RSS feedsWhen you are stepping into a leadership position, the world changes and things are never quite the same again. People begin to have great expectations of you and you begin to take on a strange and wonderful new role in relation to others.
Sometimes this happens from the inside out; a new role appears at your fingertips. Perhaps a parent, a previous boss, or a teacher has subtly invaded your psyche as a role model and you begin to take on their mantle. But maybe you lack the right role models, and you have to work at things a bit harder.
In their book, Making Sense of Leadership: Exploring the five key roles used by effective leaders, the authors, Esther Cameron and Mike Green, offer advice on how to become a successful leader. They identify the key roles that leaders take and, rather than list all the things that good leaders do, or examine impressive case studies of well-known leaders, they identify key clusters of behaviour that form patterned leadership roles.
Role play
It is important for potential leaders to look at what role is best for them. They will need to develop their capacity to tune into an organisational system and get a sense of what the organisation needs in terms of leadership, rather than do what they did last time, or do what the boss is telling them to do.
Leaders don’t all have to be highly dominant people, or interpersonal wizards. It’s not essential for all leaders to be electrifying speakers and leading-edge thinkers. Neither is it essential for every leader to be superbly organised. But it does help to be at least some of these things. And leaders do have to learn to develop the right mix of roles to match their personality, the situation and the people around them.
Aspects of the leaders identified - edgy catalysers; visionary motivators; measured connectors; tenacious implementers; and thoughtful architects - will be in you to a degree.
On the edge
The edgy catalyser is the leader who smells a rat and points at it. This person is an intelligent agitator who spots real problems, especially if they are hard to face and adds the right amount of tensions and pressure to ensure that the difficulty is addressed. This process is likely to feel quite uncomfortable for those involved, but the secret of the edgy catalyser is that they don’t get stressed by conflict. In fact, this type of leader is happier when there is discomfort and a need for action in the air.
In this role, the leader has an uncanny ability to ask the right question, point the finger at one part of the organisation, or question the accepted wisdom of the business in order to get people to see that things might need to change.
They are not disconnected from the business goals. In fact, their skill is to hold the strategic direction and organisational purpose in their minds, and see clearly where the structure, systems, infrastructure, or the people are failing.
They can take a step back or knock the machine in the right place with a hammer to illustrate its weak points. But they don’t just focus on the negatives; they may also focus very assertively on what’s going right, and demand the same performance or outcomes from the rest of the organisation.
These people are not intimidated by politics, but are clever enough to respect its power. They can assimilate and respect the prevailing vision and values and point out, for example, where executives are failing to provide role models for agreed values, or where expensive IT systems are falling short of expectations, or where one team is achieving great results while others appear to struggle.
A typical example is a new leader who arrives in an organisation and sees everything with fresh eyes, drawing everyone’s attention to what’s not right, or what’s surprising or what compares badly to other organisations. Some people find this type of leadership irritating and hard to deal with. It needs to be done intelligently and with respect, but there will almost certainly be tension around.
Edgy catalysers definitely have to court the anger of others by having a potent mix of courage and good judgement and a relatively thick skin.
The five styles of leadership
Edgy catalyser
Asks questions and creates discomfort when things don’t improve
e.g. Alex Ferguson
Visionary motivator
Articulates a compelling picture of the future and gives purpose
e.g. Richard Branson
Measured connector
Believes successful people communicate with each other
e.g. Sven-Goran Eriksson
Tenacious implementer
Doggedly pursues his plans
e.g. Martin Sorrell
Thoughtful architect
Creates a clear strategy by coming up with original ideas
e.g. George Soros
Esther Cameron is director of Cameron Change
Consultancy and Mike Green runs the change management
consultancy, Transitional Space. The above is taken from their book Making Sense
of Leadership: Exploring the five key roles used by effective leaders, published
by Kogan Page.
