Understanding Leadership
Leadership comprises a complex set of abilities, tasks, and personal characteristics. At its core, however, leadership can be defined very simply as accomplishing change through the efforts of others.
Three Main Activities of Leaders
To achieve an organization’s goals through the efforts of others, leaders engage in three main activities:
- Setting direction for the organization
- Inspiring others to work toward that direction
- Mobilizing the effective accomplishment of goals
Your overall leadership success depends in part on how well you perform each of these activities.
Setting direction can include creating a vision, considering a wide range of possible courses, establishing strategy, defining objectives, and developing goals. It requires both creativity and good judgment, along with the ability to synthesize substantial information about the context, generate viable alternatives, set priorities, and make timely decisions, often with incomplete information.
Inspiring others to work toward a chosen direction draws on a leader’s abilities to engage and communicate with people effectively, understand their motivations, influence their actions, and build trusting relationships. It requires the ability to bring out the best in others, both individually and in groups.
Mobilizing the effective accomplishment of goals requires that leaders clarify the desired results, focus efforts toward those results, help identify and remove barriers to action, manage performance, align the organization’s systems to support progress, and make full use of everyone’s abilities. This role requires both a drive toward results and the ability to manage change skillfully—moving individuals and organizations in a timely manner.
Best/Worst Leaders and Emotional Intelligence
When workers are asked about the behaviors that separate the best leaders from the worst leaders, their answers are remarkably similar. The best leaders
- Are passionate about their work
- Believe in and encourage others’ efforts
- Set clear expectations
- Give their people “stretch” assignments
- Provide guidance but don’t micromanage
- Encourage learning from mistakes
- Run interference to help get the work done
On the other hand, the worst leaders
- Give conflicting or unclear goals
- Manipulate others
- Berate their people, sometimes in public
- Are poor listeners
- Make bad decisions
- Don’t wield enough influence to help get the work done
- Are too political
Research confirms that the most effective leaders have better-than-average emotional intelligence (EQ). In particular, they develop three important competencies considered by many experts to form the basis of EQ:
- Self-awareness
- Self-management
- Empathy
Developing these competencies enables leaders to excel at the most complicated interpersonal skills. Studies have shown that EQ accounts for up to 70 percent of leadership success. The best leaders routinely demonstrate a high level of emotional intelligence.
In contrast, the worst leaders are generally unaware of how their behavior affects others, and they greatly underestimate how much this impedes their effectiveness. They are weak on the EQ competency of empathy and often are insufficiently self-aware. They may not even know they are failing until they derail midcareer. Both they and their organizations pay a high price for their lack of development.