Qualities of successful leaders
From PLN
Qualities of successful leaders
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Leadership is about doing--but it's also about being. Notes here consider some of the qualities that make for successful leaders.
Timeless leadership
- by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest March 2008
David McCullough, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and author of John Adams and 1776, describes the qualities of “timeless leadership.”
One of the essential ingredients of great leadership is the ability to spot talent. “Good leaders also judge people by how they handle failure … [They] don’t tolerate self-pity in themselves or others.” But those who have never failed “may not have what it takes when the going gets rough.”
Essential to leadership are three qualities identified by Douglas Southall Freeman: “Know your stuff, be a man, look after your men.”
- Know your stuff. Have expertise, experience and knowledge; do the work required to know a subject — not just accruing information, but learning how to analyze problems, learning to do things by doing them. You can’t learn to play the piano by reading a book about it.
- Be a man. (Regardless of gender) Have the “attributes of courage—backbone—resilience, and strength of character.” See the strengths in others. Be someone “who can be counted on when the chips are down.”
- Look after your men. Take care of your staff. Take a “genuine interest in them.” Be empathetic. Treat them well.
A fourth essential quality of leadership, says McCullough, is the power of persuasion. But great leadership begins with listening.
Rebecca Rimel, head of the Pew Charitable Trusts in Philadelphia, exemplifies great leadership. “She is a visionary who is able to generate a great sense of mission. Her enthusiasm is infectious, and she’s willing to take risks. She personifies the old adages ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained,’ ‘Any job worth doing is worth doing well,’ and ‘Handsome is as handsome does.’ Those are all the kinds of things your grandmother used to say, and they probably can’t be said too often. Samuel Johnson once observed that we ‘more frequently require to be reminded than informed.’”
(Bronwyn Fryer, “Timeless leadership: A conversation with David McCullough,” Harvard Business Review, March 2008.)
How successful leaders think
- by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest June 2007
The June 2007 Harvard Business Review cover story, “How successful leaders think,” points out that the focus on what a leader does is misplaced. Instead, we need to look at how leaders think, i.e., to examine the “ways in which leaders’ cognitive processes produce their actions.”
Successful leaders have a rather unusual trait in common: they can “hold in their heads two opposing ideas at once. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to creatively resolve the tension between those two ideas by generating a new one that contains elements of the others but is superior to both.”
The author, Roger Martin (Dean, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto and author, The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking, calls this process of consideration and synthesis “integrative thinking.” He believes it’s “a defining characteristic of most exceptional businesses and the people who run them.”
Decision making involves four separate and distinct stages. Everybody goes through these stages, but integrative thinkers approach the steps differently.
- Determining salience: Conventional thinkers focus only on obviously relevant features; integrative thinkers seek less obvious but potentially relevant factors.
- Analyzing causality: Conventional thinkers consider one-way, linear relationships between variables; integrative thinkers consider multidirectional, nonlinear relationships among variables.
- Envisioning the decision architecture: Conventional thinkers break problems into pieces and work on them separately or sequentially; integrative thinkers see problems as a whole, examining how the parts fit together and how decisions affect one another.
- Achieving resolution: Conventional thinkers make either-or choices and settle for best available options; integrative thinkers creatively resolve tensions among opposing ideas and generate innovative outcomes.
(Roger Martin, “How successful leaders think,” Harvard Business Review, June 2007.)
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