthrough to the next level of practical leadership theories. He developed the first relatively simple method of measuring what he called “situational demands” – i.e. the things that dictate how a manager must operate to be most effective.

Reddin’s model was based on the two basic dimensions of leadership identified by the Ohio State studies. He called them Task-orientation and Relationships-orientation. However he introduced what he called a third dimension – Effectiveness. Effectiveness was what resulted when one used the right style of leadership for the particular situation.

Reddin, like Blake, identified four major leadership styles on the high effectiveness plane and four corresponding styles on the low effectiveness plane, effectiveness being where the leadership style matched the demands of the situation. So a manager who demonstrated a high level of task-orientation and low relationships orientation (equivalent to Blake’s 9,1) where it was the style that was required was called a Benevolent Autocrat while a manager who applied that style of behaviour where the situation did not call for it was labelled an Autocrat.

The real theoretical breakthrough with Reddin’s 3-D model was the idea that one could assess the situation and identify what behaviour was most appropriate. (Effective Situational Diagnosis, W. J. Reddin and R. Stuart-Kotze, MEL, London, 1972.)

Taken from our Online Development Academy

For more information on leadership programmes visit Call of the Wild's website

Hersey & Blanchard’s Situational Leadership Theory

Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard came up to Toronto in the early seventies to attend one of Bill Reddin’s 3-D seminars. They were both junior academics teaching in Michigan or thereabouts. They loved what they saw and took Reddin’s model and introduced what they called a “maturity curve”. (They got this idea from Fred Fiedler’s work on what he called the least-preferred co-worker.) Their proposition was that, rather than go through a mildly complex process of analysing a set of situational demands, all you had to do was assess the degree to which subordinates were able and willing to do what they were required to do. If they were both unwilling and unable the manager needed to tell them what to do; if they were unable but willing the manager had to do a selling job on them, etc. Reddin saw this as a direct theft of his model and there was a long file of correspondence threatening various things, none of which ever came to anything.

Hersey and Blanchard’s model is still widely used. It is simple to apply and easy to understand. Ken Blanchard is a very nice chap and is very bright and creative. (You may recall that he wrote The One Minute Manager, and an old publishing colleague of mine just told me that Ken sent him an autographed copy of the 7 millionth copy as thanks for his help in publishing his books!)

There really wasn’t a breakthrough with Hersey and Blanchard, but they did bring the idea of the importance of the situation to the attention of practitioners and consultants in leadership.

Taken from our Online Development Academy

For more information on leadership development programmes visit Call of the Wild's website

Brainstorming - What is it and Does it Work?

"Let's brainstorm a few ideas on this," - a proposition that can mean many things. The problem with the word "brainstorm" is that it sounds fast, trendy, action oriented and effective. The problem with the technique of brainstorming is that it is slow, process oriented and - some research suggests - not very effective.

What is brainstorming?

It is a technique - or rather a collection of techniques - which aim to enable a group of people to come up with new ideas on a question and to reach agreement on which are the best. It is practised in many ways - from the complex to the simple. The most complex use that I have seen was in Hamburg, in Germany, where a group of highly trained facilitators used a number of moveable boards, covered in brown paper that could be removed, stored and re-posted and on which an array of sticky cards in different shapes and colours could be mounted. It was extremely impressive to watch the way that the facilitators worked the flow of ideas, categorising, prompting and drawing our conclusions from a fairly large group of people.

In its more simple form, brainstorming is a process involving a group of people with one other person acting as facilitator/scribe. Members of the group call out ideas and the 'scribe' writes them down on flip charts. The rules are set such that no one is allowed to make a negative comment about an idea. "That won't work," is not allowed. Building on an idea is encouraged. "That's a good idea and it makes me think that (a related idea) might work as well."

The group works at producing new ideas until they run out of steam. At this point, the group is faced with an array of ideas written on probably several sheets of flip chart paper. A simple way of handling this array is to ask the members of the group each to list what they consider to be the best ten ideas. The facilitator then puts a mark against each idea that is in someone's 'top ten' and the ideas that receive the most 'votes' are chosen for action.

