Pilar Jerico

Few subjects arouse such interest as leadership. There are millions of entries devoted to it in Google, and hundreds of courses and books, some of which provide the ingredients for becoming a good leader in the best style of the traditional cookery book. And yet, leadership continues to be a problem area for many organizations, despite the fact that it is quite possibly the key factor in fostering the development of talent, the achievement of targets and the elimination of fear.

Before approaching such a broad subject, we need to state a basic premise: we would do better to speak of leaders rather than leadership in the abstract. Now, the necessary but not sufficient condition of being a leader is to have followers. Let us be clear, being recognized as a leader does not mean that we have to become a combination of John Wayne and Albert Einstein, in the words of Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordström, the authors of Karaoke Capitalism. The essence of being a leader is much simpler than that, although no easier. Whereas managers are in charge of teams who follow their orders, leaders have people who want to follow them. This fundamental difference has two implications. First, we all have been, or may in the future be, leaders in a particular situation. Secondly, leadership is above all a question of the emotions. In point of fact, the best leaders I have known all have one thing in common, judging from what people who work with them have told me: the utmost understanding of each person they work with, the utmost awareness of their colleagues’ strong and weak points, and the ability to inspire the utmost trust. Their colleagues want to follow them not only for rational considerations but also for emotional ones. One last point on the subject of leaders. There are as many types of leaders as teams to lead. There are leaders whose strong point is their expert knowledge (like Gil Grissom in CSI Las Vegas, to take an example from TV), leaders who base their success on their ability to influence people while yet others who are very charismatic (such as Jack Welch, ex-Chairman and CEO of General Electric). Leaders of all types share common characteristics, one of the most important being the ability to communicate.

All organizations need to have efficient channels of communication if they want to avoid becoming a parody of the game of Chinese whispers, where a message is passed along a chain of people only to emerge completely distorted when it reaches the last person. To avoid a company falling into this trap, leaders have to communicate clearly, to communicate frequently and to check that their staff really understand what they’re trying to get across. If they don’t do this, they can suffer the same fate as Captain James Cook, the Englishman who discovered Australia in 1770. On disembarking to explore the newly-discovered continent, he saw a strange animal jumping around. He asked the Aborigines what it was called. “Kan-ga-roo” they replied. And so he called it a kangaroo. Years later, philologists began to study the Aborigines’ language. They discovered that “kan-ga-roo” actually means “I don’t understand”.  I wonder how many kangaroos are jumping round your office…

On-going communication can be extremely tiring but it is very productive. It helps to transmit emotions, values and the company culture and it also stops people wasting time trying to find out what’s going on in the corridors. Let us not forget that humans, according to psychologists, are informavores (consumers of information). If leaders do not provide all the necessary information, their staff will go and look for it in rumours, the number of which is always in direct proportion to the opaqueness of the organization.

To sum up, if we want to become good team leaders we need to develop excellent communication skills, regardless of what type of leader we strive to be. We need to communicate what we want, what we think and, of course, check that our message has been received loud and clear.

The competing theories on how to develop leadership qualities can be neatly divided into two camps. First of all, we have the “development looking out” approach which involves identifying positive role-models to follow. On the other hand, we have the “development looking in” school which advocates harnessing our emotions to achieve our full potential. Obviously, there is also a middle way which combines both approaches. This is probably the most fruitful course of action.

When management studies began to focus on leadership, the “development looking out” model was the order of the day. Writers analyzed great leaders from history or in business, such as Jack Welch, Napoleon or Churchill. They looked at how these figures acted to try to extract patterns of behaviour to hold up as a model. This approach is interesting. It gives us clues as to how we can improve, and it also provides a wealth of famous quotes to try out on friends and clients.  However, when we read biographies of famous people or heroes, we are often drawn into thinking how short we fall of their standards. And this is indeed the case. It’s as if being a leader meant becoming a combination of John Wayne and Albert Einstein, as the authors of Karaoke Capitalism, Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordström, say.

The essence of being a leader is much simpler than that, although no easier. The necessary, but not sufficient, condition of being a leader is to have followers. Whereas managers are in charge of teams who follow their orders, leaders have people who want to follow them. This fundamental difference has many implications. First, we all have been, or may in the future be, leaders in a particular situation. This may come as something of a relief. Secondly, leadership is a question of emotions. For this reason, any effort directed at developing our potential as leaders has to be based on “looking in”.

We all know that we have to delegate. We don’t need a consultant or a book to tell us that. What we have to find out, and afterwards deal with, is what makes it difficult for us to delegate in the people we manage or to spend more time with them. At root, the answer is always a silent but important emotion: fear. As a corollary, the development of leadership skills is bound up with dealing with our fear, since it is fear which stops us using all of our potential and making the most of our talents. I don’t think that we can become better leaders without becoming better people; and that takes a lot of courage. Looking in is not always a pleasant task, and I know too many people who find  thousands of excuses not to do it.