The skills of leadership need to address each of the key elements which make up the ‘problem space’ of leadership: (a) oneself, (b) one’s relationship with one’s collaborators, (c) the system in which one is acting and (d) the goals to be achieved by oneself and one’s collaborators in that system. This entry will cover a numerous skills addressing these various elements of leadership: self skills, relational skills, strategic thinking skills, and systemic thinking skills.

Self skills are how the leader handles himself or herself in a particular situation. Self skills allow the leader to choose the most appropriate attitude, state-of-mind, focus, etc., with which to enter a situation. In a way, self skills are the steps by which the leader leads himself or herself.

Relational skills have to do with the ability to recognize, encourage, and communicate with other people. They result in the ability to enter another person’s model of the perceived world or perceptual space, establish rapport and guide that person to recognize problems and objectives. Since leaders must reach their dreams and accomplish their goals through their influence upon others, relational skills are one of the most important aspects of leadership.

Strategic thinking skills are necessary in order to define and achieve specific goals and objectives. Strategic thinking involves the ability to identify a relevant desired state, assess the starting state, and then establish and navigate the appropriate path of transition states required to reach the desired state. A key element of effective strategic thinking is determining which team members and tasks will most efficiently and effectively influence and move the present state in the direction of the desired state.

Systemic thinking skills are used by the leader to identify and understand the problem space in which the leader, his or her collaborators and the organization is operating. Systemic thinking is at the root of effective “solution creation” and the ability to create functional teams. The ability to think systemically in a practical and firm way is probably the most definitive sign of maturity in a leader.

Groups of people have been around since the as long as I’ve been around… and then some; human nature draws people to one another. Group behavior ranges from encouraging to chaotic, from adversity to success. Many managers are fine with group performance. For me, though, it is increasingly obvious that groups that experience the highest output are those that have bonded into a team.

I believe that the main determining factor between a group and a team is their point of reference to one another. A group is two or more people working in proximity, each doing his or her own thing to accomplish a goal.

A team shares the same goal. Its work is dependent upon each team member for the final results. Take for example some of the curriculum at the International Leadership Conference. While it’s a group of people with different accountabilities… one laying out materials, one proofing, another editing, another administering tasks… none is successful without the other. The final product, whether it’s a book, a CD or a slide presentation, cannot be completed without the team’s integration of talent.

A leader’s job is all about getting results. You do that by building your team, individual talent upon individual talent. You balance the multiple needs, recognizing one and minimizing another to incorporate them into a unit. Taking care of your associates with an organic focus is what makes the team strong.

Developing individual team members so they compensate for and support one another makes them a team. As individuals improve, the team improves. The result of moving among your roles of coaching, mentoring and counseling is what your team produces… productivity and job satisfaction.

Ask people today what motivates them to join one organization over another and a top response is to be able to work with the team. Integrating your individual associates into the team requires the same skilled approaches for me. Shared values, common goals, constant rewards and satisfaction take a group and shape it into a top-performing team.

The other day I had a sudden realization about the importance of emotion and logic.  When I was managing a small computer support service provider, I would work closely with specialized technicians, programmers, integrators, accounting personnel, legal professionals, medical directors, and the obvious internal staffing of my company. Over the handful of years, I’d found it to be challenging to find people that had “the balance” of emotional and logical skill set in which I thought to be a “common sense standard”.  With the above established, I decided to put together the following blurb of research that I’ve recently developed:

A generalized overview with the expansion of the Internet and the resulting globalization of business activity, the capacity of the influence of information technology (now referenced as IT) has increased significantly. Many innovative business practices are being enabled specifically by IT. The capacity for integration of information in alpha/numeric, text, voice, and video form will give rise to an even greater abundance and impact of IT in the future. Also, the information systems (now referenced as IS) development profession has been maturing and IS has been recognized as a socio-technical endeavor for some time. For system developers, the need to communicate effectively with users and team members has been increased significantly.

A survey taken in 1993 of 192 human resource personnel responsible for hiring new IS graduates in the Denver, Colorado area discovered that, in addition to knowledge in applied computing and business, it was very important that a new IS hire be educated in: 1) the ability to learn, 2) the ability to work in teams, 3) oral and written communication, 4) problem solving and reasoning, and 5) a point of reference to health and wellness. In short, adaptability, communication, and stress management are seen as key skills for the IS professional. Yet, such skills are not developed through logic alone, but involve the “soft areas” of feelings, instinct, and senses.

