Develop Your Leadership Skills

Fast, Effective Ways to Become a Leader People Want to Follow

John Adair

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780749492533
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

Develop Your Leadership Skills is leadership guru John Adair's most accessible title on leadership. This essential pocket guide will boost your confidence levels, inspire you and guide you on your journey to becoming a leader of excellence. Acknowledged as a world expert, John Adair offers stimulating insights into recognizing and developing individual leadership qualities, acquiring personal authority and, most importantly, mastering core leadership functions such as planning, communicating and motivating. Fully updated for 2019, this 4th edition now features even more practical exercises, useful templates, and top tips to improve or develop your leadership skills, this guide distils the essence of John Adair's teaching and provides a framework for becoming an effective leader. The Creating Success series of books...
Unlock vital skills, power up your performance and get ahead with the bestselling Creating Success series. Written by experts for new and aspiring managers and leaders, this million-selling collection of accessible and empowering guides will get you up to speed in no time. Packed with clever thinking, smart advice and the kind of winning techniques that really get results, you'll make fast progress, quickly reach your goals and create lasting success in your career.

04

How to turn the core leadership functions into skills

In this chapter, I shall consider each of the main eight leadership functions in turn, and help you to identify ways in which you can perform them better.

Remember always that because the three areas of task, team and individual overlap so much, any function will tend to affect all three circles. Let’s have another look at the those leadership functions we introduced in the last chapter.

Figure 4.1 Leadership functions

The three phases are Leadership Competence; Leadership Skill which is gained through practice with skill; and Leadership Excellence which is acquired through self-development and continuous improvement with excellence. The phases are shown with arrows indicating continuity.

Take planning, for example. At first sight that appears to be solely a task function. Yet there is nothing like a bad plan to break up a team or frustrate an individual: it hits all three circles. Another general factor to bear in mind is that – as I have mentioned already – leadership exists on different levels as is shown in the Figure 4.2.

Figure 4.2 Levels of leadership

The first level is Strategic Leadership which is defined here as leading a whole business or organization, with overall accountability for the two levels of leadership below you. The second level is Operational Leadership defined in the figure as leading a significant unit in the business or organization, composed of a number of teams whose leaders report to you. The third level is Team Leadership which is defined as leading a team of about five to 20 people. The bottoms up triangle shown in the figure indicates that the functions apply to all levels.

As well as the three circles, the eight functions also apply at all these levels, although in different ways. In the brief discussions of each function below I shall sometimes indicate these differences, but my focus here is upon the first level – the team leadership role.

The functional approach to leadership set out here is also sometimes called action-centred leadership. A function is one of a group of related actions contributing to development or maintenance, just as each part of the body has its function in relation to the whole. ‘Function’ comes from a Latin word meaning performance. Sometimes it is used more widely to mean what I have called role – the special kind of activity proper to a professional position. Are you functional as a leader? In other words, are you capable of performing the regular functions expected of a leader?

Function one: Defining the task

‘Task’ is a very general word. It simply means ‘something that needs to be done’, usually something that you are required to do. Generally speaking, people in teams or organizations have some idea of what they are there to do, but that general sense needs to be focused on an objective that is:

• clear;
• concrete;
• time-limited;
• realistic;
• challenging;
• capable of evaluation.

Tip

When setting objectives, it is good practice to ensure that they are SMART:

• Specific;
• Measurable;
• Achievable;
• Realistic; and
• Timed.

Before setting objectives for your team, evaluate them against the SMART criteria. There is a tool provided on in the Appendix at the end of the book to help you with the exercise overleaf, but you can also use this to assess whether or not future objectives are SMART.

By the last point I mean that there is a simple ‘success criterion’ that will enable you – and the team – to know that the objective has been achieved. If your target or goal is to reach the top of Mount Everest, for example, you will know when you attain it. In many other areas of human endeavour, of course, the success criteria are far less obvious.

Exercise

Think about a recent objective that you set yourself or your team. Evaluate that objective against the SMART criteria.

Objective:
Was the objective	Yes/No	How?
Specific?
Measurable?
Achievable?
Realistic?
Timed?

If the objective failed to meet any of the criteria, was there something that you could have done to change that?

Leadership is also about answering the question why as well as what. A boss may tell you what to do in a specific way, but a leader will explain or convey to you why as a first and important step on the road to your free and willing cooperation – the hallmark of all true leadership. There is an overlap here with motivation, or giving others a sufficient reason or grounds for action, which we shall discuss shortly. Here I want to stay within the task circle and suggest that all leaders should be able to relate an objective to the wider aims and purpose of the organization. In other words, they need to be able to think – and often to speak – in terms of a set of directions. When they do so they will be moving from the particular to the more general, from the concrete to the more abstract.

Exercise

Gaia plc ar...