Feb 18, 2015

If you were expecting Warren Buffet, I’m sorry to disappoint. Warren Bennis is a professor, author, management consultant and pioneer of modern leadership studies, and he believes there are seven attributes essential to leadership. They are:

• Technical competence
• Conceptual skill
• Track record
• People skills
• Taste (recognising talent)
• Judgement
• Character

Bennis famously quipped: “Managers do things right; leaders do right things”. In relation to the seven attributes he goes on to say that you will often find people in positions of leadership who have the first three but the other four are not as common. This view definitely bears out from our experience in our “The New Manager” and “Team Leadership” and sometimes in “The Effective Manager” (previously The Complete Manager) programs. New managers, team leaders and supervisors often get to their positions based on their technical competence and track record, as well as their ability to solve problems and think abstractly. Once they attain that position, they need to learn a whole new set of skills in order to manage. But hey, that’s management not leadership. Every manager needs to lead or otherwise they are going to have to use force or coercion to get people on board with their program. So can you learn these things, or are you born with them? Well, ‘people skills’ is our business in the Professional Development Portfolio at New Horizons, so I’d like to believe that these elements are learn-able, and our experience bears out that they are. As examples, I recently had a Project Manager from a large building project in an “Advanced Interpersonal Communications” course. He was sent along to ‘rectify’ his bluntness. His initial stance was: “why should we empathise with these guys? They just need to do what they’re told.” By the time he returned for our “Effective Coaching for Managers” program, he had changed his tune and was demonstrating his new-found skills to others in the class. Another participant – a warehouse manager – had a similar issue to the first; his quote at the end of the three day “New Manager” program  was, “I’ve come to the realisation that you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar”. Albeit it was not an original adage; it demonstrated a distinct change in his outlook and behaviour. What of Taste, Judgement and Character? These are the characteristics that most people might see as innate or at least not learnable in a course. It is true that such things are harder to train than ‘People Skills’ but they are still trainable. Many of our programs look at personal values and ethics; another set of character shaping ingredients. Spotting talent through the ability to glean the right information and understanding the right ‘position’ to play someone in, is learn-able. Building judiciousness by understanding problem solving and strategic decision making is highly probable, and character can definitely be built as we gain more confidence in what we  do, which can also come through training. Surely, we can both “do things right” and “do right things”.