LEADERSHIP IMPROVEMENT METHODS AND TIPS

Illumination and understanding the nature of good leadership is probably easier than practising it. Good leadership requires deep human qualities, beyond conventional notions of authority.

In the modern age good leaders are an enabling force, helping people and organisations to perform and develop, which implies that a sophisticated alignment is achieved - of people's needs, and the aims of the organisation.

The traditional concept of a leader being the directing chief at the top of a hierarchy is nowadays a very incomplete appreciation of what true leadership must be. Effective leadership does not necessarily require great technical or intellectual capacity. These attributes might help, but they are not pivotal.

Good leadership in the modern age more importantly requires attitudes and behaviours which characterise and relate to humanity.

The concept of serving is fundamental to the role. Good leadership involves serving the organisation or group and the people within it. Ineffective leaders tend to invert this principle and consider merely that they must be served by the people. This faulty idea based-in the notion that leadership is as an opportunity to take: to acquire personal status, advantage, gain, etc., at the expense of others, which is grossly wrong.

It is instead an opportunity to give; to serve the organisation, and crucially the people too. The modern notions of 'servant leader' and 'servant leadership' are attributed "The Servant as Leader"). However the philosophy and concept of leadership being a serving function rather than one that is served, is very old indeed and found in ancient civilisations and religious writings.

Leadership is centrally concerned with people. Of course it involves decisions and actions relating to all sorts of other things, but leadership is special compared to any other role because of its unique responsibility for people i.e., the followers in whatever context leadership is seen to operate.

Many capabilities in life are a matter of acquiring skills and knowledge and then applying them in a reliable way. Leadership is quite different. Good leadership demands emotional strengths and behavioural characteristics which can draw deeply on a leader's mental and spiritual reserves.

The leadership role is an inevitable reflection of people's needs and challenges in modern life. It therefore is a profound concept, with increasingly complex implications, driven by an increasingly complex and fast-changing world.

Leadership and management are commonly seen as the same thing, but they are not. Leadership is also misunderstood to mean directing and instructing people and making important decisions on behalf of an organisation. Doing it effectively is much more than these.

Good leaders are followed chiefly because people trust and respect them, rather than the skills they possess. Leadership is about behaviour first, skills second.

This is a simple way to see how leadership is different to management:

• Management is mostly about processes.

• Leadership is mostly about behaviour.

We could extend this to say:

• Management relies heavily on tangible and measurable capabilities such as effective planning; the use of organisational systems; and the use of appropriate communication methods.

• Leadership involves many management skills, but generally as a background function of true leadership. It instead relies most strongly on less tangible and less measurable things like trust, inspiration, attitude, decision-making, and personal character. These are not processes or skills or even necessarily the result of experience. They are facets of humanity and are enabled mainly by the leader's character and especially his/her emotional reserves.

Another way to see leadership compared with management, is that the former does not crucially depend on the type of management methods and processes a leaders uses; leadership instead primarily depends on the ways in which the leader uses management methods and processes.

Good leadership depends on attitudinal qualities, not management processes.

Humanity is a way to describe these qualities because this reflects the leader's vital relationship with people.