LEADER SKILL Flashcards
Skills Approach To Leadership
- Leadership skills– The ability to use one’s knowledge and competencies to accomplish a set of goals and objectives
- Is also a leader-centered perspective
- Emphasis on skills and abilities that can be developed
- This approach suggests that one can learn to be an effective leader
Katz’s (1955) Three-Skills Approach
Covers how organizations work
When starting off an organization, high on technical skills and high on contributor s kills…not high on the leader to control things, just high to contribute
* Technical Skill – not needed as you go higher in the hierarchy
* Human Skill – person component on the stability of the job, restructuring organization, create a vision
* Conceptual skill
* Leaders need all three skills – but relative importance changes based on level of management
Technical skills
- Having knowledge about and being proficient in a specific type of work or activity.
- Specialized competencies–
- Analytical ability - tangible, doing a lot of the work
- Use of appropriate tools and techniques
- Technical skills involve hands-on ability with a product or process
- Most important at lower levels of management
- Human (Interpersonal) skills
How to manage how to push boundaries, how to deal with emotions, how to keep them on track with time
Especially when conflict is not accepted in certain cultures.
Some cultures are more confrontational… no is no
Being ghosted
Keep team motivated
* Having knowledge about and being able to work with people
* Being aware of one’s own perspective and others’ perspectives at the same time
* Assisting group members in working cooperatively to achieve common goals
* Creating an atmosphere of trust and empowerment of members
- Important at all levels of the organization
Skills-based Model (Mumford et. al., 2000)
Look at how this skills come about, how we pick them up, and think that they have the leadership once they pick up the correct skills
* Research studies in 1990s with the goal to identify the leadership factors that create exemplary job performance in an organisation
- Emphasizes the capabilities that make effective leadership possible rather than what leaders do
- Skills-based Model of Leadership
- Capability model – Examines relationship between a leader’s knowledge and skills and the leader’s performance
- Suggests many people have the potential for leadership
- Three components of the Skills Model
- Leader Competencies
- Individual Attributes
- Leadership Outcomes
Skills Model Affected by:
- Career experiences
- Environmental Influences
Leader Competencies Skill:
Problem Solving
o Creative ability to solve new/ unusual, ill-defined organizational problems
o Crystallized and fluid thinking
· Application: People use their fluid intelligence when facing situations that require creating strategies and solving problems. Examples of the use of crystallized intelligence include vocabulary exams, remembering history, and recalling formulae to solve mathematical problems.
· Fluid intelligence is your ability to process new information, learn, and solve problems. Crystallized intelligence is your stored knowledge, accumulated over the years. The two types work together and are equally important
o Ability to solve problems outside of what you have learned
o Having the knowledge to apply
Leader Competencies Skill: · Social Judgment
o Capacity to understand people and social systems
· Perspective taking
· Social perceptiveness
· Behavioral flexibility
· Social performance
Leader Competencies Skill:Knowledge
o The accumulation of information & the mental structures to organize the information
Individual Attributes
General Cognitive Ability
· Person’s intelligence
○ Perceptual processing
○ Information processing
○ General reasoning
○ Creative & divergent thinking
○ Memory
○ Fluid vs Crystallized thinking
Crystallized Cognitive Ability o Intellectual ability learned or acquired over time Motivation o Three aspects of motivation · Willingness · Dominance · Social good Personality o Any characteristic that helps people cope with complex organizational situations is probably related to leader performance
2 types of Influences
Career Experiences
Environmental Influences
Career Experiences
Challenging Assignments
Mentoring
Appropriate Training
Hands-on Experience with Novelty
- Experience gained during career influences leader’s knowledge & skills to solve complex problems
- Leaders learn and develop higher levels of conceptual capacity if they progressively confront more complex and long-term problems as they ascend the organizational hierarchy
Environmental Influences
How well is your job handled, by virtue of the environment
External environment
* Factors in a leader’s situation that lie outside of his or her competencies, characteristics, and experiences
- Internal environmental influences
- E.g. Outdated technology, skill level of employees
- External environmental influences
- E.g. Economic, political or social issues, natural disasters
Three-factor Leadership Model
Future-oriented
Create a future for the team
* The ability to have vision, set stretching objectives, identify trends, and seek better ways of doing things.
- E.g. has a vision of where they would like the department to move, anticipates the future needs, consequences and trends.
Operational focus
Can this person do the job I am currently doing
Having the techniques to do the job
* Behaviours around the day-to-day management of an office and employees.
* E.g. providing feedback, staying in touch with others’ performance, influencing staff to behave in line with department values.
Positive energy
* Leader’s charisma and their effect on others in terms of morale and empathy.
* E.g. facilitates a strong sense of involvement with staff, creates strong morale and spirit in the team, has a positive influence on the people that work for them.
How does the Skill approach work
- Focus is primarily descriptive – it describes leadership from skills perspective
- Provides structure for understanding the nature of effective leadership
- Principle Research Perspectives
for skills approach
- Katz (1955) suggests importance of particular leadership skills varies depending where leaders reside in management hierarchy
- Mumford, Campion, & Morgeson, (2007) suggest higher levels of all skills needed at higher levels of hierarchy
- Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding et al. (2000) suggest leadership outcomes are direct result of leader’s skilled competency in problem solving, social judgment & knowledge
Strengths for Skill Approach
Useful for coaching and development, for career development and succession planning
- First approach to conceptualize and create a structure of the process of leadership around skills
- Describing leadership in terms of skills makes leadership available to everyone
- Provides an expansive view of leadership that incorporates wide variety of components (i.e., problemsolving skills, social judgment skills)
- Provides a structure consistent with leadership education programs
Criticisms for Skill Approach
Broad…If you talk about visioning, how are you going to that? Difficult to answer
* Breadth of the skills approach appears to extend beyond the boundaries of leadership, making it more general, less precise
- Weak in predictive value; does not explain how skills lead to effective leadership performance
- Skills model includes individual attributes that are trait-like
Application for Skill Approach
- The Skills Approach provides a way to delineate the skills of a leader
- It is applicable to leaders at all levels within the organization
- The skills inventory can provide insights into the individual’s leadership competencies
- Test scores allow leaders to learn about areas in which they may wish to seek further training
