I would like to open a discussion on the qualities of a good leader, based upon my experiences over the past few years. I know readers don’t want to hear me drivel on about my “feelings” or band class or the family cat. They want hard opinions on hard issues. Forgive me this one since I think this is a valid issue, just one that happens to be very close to my personal situation at this moment. I have not taken any courses on ethics or leadership, the below is simply my opinion, and I am looking forward to input from the rest of the community here at Coming Anarchy.
First, a disclaimer: I am not talking about national leadership — which I think requires a different set of attributes — so please don’t drag the comments into discussions on presidents and prime ministers of the past and present. What I am really talking about is team leadership, involving a small group of people numbering no more than a dozen. In this scenario, what are the things required of a leader?
My current situation has me thinking a lot about personal characteristics, particularly leadership, and so far the attributes I have found to be necessary for a good leader are the following:
VISION — A leader should be able to see where the puck is going. He might not have a specific idea where it will be at a specific time, but he should have an idea and a strategy for what to do.
BOLDNESS — Sometimes there isn’t any easy answer. Some decisions hurt. The leader has to make those tough calls for the good of the mission.
HUMILITY — Leaders that take the authoritarian route every time lose out in my experience. Leaders aren’t there to make friends, but they also don’t have all the answers. A leader must take care to listen to those below as well as above. This is related to the next characteristic:
TRUST — It is extremely important that a leader can trust those below him. This is reflected in the all-important leadership responsibility of delegating tasks. If a leader is distrustful he will fall into a pattern of micro-management which will disrupt the workflow in general.
The leadership at the company I am at leaves much to be desired. Having proper leaders may not determine whether your company is a failure or not, but it sure can contribute to success. In doing the research to transform my company I have come across countless examples of good leaders in business to add to my experiences in the private sector, academia and the military. So why do those outfits have good leaders and mine doesn’t? Luck of the draw? Then of course there is the ultimate question: Are leaders born or are they made?
When I first went to the Royal Military College I was surprised at the number of true leaders I found there. Some of the leaders I respect the most went through the system at RMC. One example is a boss I had while working as a researcher on base. This guy was great. He knew he was surrounded by a bunch of braniacs smarter than him, so he preferred not to get in the way of discussion and let them have at it. Yet he had a great sense of vision as to the direction we should be going, and would interrupt occasionally by asking the perfect question to get everyone back on track again. His simple questions kept everyone focussed and motivated. Rather than simply having a commanding presence, he facilitated the completion of the task at hand. Of course, not everyone that comes out of RMC is a leader. The concentration seems higher than regular society, but natural talent must play a role. Not everyone can make optimal use of lessons in leadership.
Thoughts?
Addendum
I just came up with another one: PATIENCE. I just finished watching Season 1 of The Wire which came highly recommended by Roy from Mutant Frog. In fact, this show might have been the catalyst for all this thinking on leadership. One of the themes in the show is rotten leadership and the character Lt. Daniels makes the transformation from a bad to a good leader. In the final episode he forgives a young underling. He doesn’t do this out of kindness, but recognizes that having patience with mistakes made by inferiors will often benefit your organization, rather than simply blowing up on them every time they make a slip. This is also key to developing a leadership persona that is APPROACHABLE. If you randomly blow up all the time, your men will stop approaching you for even the simplest stuff, for fear they might get their head ripped off. The worst kind of boss is the one that thinks his job is to be angry all the time.
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Comments to this entry
Grendel
April 11, 2007
11:20 am
Being in a comparable work situation myself - I lead a team of two dozen staff members, but I think the same rules apply as to smaller groups - without having much experience with team leadership or management (and there are big differences between a manager and a leader). There are several competencies I need to do my job successfully - I added points from a German site:
* "technical" competence: This is not neccessarily knowledge about computers (in my special case very important, since we're conducting online language tests), but knowledge about your field of business. Without insight about what your business is about you lack the basic tools you need to assess a situation correctly
* strategic thinking: This is possibly very similar to the aforementioned aspect VISION, it is also neccessary not to know only "what" to do, but also "how" and being able to prescing the best path.