Leadership

Leading a team is more than barking orders at people. Team leading is about motivating a group of people to work supportively and effectively together. Each member of a team is an individual. Team leading is also about maximising the contribution that each different individual can make to the team as a whole.

Leadership is usually taken to mean change. The leader is not content with what appears satisfactory today. The leader is constantly seeking better and better results. Tom Peters has said that the old saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" no longer applies. Everything can be improved so "Fix it anyway!" Leaders have visions of what is possible - and they achieve these visions in different ways. Some inspire followers. Others invest in teaching people. Still others see and create a system that people can live within.

Professor Robin Stuart-Kotze, in his recent research, distinguishes leadership from stewardship. Leadership, he says, is about change, about seeking to create the conditions in which people will perform to ever higher standards, to change the company constantly, to compete in an ever-changing world. Stewardship, which we might think of as ordinary management, is about control, maintaining the status quo, keeping things going, and doing the best one can with what one has got.

Thus, leadership is generally taken as having a creative aspect while management (or stewardship) as having a controlling aspect.

In history, great leaders have achieved things that ordinary mortals would have felt were not even worth trying - Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Bismark, Churchill, Martin Luther King, Simon Bolivar, Lincoln, Mao Tse Tung. Each of these leaders had different approaches. For example, Napoleon is usually thought of as a military leader, inspiring his men. However, his monument to the world is really the system of laws and civil management that he installed in France, and which has been exported to many parts of the world.

Taken from our online Development Academy.

For more information on our leadership programmes visit Call of the Wild's website.

Social Intelligence and Leadership Video

An interview with Daniel Goleman, Psychologist. See how you can use emotional and social intelligence to improve your own and your organization's performance.

 

For more information onleadership visit Call of the Wild's website.

Desmond Tutu on leadership - A Video

Here is a short video featuring the 1984 Nobel Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu discussing what makes a good leader.

For more information on leadership visit Call of the Wild's website.

Personal Leadership - Leaders & Followers

Personal leadership

It is a fallacy to believe that the world is divided into leaders and followers. Everyone, at some time and in some circumstances, practises leadership. Indeed, most of the time leadership is a shared activity. This may sound a new thought but as long ago as the early 1900’s Mary Parker Follett, as Jim Stroup says in his book Managing Leadership:

“... observed that individuals had a natural tendency to seek organization in groups. She went on to argue that groups possessed a natural internal dynamic that led to the consensual formulation of goals, and plans of action for attaining them.”

It is Stroup’s thesis - and in this he follows Mary Parker Follett - that leadership arises spontaneously in any group of people and management’s job is to facilitate, enhance and focus this process. In other words, leadership is a natural event, something that happens with many people not just a chosen few. This may sound a little academic, so try the following:

In one of his Thoughts for the Month, Johan Campbell asked What are you doing to deserve your place on the team?

This is an extract from Call of the Wild's on-line development academy. For more information visit the site for team building, leadership and management development programmes.

