Focusing on Leadership: Different Perspectives

Last week you learned a little about me, but this week I wanted to give some introduction about leadership in general. As mentioned in my prior post, leadership is what happens when followers and a leader interact (Northouse, 2016). This relationship varies based on the project or task at hand. It sometimes takes the form of roles at work, volunteering or even in a sports arena. Each situation has an objective and the leader is the person who ensures everyone works for and attempts to accomplish what they set out to do. But what makes a leader? Are the born that way? Do they have certain traits about them? Does the culture around them dictate their abilities or traits? These are just a few things we will explore further today.

What makes a leader is their ability to step up to the plate and be in charge when needed. As mentioned before the role of the leader can change and does change depending on the circumstances. For instance, a sports coach leads his athletes different than say a surgeon to his medical team. Each leader has certain characteristics that shine in their given moment. Garrick (2004) said it best stating “regardless of position or role, leadership behavior demands flexibility”. It is true that a leader must be able to adapt to their situation. If a coach is winning or losing, his interactions with his players may be different. The same goes for a project team, based on how close they are to a deadline, the team leader may have to change his leadership style to keep everyone focused.

So what are the traits or skills that define a leader? Northouse identifies some of the top traits of leaders as: intelligence, integrity, sociability, self-confidence, and determination (2016). Some of the skills that can be learned based on experiences as a leader include technical skills, people skills and conceptual skills (Northouse, 2016). Traits are typically inherent to the individual, while skills have more of the ability to be adjusted and refined. You can often get education to help with the skills, such as conflict resolution or time management, but traits like sociability of being an introvert or extravert are harder to change.

Example of the Myers-Briggs outcomes

How do you know what skills you have? There are several skills tests that can be taken to help determine what your skills or traits are. There is even the ability to understand those around you. The Leadership Trait Questionnaire (Northouse, 2016) has the leader rank themselves on 14 traits that include perceptive, determined, sensitive and outgoing. It also asks the leader to get others around them to rank them. The leader can then compare their scores to that of those that ranked them. There should be some expected variability in the results and depending on who answered the questions and what role the leader is to them may matter. For instance, the boss of the leaders is going to rank them differently than the team members they are leading because it is form a different perspective. This reflection allows leaders to know others perception and flex to make changes if needed to improve their leadership. Another type of traits test you might be more familiar with is the Myers-Briggs personality test that will produce an alphabet type of score. If you understand how your teammates score on this test, you may have better interactions with them or be able to adjust your leadership style to meet their needs.

For a skills inventory test, one simply takes the test and learns what strengths or weaknesses they have in relation to one of the three skill categories: conceptual, people or technical. I actually took the test presented by Northouse (2016) and scored a 27 for both technical and conceptual skills with a 23 in human skills. These scores are in the high range for the test, but personally it makes me think that I could improve in the human skills more. Being able to convey ideas to various teams based on the project I’m working on, could be an improvement in this area. In fact, knowing the traits of those individuals to understand their way of perceiving information may help as well. It is often that taking time to get to know employees and what makes them happy, be it time off to attend a kid’s school function or having a flexible work schedule. These are important issues to employees that might help improve the leader’s ability to accomplish the goal.

Here are several great movie clips from two movies I love that talk about leadership. The first is from Moneyball, where the general manager of the baseball team is asking a player to step up to the game. The second is from Remember the Titans, where the football captain and a player discuss the lack of leadership and following directions on the team. Hope you enjoy them both!

Moneyball Clip