* past successes: I had to deal with staff members who were older (more or less more experienced), smarter or better in one aspect or another. There's always someone If you have a successful past as a leader, people tend to trust you more, too. In the last one and a half years our test center has been a huge success, this added credibility to me as a leader to new staff members - and business partners.
* people / soft skills: Communication is so important, I can't stress this enough. Even when you issue absolutely clear orders, "it still can happen that staff members do something else":http://www.amazon.com/Employees-Dont-Theyre-Supposed-About/dp/0071486151/iroke-21/ , so you need to find the balance on the tightrope of short and precise orders and epic explanations.
* Staff is not motivated by money alone. Again, you have to find out the balance between praise, where praise is due and overdoing it or not doing it at all. The problem is, the team needs to work as a team, but I find it extremely difficult to compliment the whole team when it is actually driven by few individuals who stand out. You can't pick your favorites, so everybody's lauded.
* Let your staff enough space to breath: While the ability to delegate is important, too, you have to be able to back off and let them do their job. Sure this means that here and there stuff will go wrong, but it's your job to have a plan B for such cases in the first place.
* Seek talent and do something about the bad apples. I'm not sure if this can be trained, but you need an eye for this. There're always a colleague who's good at the details, and the other one has the big picture in mind, don't fire them just because they can't do both. The problem are the people who can't do either and show a lack of interest for the success of the whole operation. I can deal with many shortcomings, in fact, everyone including (especially) myself has quirks, it's just a question of how to work around and effectively neutralize them.
* A good leader needs to be all himself, which also adds to your credibility and your staff will trust you more. If you start to pretend to be someone who you're not, they'll find out soon enough.
* Question the status quo, permanently improve, develope, evolve. A manager only needs to use the tools and staff at hand to do his job. A leader can't stop and be content, the competition never sleeps. One of my teachers once said, if you stop becoming better you stop being good (probably quoted from somebody else).
* Ability to make difficult decisions, and make them fast. Is there a word for it in English, I don't know? But there should be one, if there's none. Even if you have less time and information than neccessary to draw the correct conclusions and make the right decision under pressure, you just have to be able to pull it off. No risk, no fun - and your boss is only going to put the screws on you, if you guessed right less than 50% of the time, which brings me to the last point
* luck. I can't tell you how many times I've been lucky. ;-)
Younghusband
April 11, 2007
11:52 am
Also, thanks Grendel for sending the "Krulak interview link":http://www.sonshi.com/krulak.html. Here is what he has to say on leadership:
Hootsbuddy
April 11, 2007
12:19 pm
The Chinese gave a lot of thought to many subjects long before the invention of the internet, so they sometimes came to some interesting conclusions. In ancient China a student once asked his teacher about leadership:
"What do you think of the leader who is loved and respected by everyone in the community?"
"That is not enough," said the teacher.
"Then what of the leader who is feared and hated by all in the community?"
"That, too, is not enough," said the teacher,
"The ideal leader is one who is loved and respected by all the good people in the community, but feared and hated by all the bad people in the community."
Good leadership, it seems, involves selecting the right people and deselecting others. The master didn't give any guidelines to deselecting those who pay us to endure meanness, whether perpetrated by them or others. In this way we are not too different from professional athletes who sacrifice their health in exchange for big money. Or ladies of the night, for that matter, who are selling something else...
I suppose that is how we get the scar tissue. The scars which remain are those that came first, before we learned to forgive. Years at this job will build your faith. Only by learning to forgive the shortcomings of others, even before they become manifest, can we prevent the formation of new scars.
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Your list of qualities of good leadership can be as long as you wish, but somewhere near the top there must be some mention of subordinates. The effective leader knows he is a maker of human chains, and even the strongest chain is tested by the strength of its weakest link. One of the talents of leadership is sensing how to enlist the collective power of a team to come together in a crisis to support one another, including the least attractive among them, knowing that their collective success rests on their combined efforts. The metric of "success" may be anything from pizza to money to job promotion. And in combat it can mean the difference between life and death.
I could ramble on like this for pages but to illustrate a point I will mention just one observation I made long ago about dishwashers. (The principle applies to all work groups, but it is easier to see here.)
