Leadership

Leadership is the capacity to translate If your actions inspire others to dream

vision into reality - Warren Bennis
A leader takes people where they want
to go. A great leader takes people
where they don’t necessarily want to
go, but ought to be - Rosalynn Carter
more, learn more, do more and become
more, you are a leader - John Quincy Adams
People buy into the leader before
they buy into the vision - John Maxwell

The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say

thank you. In between, the leader is a servant - Max DePree

Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to

Before you are a leader, success is all
high sights, the raising of a person’s
about growing yourself. When you
performance to a higher standard, the
become a leader, success is all about
building of a personality beyond its
growing others - Jack Welch
normal limitations - Peter Drucker
INTRODUCTION

 What is leadership?
 Understand the nature and myths of leadership
 Leader development through education experience and
reflection.
 Skills for developing yourself as a leader
What do we mean by leadership?

 “Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives

sublime and, departing, leave behind us footprints on the
sands of time.”
 ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Definitions of Leadership (What is Leadership?)
 The process by which an agent induces a
subordinate to behave in a desired manner.
 Directing and coordinating the work of group
members.
 An interpersonal relation in which others comply
because they want to, not because they have to.
 “The process of influencing an organized group
toward accomplishing its goals.”
 Actions that focus resources to create desirable
opportunities. (continued on next slide)
Definitions of Leadership (continued)

 The leader’s job is to create conditions

for the team to be effective.
 The ends of leadership involve getting
results through others, and the means of
leadership involve the ability to build
cohesive, goal-oriented teams. Good
leaders are those who build teams to get
results across a variety of situations.
 Leadership represents a complex form of
social problem solving.
Leadership is both a science and an art
 Bass & Stogdill’s Handbook of Leadership: Theory,
Research and Managerial Applications cites
approximately 8,000 studies on leadership.
 Some managers may be effective leaders without ever
having taken a course or training program in leadership.
 Some scholars in the field of leadership may be
relatively poor leaders themselves.
 Leadership will always remain partly an art as well as a
science.

“Any fool can keep a rule. God gave him

a brain to know when to break the rule.”
~ General Willard W. Scott
Leadership is both rational and emotional

 Leadership includes actions and

influences based on reason and logic as
well as those based on inspiration and
passion.
 Sincepeople are both rational and
emotional, leaders can use rational
techniques and/or emotional appeals.
Leadership is both rational and emotional
(continued)

 Aroused feelings can be used either

positively or negatively, constructively
or destructively.
 The mere presence of a group can
cause people to act differently than
when they are alone.
 Leaders need to consider both the
rational and the emotional
consequences of their actions.
Leadership and Management
• Managers: • Leaders:
 administer  innovate
 maintain  develop
 control  inspire
 have short-term  have a long-term
view view.
 ask how and when  ask what and why.
 imitate  originate.
 accept the status  challenge the status
quo. quo.

http://freevideolectures.com/Course/2525/Leadership-by-Harvard-Business/6
The overlap of leadership and management
Leadership Myths
Leadership Myths
Myth: Good Leadership is All Common Sense

 Most leadership literature only confirms common

sense knowledge.
 Common sense is ambiguous.
 Challenge is to know when common sense applies
and when it does not.
 If leadership was simply common sense, then
workplace problems would be few, if any.
 Effective leadership must be something more
than just common sense.
Leadership Myths
Myth: Leaders are Born, not Made

 Many factors and formative experiences

influence behavior and leadership.
 Research shows cognitive abilities and
personality traits are partially innate.
 Different environments can nurture or suppress
different leadership qualities.
 Leaders are born and made.
Leadership Myths
Myth: The Only School You Learn Leadership
From is the School of Hard Knocks

 Formal study experiential learning compliment

each other.
 Students must learn to discern critical lessons
about leadership from their own experience.
 Being able to analyze experiences from
multiple perspectives may be the greatest
contribution a formal course in leadership can
give you.
 Leader development through
education experience and
reflection
 “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.”
 ~John F. Kennedy
The Action-Observation-Reflection Model
 Making the most of experience is key to
developing one’s leadership ability.
 The theory shows that leadership
development is enhanced when the
experience involves three different
processes:
 Action
 Observation
 Reflection

 Spiral of experience: Colin Powell’s

example.
The Spiral of Experience
The Key Role of Perception in the Spiral of
Experience
 Experienceis not just a matter of what
events happen to you; it also depends
on how you perceive those events.
 Perceptionaffects all three phases of
the action-observation-reflection
model.
 People actively shape and construct
their experiences.
Perception and Observation
 Observation and perception both deal with
attending to events around us.
 We are selective in what we attend to and what we,
in turn, perceive.

 Perceptual sets can influence any of our

senses:
 They are the tendency or bias to perceive one thing
and not another.
 Feelings, needs, prior experience and expectations
can all trigger a perceptual set.

