Leadership

Tips for developing your skills

Type the word “leadership” into the Amazon website and you will find more than 100,000 search results. Why is there such significant interest in leadership and leaders? Is there an essence to leadership that can be distilled from all these books and other products — a “best way of doing it”? And with all this information available, how can you know whether you’re capable of leading?

In this new series, we will look at various dimensions of leadership. Before you read on, take a few minutes to think about how you would answer the following questions:

What is leadership? What is my leadership role at the moment?

What do good leaders do? 1. What is leadership?

If you want to understand whether or not you can be a leader, you first need to understand the meaning of “leadership”. But leadership is a complex concept and, despite all the discussion of the topic, there is no clear consensus on exactly what it means, particularly in today’s very culturally complex, global business world. It seems impossible to identify precisely what constitutes “good leadership” in any given context. This often depends on what we mean by “good” — and people will always disagree about that. Nevertheless, anyone who aspires to leadership needs to engage with the diverse meanings of the term and its interesting journey as a concept over time.

In 2016, the Harvard Business Review published a list of the qualities that 195 global leaders believed to be important (see table 1). Communication, creativity, support and flexibility appeared on the list, as one might expect. But top of the list was “has high ethical and moral standards”, listed by 67 per cent of respondents. This possibly reflects the rise of the importance of regulatory compliance and moral concerns for those in leadership roles — and shows the situational nature of what might otherwise seem like a timeless phenomenon.