Almost anyone can wash dishes, so it is not unusual to employ developmentlly challenged indviduals for that job. My observation is that in a group of four to six, one of can be mentally slow and the others can be led to work well with that person, even coming to like and accept him or her in the workplace.
However there are times when two such people will make the job intollerable for the others. When stressful times come...and they always do...there are reserves of energy, drive and ability that can pull the group out of the ditch. At those times the ones who are able will basically do for their weakest team mate what he cannot do for himself.
But those times (and this is where the wise leader must be alert) cannot happen too often, and those reserves of energy and motivation must be preserved for just such moments. Anything more is simply exploitation.
a517dogg
April 11, 2007
4:54 pm
Rommel
April 11, 2007
5:03 pm
So my choices are to go the OCS route and have a trial by fire if you will or to go enlisted and see from there if I have what it takes.
As my vocational options will be more open going enlisted, I'm leaning towards that. Perhaps I will see there if I have what it takes. Any advice or experience by others would be appreciated.
a517dogg
April 11, 2007
8:05 pm
lirelou
April 11, 2007
11:41 pm
The voice of 27 and a half years experience, comrade. Join the Marines first, learn the leadership trade, and then, if you want to make it a career, switch over to the Army.
The Legion is also an option...
Character of a Leader « MENTAL SIDEWALK
April 11, 2007
11:46 pm
Rommel
April 13, 2007
3:11 am
I've considered the Marine Corps., however I always saw myself as someone who would go Army and everything else was a distant 2nd. Don't get me wrong, the Marines have a honorable and proud past and tradition but the Army has always just appealed to my aesthetic more. Also, I see myself as possibly going into intelligence and I've never really heard much about the Marines' intelligence gathering capabilites (bound to get some jokes about that), even though I'm sure its top notch.
I'm also currently looking into the degree to which those in military intelligence get to be out in field. I certainly don't crave combat but I really want to be in the field up close feeding the front-line soliders the information they need to stay alive and kill the enemy. I'm also hoping I score well on my language aptitude test so they will send me to Monterey to learn Dari or Pashto. My recruiter is less than knowledgeable about the these issues so it looks like I'm gonna need to do some research.
Strategist
April 13, 2007
10:23 am
I would add another trait, and that is to lead by example: 'Do as I do, not as I say'. This doesn't mean that a leader must do everything, or be out in front all the time - what it means is that the leader sets a high overall standard, a standard for his/her people to emulate.
One of the best pieces of practical advice that I got on leadership was at officer cadet school. We were doing an assault course and live firing in jungle lanes, and at the end of it our sergeant-major instructor told us that as officers we had to set the example by doing enough of the unpleasant stuff, but not get caught up in the nitty gritty of the action.
R. Elgin
April 13, 2007
1:59 pm
Iacoca talks of leadership and uses what he calls a "C list", i.e., curiosity, courage, charisma, character, competence, common-sense, conviction and communication.
I did wince reading Iacoca's comments and I will let people read the above link to figure out why.
MrChips
April 13, 2007
2:25 pm
Nice post by the way. Most everything noted above are indeed quality manifestations of leadership. If I were to draw it down to a root I would quote Shakespeare in one of his most misrepresented quotes of all:
"This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
Ironically, it's Polonius' speech on leadership to his son Laertes in Hamlet.
Michael
April 13, 2007
10:58 pm
Rommel: this information is VERY dated, so take it for what it's worth.
My grandpa was in a Marine Intelligence unit in the Pacific in WW2. As they were intercepting Japanese communications, he was required to learn some Japanese. He was (and is) very intelligent, a bookworm who's children and grandchildren all became bookworms, and went to college besides. What he did in the field, I do not know, but I can tell you what he came back with:
a busted eardrum from an insect that decided to make a meal out of it,
a Japanese rifle he picked up off of a dead soldier,
a respect for anybody who was a Marine in any war,
and a desire to immerse himself in alcohol for the next 3-4 decades.
Without knowing what you mean by aesthetics, I can't comment one way or the other.
lirelou
April 16, 2007
12:21 am
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