A little over 25 years ago, there were two researchers, Couger and Zawacki, who  reported that, while IS professionals (systems analysts and programmers) had the lowest needs for social interaction on the job, they reported much higher “growth needs” than the other professionals surveyed. While at the time, growth needs were largely understood as greater development of professional proficiencies, there now appears to be some evidence that the IS development profession may be ready for a more holistic approach to growth.

For example, a management scientist, in his book on IS management, has called for extending Maslow’s hierarchy of needs beyond self-actualization to “self-donation” and has provided a concrete example of such a stage in the career of a systems analyst. An article in Computerworld has called for “emotional literacy among IS professionals” in the context of personality awareness. There was a convention of the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS), where a keynote speaker proposed that “love” and not confrontation be the model for organizational communication, and received a standing ovation. A job advertisement for IT professionals within an insurance company in a prominent U.S. software center points out that this employer is interested in contributing to the employee’s professional and personal life, and advises candidates to “listen to their inner voice.” A prominent U.S. textbook author has referred, in the dedication of his text on IS for the Internetworked Enterprise to “experiencing the Light within.” In a recent Canadian survey on stress among IS professionals, the most frequently mentioned desired coping resource was “personal development seminars,” closely followed by “conflict resolution seminars.”

Also, the concept of “emotional intelligence” is being increasingly emphasized in management literature. It is being recognized that, while the traditional IQ (intelligence quotient) can help a person to get a job, it is the EQ (emotional quotient) that will allow the person to keep the job and to progress satisfactorily in his/her career.

Thus, the stage appears to be set for a preliminary attempt to address specific psychological factors as applied to the work of various IT professionals such as system and data analysts, programmers, project managers, help desk personnel, and also software engineers, telecommunications designers, and others. In this context, the term IT is considered to include a broader range of positions, whereas IS is more restricted to the activities of planning, analysis, design, development, and deployment of computerized business application systems.

Today, it seems that many processes that are related to organizational development, management, and leadership are undergoing an insightful change for a number of great reasons. History shows us that in the past several decades, companies have continued to become more and more complex. This complexity is a function of changes in both the internal organization of companies, as well as their external environment. This greater than ever complexity has given rise to a generation of problems that were not present in the customary organization of the past.

The changes in technology, production methods, the workplace over the past several decades, and the optional space of people working within corporate organizations has grown larger and larger. Especially in technologically intensive areas, people have become highly trained experts who must use their own judgment to make technical decisions (which managers themselves are not always qualified to make). Employees can no longer be viewed as ‘laborers’ doing a specific behavioral task who need to be controlled and watched over. As a result, the skills and demands of valuable management and leadership have also become more complex and refined.

Managers and leaders can no longer be successful by mere decision making or delegating orders based on their title or rank in the corporate hierarchy, rather they must recruit the ‘co-operation ‘ and willing involvement of their collaborators in order to most proficiently and successfully accomplish jobs and tasks. In order to avoid conflicts and assure peak performance, managers must rely more on such processes as persuasion and negotiation as opposed to the processes of command or directives. In other words, as the ‘discretionary space’ of employees increases, the focus of the manager shifts from managing time, tasks and situations, to managing relationships, policy and procedure. Thus, the primary focus in effective leadership and management is moving from the content aspect to the process aspect. Additionally, the increasing globalization of business requires a whole different concept of management and organizational learning.

The world is the company arena. Differences in cultural belief, behavior patterns and values must be respected and incorporated into the daily thinking and activity of managers at all levels.

I’ve always hated bureaucracy.  To me, bureaucracy is the enemy. Bureaucracy means waste, slow decision making, unnecessary approvals, and all the other things that kill an organization’s competitive spirit.  I’ve spent many years battling bureaucracy, trying to rid any company I’ve worked with of anything that would make it less competitive.

I feel that ridding any company of bureaucracy is everybody’s job. Over the years, I’ve urged all of my co-workers and employees to “fight it, kick it.”  That’s why “disdaining bureaucracy” became such an important part of my first organization’s shared values (the list of behaviors that were expected of all SFS /Alloy Software employees).

When a young intern asked me what he should do when he encounters bureaucracy in a large corporation, with a smile, I advised him to “get a hand grenade…and blow it up” (figuratively, of course).  Again, I feel that it is everyone’s job to at least try to rid any organization of wasteful bureaucracy.

But isn’t that easier said than done?  Yes, even organizations that do a good job of eliminating this cancerous element can’t kill it permanently.  That’s why I’ve referred to bureaucracy as “the Dracula of institutional behavior,” because it had a way of rising from the dead every few years and sucking the life out of what ever is left.

