Effective Leadership -- Can We Have Some Please?

Effective Leadership -- Can We Have Some Please?

Roman Haluszczak Bsc CPFA

Senior Manager CIPFA Finance Advisory Services ( Finance Advisory Networks,) at CIPFA

Everyone is talking about leadership and how important it is. Organisations suffer from "poor leadership" when their performance dips. Everyone expects people (you and me) to offer excellent leadership to them so they can improve. We are often asked ourselves in our personal and work lives to "show more leadership" to get things moving. Leadership is a buzz word right now -- not to be confused with management -- management is getting people in your organisation for whom you are responsible to ensure they fulfil their objectives. Leadership is something more but what exactly is it? How do we try and get some of it? I am convinced we do not see enough good leadership around,however it is sorely needed.

Do we need to be charismatic to be good leaders? Well it does help - but we need to remember that some of the worst leaders in the 20th century ( Hitler, Mao and Stalin for example) were charismatic with a magnetic and forceful personality - they lead their people in a certain (bad way) - but were they good leaders? They were good in leading people but in the wrong direction and to disaster -- so their skills were used in a wholly malevolent manner. So perhaps one of the key elements of good leadership -- apart from charisma and the ability to talk and make good speeches and communicate well - is integrity - to do the correct thing. Unfortunately integrity isn't like charisma or eloquence, it isn't very sexy but it is crucial to good leadership no matter what other people say.

Peter Drucker, the great management thinker opined on integrity as it relates to leadership in the following way. "Subordinates know in a very short time if a person aspiring to leadership has integrity. They can forgive someone a mistake or even incompetence but not a lack of integrity."

A fish rots from its head and any leader must have integrity, His\Her character will be taken as a model by subordinates in the organisation -- it must be a good model. Would you like your son\daughter to work for this person and learn from them? That is regarded as the ultimate test by Drucker.

Leadership means having the ability to lift the performance of your employees beyond what they themselves would expect to achieve. You need to have a vision to move your organisation forwards and a strategy to achieve that. However you must also have the ability to take your people with you and they must believe in your vision and also believe in you. They do not have to like you but they do have to respect you. Getting ordinary people to do extraordinary things is a true sign of excellent leadership. It is very difficult to define but easier to see in practice.

Winston Churchill in WW2 gave excellent leadership to the free world. He was thrown up by a crisis,interestingly before WW2 he was seen as a maverick and someone whose time had gone - yet in a crisis situation he did express fantastic leadership coupled with great communication skills. Lech Walesa - an electrician became leader of Solidarity and helped democratise a communist state and indeed the whole former Eastern block. Both these are examples of leadership which made huge differences to people's lives.

So what characteristics do we need to possess to aspire to excellent leadership? Well amongst the main ones not, in any particular order are the following:

Managers - manage processes whilst leaders lead people - So leadership is people focused.

Leaders have a positive outlook and a future vision they aspire to.

Leaders make a commitment to communicate with their employees and keep them in the picture.

Leaders inspire employees to share their vision and deliver outstanding performance.

Leaders give a commitment to support and facilitate their employees.

Leaders are optimistic and confident in their own abilities and the abilities of their people and organisation.

Leaders are decisive and make decisions as soon as they can.

Leaders promote and deliver imaginative solutions to organisational problems. They do not shy away from those challenges

Last but not least -- Leaders must have integrity and be honest and fair in their dealings with everyone.

What about the future? As organisations grow in complexity we may need to move to a model of collaborative leadership where leadership is vested in different people\groups at different times within an organisation and in different circumstances. The organisation will need different levels of leadership and will no longer be able to afford vesting leadership in just a few hands. New models like the mutual approach will help in this process.

Have managers got all or even some of the above characteristics? - Well we may have some but certainly not all and certainly we need to work on all of the above, to transform ourselves from managers to leaders. It is a constant journey but we all need to work on it and the journey to effective leadership never stops.

This week, Warren Bennis, the father of modern leadership studies died. He was convinced that leadership characteristics change over time. Leaders in the modern age need to be more coaches than seargeant majors. They deal with knowledge workers who are skilled and talented and who cannot be micro-managed and top downed like in the past. Modern leaders need to let them use their talents creatively or else the organisation will suffer

The world unfortunately does not benefit from an abundance of great leadeship. We need to keep striving to improve that for everyone's sake.