 Stereotypes represent powerful impediments

to learning.
 Awareness of biases occurs upon reflection.
Perception and Reflection
 Reflection deals with how we interpret
our observations.
 Perception is inherently an interpretive,
or a meaning-making, activity.
 Attributions: Explanations we develop for
the behaviors or actions we attend to.
 Fundamental attribution error: Tendency
to overestimate the dispositional causes of
behavior and underestimate the
environmental causes when others fail.
Perception and Reflection (continued)
 Self-serving bias: Tendency to make
external attributions for one’s own failures,
yet make internal attributions for one’s
successes.
 Actor/observer difference: Refers to the
fact that people who are observing an action
are much more likely than the actor to make
the fundamental attribution error.
 Reflection also involves higher functions like
evaluation and judgment, not just
perception and attribution.
Perception and Action
 Research found that perceptions and biases
affect supervisors’ actions towards poorly
performing subordinates.
 Self-fulfilling prophecy: Occurs when our
expectations or predictions play a causal role
in bringing about the events we predict.
 Research has shown that having expectations
about others can subtly influence our actions.
 These actions can, in turn, affect the way
others behave.
Summary

 One way to add value to your leadership

courses and experiences is by applying the
action-observation-reflection model.
 Be aware of the role perception plays in
leadership development.
 Education and experience can contribute to
your development as a leader.
 To become a better leader, one must seek
challenges and try to make the best of any
leadership opportunity.
Skills for Developing
Yourself as a Leader
Introduction
 Your First 90 Days as a Leader

 Learning From Experience

 Building Technical Competence

 Building Effective Relationships with Superiors

 Building Effective Relationships with Peers

 Development Planning
Your First 90 Days as a Leader

Figure 3.1: New Leader Onboarding Roadmap

Before you start…
Candidates should gather as much information
about their potential company as they can. Some
good sources of information include:
 Web sites
 Annual reports
 Press releases
 Marketing literature
 Facebook
 LinkedIn
 Other social networking sites to set up informational
interviews with people inside the organization.
The first day…
Two critical tasks to accomplish on the first day on
the job include meeting the new boss and meeting
the new team.

The first meeting with the boss should happen in

the boss’s office and be about an hour long. Key
topics to discuss include:
 Identifying the team’s key objectives, metrics, and
important projects.
 Understanding the boss’s view of team strengths and
weaknesses.
 Working through meeting schedules and communication
styles.
 Sharing plans for the day and the next several weeks.
The first two weeks…
The first two weeks should be filled with meeting
with many people both inside and outside the
team. The key objectives for these meetings are:

 Learn as much as possible

 Develop relationships

 Determine future allies.

Meeting key team members…
Meetings with key team members should provide
the new leader with answers to:
 What is the team member working on?
 What are the team member’s objectives?
 Who are the “stars” a level or two down in the
organization?
 What are the people issues on the team?
 What can the team do better?
 Whatadvice do team members have for the new leader,
and what can the new
 leader do to help team members?
Meeting with peers…
During meetings with peers, the new leader should
discuss:
 Their peers’ objectives, challenges, team structure, etc.
 Theirperspectives on what the new leader’s team does
well and could do better.
 Their perspectives on the new leader’s team members.
 How to best communicate with the boss.
 Howissues get raised and decisions made on their boss’s
team.
The first two months…
During this time period, the leader is gathering
more information, determining the direction, and
finalizing the appropriate structure and staffing
for the team. Tasks to be performed include:

 Gathering benchmarking information

 Meeting with key external customers and

suppliers

 Meeting with the former team leader

The third month…
The new leader should have developed a vision of
the future. Things to do now include:
 Articulate how the team will win
 Identify the what, why, and how of any needed changes
 Define a clear set of expectations for team members.

The two major events for the third month are to:
 Meet with the entire team
 Meet off-site with direct reports (if the team is
large).
Learning From Experience
Leadership practitioners can enhance the learning
value of experiences by:

 Creating opportunities to get feedback

 Taking a “10 percent stretch”

 Learning from others

 Keeping a journal of daily leadership events

 Having a developmental plan.

Building Technical Competence
Technical competence - knowledge and repertoire
of behaviors one can utilize to successfully complete
a task. Technical competence is important for a
leader for many reasons including:
 Ithas been found to be consistently related to managerial
promotion rates.
 Many leaders often spend considerable time training
followers
 Ithelps to reduce the level of role ambiguity and conflict in
their groups
 Ithelps leaders stimulate followers to think about problems
and issues in new ways, which in turn has been found to be
strongly related to organizational climate ratings and
followers’ motivation to succeed.
Building Effective Relationships with
Superiors
To build an effective relationship, the leader should:
 Understand their superior’s world
 Understand their superior’s personal and organizational objectives
 Realize superiors do not have all the answers and have both
strengths and weaknesses
 Keep them informed about various activities in the work group or
new developments or opportunities in the field
 Adapt to the superior’s style
 Clarify expectations about their role on the team, committee, or
work group
 List major responsibilities and use them to guide discussions with
the superior about other ways to accomplish the task and relative
priorities of the tasks.
 Be honest and dependable
Building Effective Relationships with Peers

To build an effective relationship with the leader’s

peers, they should:

Recognize common interests and goals

Understand peers’ tasks, problems, and rewards

Practice a Theory Y attitude

Development Planning
Developmental planning is the systematic process of
building knowledge and experience or changing
behavior. Peterson and Hicks claim that there are 5
interrelated phases to developmental planning:

 Identifying development needs

 Analyzing data to identify and prioritize
development needs.
 Prioritized development needs are used to create
a focused and achievable development plan
 Periodically plan review, reflecting on learning,
and modifying or updating the plan as appropriate
 Transferring learning to new environments.
High Impact Development Plan
There are 7 steps to developing a high impact
development plan:

 Step 1: career and development objectives

 Step 2: criteria for success

 Step 3: action steps

 Step 4: whom to involve and reassess dates

 Step 5: stretch assignments

 Step 6: resources

 Step 7: reflect with a partner

 Thank You !

Thushara Asuramanna
ACMA-UK, CGMA-UK, MBA (PIM-USJ), Bsc Eng (Hons), Dip in Mgmt (OUSL), BMS – OUSL,
AM (IESL), M (IET-UK), Certified Expert in SME Finance

asuramanna.t@gmail.com.