Anything that you can do to simplify, remove complexity and formality, and make the organization more responsive and agile, will reduce bureaucracy:

Drop unnecessary work: Most organizations have far too manyrules, approvals, and forms. Work with colleagues to figure out whichof these old ways of doing things can be either eliminated orimproved.

Work with colleagues to streamline decision making: If it takes an organization a week to make a decision, the process needs to be simplified. If no one can remember why your organization does something a certain way, chances are that it is more complicated than it needs to be.

Make your workplace more informal: Send handwritten notes instead of memos (I love handwritten notes, and it is “Geoff,” not“Mr. Snyder”), keep meetings conversational (rather than formal and rigid), and encourage dialogue up and down and the entire organization.

Leaders who attract quality people, know that the key is to become a person of quality themselves.  Leadership is the ability to attract someone to the gifts, skills, and opportunities you offer as a parent, as a manager, as a business owner. I’m going to go ahead and call leadership the great challenge of life.  It seems that what is important in leadership is refining your skills.  All great leaders keep working on themselves continuously until they become effective.  And once they become effective, they continue to grow in all aspects of life.

Here are some specifics that the late Jim Rohn showed us during his journey into the leadership horizon.

1) Learn to be strong but not rude. It is an extra step you must take to become a powerful, capable leader with a wide range of reach.  Some people mistake rudeness for strength. It’s not even a good substitute.

2) Learn to be kind but not weak.  We must not mistake kindness for weakness.  Kindness isn’t weak. Kindness is a certain type of strength.  We must be kind enough to tell somebody the truth.  We must be kind enough and considerate enough to lay it on the line.  We must be kind enough to tell it like it is and not deal in delusion.

3) Learn to be bold but not a bully.  It takes boldness to win the day.  To build your influence, you’ve got to walk in front of your group.  You’ve got to be willing to take the first arrow, tackle the first problem, discover the first sign of trouble.

4) You’ve got to learn to be humble, but not timid.  You can’t get to the high life by being timid.  Some people mistake timidity for humility.  Humility is almost a Godlike word.  A sense of awe…a sense of wonder.  An awareness of the human soul and spirit.  An understanding that there is something unique about the human drama versus the rest of life.  Humility is a grasp of the distance between us and the stars, yet having the feeling that we’re part of the stars.  So humility is a virtue; but timidity is a disease.  Timidity is an affliction.  It can be cured, but it is a problem.

5) Be proud but not arrogant. It takes pride to win the day.  It takes pride to build your ambition.  It takes pride in community, it takes pride in cause, in accomplishment.  But the key to becoming a good leader is being proud without being arrogant.  In fact, I believe the worst kind of arrogance is arrogance from ignorance.  It’s when you don’t know that you don’t know!  Now that kind of arrogance is intolerable.  If someone is smart and arrogant, we can tolerate that. But if someone is ignorant and arrogant, that’s just too much to take.

6) Develop humor without folly.  That’s important for a leader.  In leadership, we learn that it’s okay to be witty, but not silly.  It’s okay to be fun, but not foolish.

After studying a leadership model called “The Ego Factor”, I noticed it pointed out that torpid growth, lost market share, and panic response management are more likely to occur if growth objectives are Ego driven vs. Profit driven.  This often leads to personal needs getting ahead of business needs and is a common symptom of the lack of leadership within an organization.

A servant leader makes a conscious choice to lead by being a servant first.  He or she is noticeably different from the person who is leading first, because of the need to alleviate an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions.

Good managers get employees to respect them, effective leaders get employees to not only respect them but more importantly they get them to respect themselves.

It has been shown that effective leaders go through a never ending development process that includes education, self study, training, experience and coaching and mentoring from one or several individuals that have a very positive influence on their personal development.  Leadership is the ability to influence, inspire and motivate others to accomplish specific objectives.  It includes creating a culture that helps direct the organization in such a way that it makes it consistent and coherent keeping short term goals and objectives in alignment with long term strategic initiatives.  The success of leadership in this process is directly influenced by the individual leaders’ beliefs, values, ethics, character, knowledge and skills.

Position and title may give one power but power in itself does not make one an effective leader.  To become an effective leader there are specific skill sets that one must understand and master.  This does not come naturally. It takes dedication, passion and commitment to the process.  That commitment, dedication and passion includes a tireless effort to improve on specific skills and the development of a personal leadership methodology.  This is referred to as your personal leadership model.