The Inspirational Leader

How to Motivate, Encourage and Achieve Success

John Adair

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780749454784
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780749456207
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

The Inspirational Leader argues that leaders are not born but made. Taking the form of conversations between a young chief executive and the author, it explores the nature and practice of leadership. Each aspect of leadership is studied and discussed, so that the key skills are revealed for anyone to adopt and use to inspire and encourage others.

Thought-provoking and accessible, it will help you to develop the necessary charisma and qualities to make you an inspiring leader. Leaders are not a particular type of person, and the valuable advice presented in this book can help anyone realize their full potential.

Part 1

The Three Basic Approaches

The young chief executive began with a question. ‘I have been thinking about your point,’ he said, ‘that there are no short cuts, no easy solutions to becoming an inspiring leader. Are you trying to tell me in a gentle way that it is quite impossible – if you are not a born leader it is too late?’

‘Not impossible,’ I countered, ‘but it is not easy. Otherwise I suppose a lot more managers today would be good leaders. Perhaps we all inspire others once or twice in our careers. But inspiring others is a bit like getting a hole-in-one at golf: doing it once is just a lucky fluke, and many players pull it off once in their golfing career, but to come near to doing it all the time suggests that you have mastered the art of golf.’

‘Are you saying that learning to inspire others can be compared to learning to excel at the game of golf?’ asked the young chief executive, in some surprise.

‘It’s only a very rough analogy,’ I replied. ‘Yet golf and leadership have in common the fact that there are basic principles underlying both arts. The picture of white golf balls flying high and true onto the green and trickling down the hole reminds me of a better analogy for leadership.’

‘What’s that?’

‘What do you think it is that makes flight possible?’

‘Being an engineer by background I ought to know the answer to your question,’ said the young chief executive with a smile. ‘It is, of course, the Laws of Aerodynamics.’ He paused while I waited, and then continued. ‘You are not going to ask me what they are, are you? If so, I shall really have to dredge down deep into my memory of what we studied in applied mechanics at university.’

‘It may be worth your while,’ I said. ‘For possibly there are equivalents to the Laws of Aerodynamics in the leadership field. If so, understanding them may enable you, as the chief pilot, to get the jumbo jet of a large organization airborne. Incidentally, pilot comes from the Greek word for a steering oar: the person qualified to steer the craft – the leader.’

‘But everyone knows that leadership is an art, and by talking about possible equivalents to the Laws of Aerodynamics you are beginning to make it sound like a science,’ protested the young chief executive. ‘For a subject to be a science you do indeed need well-established laws or principles, together with theories tested by properly conducted experiments.

‘When I was doing an MBA we had a module on Leadership,’ he continued. ‘I vaguely remember numerous so-called theories about leadership – Fiedler’s Contingency Theory, Hersey and Blanchard’s Situational Leadership, Blake’s Grid, Emotional Intelligence, to name the ones I remember. “Leadership is the most studied subject in the world and the least understood”, one lecturer quoted at us. We were told that none of these theories was proven or conclusive, just ideas. Some claimed to be based on empirical experiments, but the samples were so small and culture bound that it was impossible to take them seriously. As there was no agreement, the lecturer said that he would teach all the theories and let us make what we could of them.’

‘How did you find that?’

‘Extremely confusing.’

‘So would I have done,’ I said, ‘but I think the confusion was needless. For over the past 50 years I think we have made real strides in establishing a knowledge base in leadership – what ought to be taught on, say, an MBA programme even if, owing to a shortfall in the knowledge of the staff, it isn’t actually taught.

‘The starting point is what I regard as the basic question in the leadership field:

Why is it that one person emerges and is accepted as a leader in a group rather than anyone else?

‘At least to my satisfaction,’ I continued, ‘it has now been clearly established that there are three broad ways of answering that core question. They can be compared to paths or approaches that snake their way up a mountain from different directions. The summit of the mountain – the pure essence of leadership – is, as it were, shrouded in mist. For leadership, like all other forms of personal relations, will always have about it a dimension of mystery.’

‘What do you mean by leadership being mysterious? I hadn’t thought about it that way before.’

‘Simply that it contains elements that arouse one’s wonder, stimulate one’s curiosity, and baffle one’s efforts to explain it.’

‘Sounds rather like the Universe,’ he said. ‘But that’s just a challenge to us to find and follow clues and to interpret evidence in order to find a satisfying explanation.’

‘True, but you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We should be willing to stand on the shoulders of those who have studied the subject before us. The three paths I mentioned are well-trodden, clearly visible and from an aerial viewpoint you will see that they converge as they near the cloud-topped summit. In other words, they are complementary. The three signposts are:

• QUALITIES – what you are;
• SITUATIONAL – what you know;
• FUNCTIONAL – what you do.’

‘That all rings bells,’ said the young chief executive, ‘I am sure I have come across those three approaches before. What is the latest thinking about them?’

Leadership Characteristics

‘Let’s take first the Qualities Approach – what you are. You may recall that when the first academic attempts were made to identify the necessary and desirable qualities of leadership it produced considerable confusion: lots of lists of leadership qualities were produced and there was apparently very little agreement between them. We have about 17,000 words in the English language to describe personality or character traits and so there is a considerable choice! Therefore those who were trying to study leadership on an empirical or “behavioural” science basis in America after the Second World War tended to dismiss the Qualities Approach as a busted flush on the grounds that no one had discovered the qualities that make a born leader.’

