#10 Leadership

Keep reading! Don't give up because of the title. This isn't yet another serving of leadership "insights".

It's a tale with a telltale tail.*

Fourteen years ago this week, a group of 15 aspiring leaders sat in a red-bricked lecture room in Sydney's illustrious Macquarie Business School, eager to engage with our academic leadership expert, Dr Gayle Avery, to understand "Leadership and Motivation" more deeply.

Dr Avery helped us frame the myriad leadership styles (and let's face it, there's at least one myriad of leadership styles that have been written about, if not two) into four categories:

1) Command & Control - think Napoleon or Winston Churchill;

2) Transactional - think Bill Gates or Elon Musk;

3) Visionary - think Sheryl Sandberg or Steve Jobs;

...and the one that made most classmates gasp in shock or erupt in laughter (some did both simultaneously)...

4) Organic - think disorganisation, chaos or anarchy. We'll we did.

Remember, it was 2010.

The explanation went something like 'An environment where leadership is shared, leaders volunteer for work that play to their strengths, they emerge for specific periods or opportunities and then go back into their team at the completion of their assignment'.

There was a subtle air of outrage in the room. The fourth Leadership Paradigm sounded like something that no sensible organisation would surely ever countenance. There's a reason they're referred to as an "organisation", after all!

Fast-forward 14 years, and I think that lecture would get a whole different response. We have emergent teams, networked teams, the networked organisation, cross-functional teams, and leadership functions shared between roles such as Product Owners, Scrum Master and Agile Leads, typically filled by non-traditional "leaders" with key leadership responsibilities. We're there already.

So what? Forget About Styles - Focus On Traits

Ignoring the infinite styles and behaviours that are used to define a leader, if you're a leader or a wannabe leader contemporary advice is to simply define your own style. Be yourself.

Much has been made about the term authenticity in a work space and leadership sense. It's certainly one of the classic clichés of our time. But it's grown on me over time.

Leave your style to your authentic self to define (by being a leader, naturally), and focus on leadership traits. These are much more relevant to success as a leader than the specific styles. Sure, the style needs to fit the context and the organisational culture. But after that it's the traits that matter most to success.

The 2010 course introduced us to a 1991 study by Kirkpatrick and Locke that stands up to the test of time. Their findings were that the following six key traits are most prevalent in leaders and less so in non-leaders:

• Drive (achievement, ambition, energy, tenacity and initiative).
• Leadership Motivation (personalized or socialized)
• Honesty/Integrity (honesty and integrity form the foundation of a trusting relationship between leaders and followers)
• Self-confidence (including emotional stability)
• Cognitive Ability (the ability to process large amounts of information and formulate strategies and solve problems)
• Knowledge of Business (in-depth knowledge of the business allows leaders to make well-informed decisions and understand their consequences)

So the tail looks something like this:

1. Don't be afraid of organic leadership - it's here!
2. Ignore your leadership style - be you!
3. Hone your six traits to better your leadership!

[* I wonder if that phrase has ever been written before]