Top Leadership Tips From Jack Welch

1	Measure three things   If I had to run a company on three measures, those measures would be customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and cash flow.
2	Build confidence That's a leader’s job description. Managers hide behind complexity when they lack confidence. If you're not simple, you can't be fast. And, if you're not fast, you're dead.  So, everything we do (at GE) focuses on building self-confidence in people so they can be simple.
3	Set your people free  You've got to balance freedom with some control, but you've got to have more freedom than you've ever dreamed of.
4	Shout when you win  People feel guilty about stopping to celebrate a little victory ... but it lets people know they've won. It's so critical to an institution. It brings it alive, gives it character.
5	Think vision, not numbers Numbers aren't the vision. Numbers are the product. I never talk about numbers.
6	Fair doesn’t mean ‘the same as’ Every person should be treated fairly in an organization, but every person should be treated differently in an organization.
7	Make people share good ideas  What makes a company flourish is transferring ideas. At quarterly meetings, you must bring together the leaders of all of the businesses to share best practice ideas. Take the best of diversity and use it.
8	Do lots of these two things Spend lots of time developing people and lots of time with customers. I make a point of personally meeting GE's major customers in the spring and fall of every year. I put much of my and GE's customer insights down to these twice-a-year reality checks with customers.
9	Don’t dither; jump I've learned in a hundred ways that I rarely regretted acting but often regretted NOT acting fast enough.
10	Get out of your office - now Your job is to touch people and get into their soul. Every moment you are in your office, you are useless.
My favourite Welch story: when Jack blew up the plant One of the first things Welch did as a 24-year-old manager of a GE plant was blow up the part of the plant he was responsible for. The head of the plant called him to his office to explain. Welch, assuming this was the end of his managerial career, duly explained that he was experimenting with a different mixture and it caused an explosion. The plant boss probed further, asking him why and what he had hoped to achieve. Satisfied that Welch had a) learnt a lesson from the experiment and b) had practised sound thinking; he just needed to adjust his risk analysis the plant head protected Welch and Welch kept his job. “That act of leadership had a profound effect on me for the rest of my life,” Welch said. As head of GE, Welch championed experimentation, learning from mistakes and not blaming people unless they repeated the same mistakes. *  *  * Thanks to Leaders in London for gathering these tips. Visit their website www.leadersinlondon.com to review the  Summit where Jack Welch was a keynote speaker. For more information on leadership development programmes visit our website.

Talent and Winners - How Much Does Talent Count?

Research report by Peter Doskoch in Psychology Today indicates that:

... a mere 25 percent of the differences between individuals in job performance ... can be attributed to IQ (personality factors, creativity and luck are said to contribute to the other 75 percent.)

Doskoch reports:

Louis Terman, the legendary psychologist who followed a group of gifted boys from childhood to middle age, reported that "persistence in the accomplishment of ends" was one of the factors that distinguished the most successful men from the least successful.

And in the most-cited paper in the giftedness literature, University of Connecticut psychologist Joseph Renzulli, director of the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented, argued that "task commitment"—perseverance, endurance and hard work - is one of the three essential components of giftedness (along with ability and creativity).

Renzulli says the evidence that these nonintellectual factors are critical to giftedness is "nothing short of overwhelming."

Grit - what they mean by it

So if pure IQ accounts for only 25%, what is this grit, which along with luck, accounts for the remaining 75% of success? Duckworth and  Seligman describe it as "the determination to accomplish an ambitious, long-term goal despite the inevitable obstacles." Its component parts appear to be:

• Persistence
• Passion
• Ambition
• Self-discipline
• Optimism

Persistence - sticking at it, perseverance, working hard

... experts often speak of the "10-year rule"—that it takes at least a decade of hard work or practice to become highly successful in most endeavors, from managing a hardware store to writing sitcoms—and the ability to persist in the face of obstacles is almost always an essential ingredient in major achievements. The good news: Perhaps even more than talent, grit can be cultivated and strengthened.

Passion - single-minded, having one's imagination captured by something

Although extremely persistent people are usually passionate about their work, that doesn't mean that the passion always comes first. Perseverance, notes Duckworth, can itself foster passion. Often the most fascinating aspects of a topic (particularly a highly complex one) become apparent only after deep immersion, to a level "where you understand it and are enlivened by it."

Ambition - setting long term goals, knowing where you want to go

Truly gritty people ... tend to set especially challenging long-term goals; one of Duckworth's recent students confidently stated that he planned to become a U.S. Senator.

Self-discipline - not wasting time or energy, not giving in to whims

... whereas perseverance implies the ability to keep doing something, self-discipline primarily implies the ability to refrain from doing something—to stop drinking, goofing off or straying from one's diet. It doesn't embrace the ambition and zest needed to tackle a challenging goal. "Self-discipline is probably necessary for grit," Duckworth says, "but it's not sufficient."

Optimism - not getting despondent, a positive frame of mind, belief in the future

... a trait that Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California at Davis finds is extremely common among high achievers. "It helps them hang in there in times when they have to overcome all of these obstacles," he observes. "They just really believe in the end that they're going to win, and until they do, they're just going to keep on pushing, keep on making the phone calls, writing the letters, whatever they have to do."

Extract taken from our Development Academy website.