‘Surely they were right?’ interjected the young chief executive.

‘Not really. The error they made was that they were looking for the appearance of the same word in the different lists, such as courage or initiative. What they should have done was to cluster words into concepts, or, if you like, sets of synonyms around a core idea. So that, for example, there is a set of words that revolve like satellites around the nucleus concept of a bold and determined attitude that is undaunted by difficulties and fearless in the face of danger: backbone, courage, fortitude, grit, guts, resolution, spirit or tenacity.’

The chief executive looked puzzled. ‘But didn’t I read somewhere that there are no synonyms in the English language?’ he queried.

I Cannot Hear What You Say

Because What You Are Thunders At Me

‘No exact synonyms,’ I agreed, ‘but nearly the same meaning in some or all senses. For words gather moss over time – overtones or nuances that cling to them. All the above words, for instance, when used loosely indicate the same core concept. Used more precisely, however, there is a distinction between, say, courage – the mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear or difficulty – and tenacity. The latter has overtones of firm determination to achieve one’s ends, with hints of stubborn persistence and unwillingness to admit defeat.

‘In a similar way there is a distinction between character and personality, though both point to a bundle of traits, innate and learned, that distinguish one person from another. Character often points to an aggregate of moral qualities by which a person is judged apart from their intelligence, competence, temperament or special talents. Personality suggests more the whole indefinable impression received of a specific person.’

‘To me character spells moral forcefulness, personality emotional appeal,’ said the young chief executive. After some moments of reflection he continued: ‘It’s rather like colours. At home we are redecorating the kitchen at present and the paint catalogues offer an amazing range of different whites or yellows. It’s as if courage and tenacity are two shades of yellow.’

‘Not the greatest choice of colour!’ I laughed.

‘The next step I made was to distinguish between typical and generic leadership characteristics.’

The young chief executive asked me to explain the differences. I said that in my view leaders tend to exemplify or personify the qualities or attributes that are typical of the group to which they belong. For example, physical courage is a typical quality in the armed services, because all soldiers, sailors and airmen, whatever their rank, leaders or not, need a degree of physical courage. In other words, it’s a military virtue. What effective military leaders do is to exemplify the key typical qualities expected in their milieu. And we can apply the same principle, I argued, to nurses, accountants, salesmen, doctors, academics, and so on. In every field of human endeavour you can specify – or its practitioners can – five or six key qualities required in a good nurse, teacher, engineer, etc. These ‘local’ qualities are what I call the typical ones, and together they form – or at least a ‘critical mass’ of them form – a necessary condition for leadership. It is easy to find them: all you have to do is get a few focus groups of wise professionals in any field to list them. You can grade the responses roughly into three categories according to the strength of agreement as follows:

MUST – the essential attributes;

SHOULD – highly desirable ones;

COULD – characteristics that enhance but are not vital.

Nothing Great In This World Was

Achieved Without Enthusiasm

‘But you are not saying, are you,’ protested the young chief executive, ‘that having the typical military qualities or virtues such as courage makes you a military leader, or that having the five or six characteristics of, say, a good research scientist makes you the leader of a laboratory? I play in an amateur orchestra and I can think of lots of musicians who have all the qualities of musicality, but they don’t become conductors. It doesn’t quite add up.’

‘It’s possible that you are confusing two ideas that should be kept distinct, namely necessary and sufficient conditions,’ I replied. ‘In science, these terms drawn from logic are useful for untangling intuitions about cause-and-effect relationships. For example, it is a necessary condition for certain chemical reactions that they take place in solution. But the fact of these chemicals being in solution does not guarantee that they will react with each other. Therefore, being in solution is not a sufficient condition that these chemicals will react. In general, as I understand it, scientists find it useful to agree on necessary conditions before they feel in a position to discuss sufficient conditions.’

‘That sounds a most useful distinction and it’s easy to grasp,’ said the young chief executive.

The young chief executive glanced back through his notes and then continued: ‘Using this tool, can we not now identify the necessary conditions that lead people to accept someone as a leader? I suggest that what you called the set of contextual or typical qualities forms one necessary condition. The potential followers have to see that the leader is like them in all important respects but unlike them – different or ‘better’ if you like – in other key respects. Moreover, I suggest that the more generic qualities of leadership belong here too. For a person is a whole. It would be artificial to divide their personality or character up into typical and generic qualities. Anyway, we have yet to identify these universal hallmarks of all good leaders – the generic ones I mean.’

‘Why don’t you help me to identify them? What would you place at the top of the list?’

Our discussions on the various contenders for universal leadership virtues ranged far and wide. Eventually, however, we homed in on the following characteristics:

• Enthusiasm – a state of extreme readiness and interest in some prospective action or subject, together with a willingness to be invol...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Three Basic Approaches
• Part 2 The Authority of Knowing
• Part 3 Levels of Leadership
• Part 4 Giving and Receiving
• Part 5 Beyond the Call of Duty
• Part 6 The Common Task
• Part 7 Pulling the Threads Together
• Part 8 The Why Question
• Part 9 The Test of Leadership
• Towards Excellence
• Notes and References