Much has been written about leadership: rules, pointers, styles, and biographies of inspiring leaders throughout world history. But there are certain leadership ideas that we ourselves fail to recognize and realize in the course of reading books. Here is a short list of things you thought you knew about leadership.
1. Leaders Come In Different Flavors. There are different types of leaders and you will probably encounter more than one type in your lifetime. Formal leaders are those we elect into positions or offices such as the senators, congressmen, and presidents of the local clubs.
Informal leaders or those we look up to by virtue of their wisdom and experience such as in the case of the elders of a tribe, or our grandparents; or by virtue of their expertise and contribution on a given field such as Albert Einstein in the field of Theoretical Physics and Leonardo da Vinci in the field of the Arts. Both formal and informal leaders practice a combination of leadership styles.
-Lewin's three basic leadership styles - authoritative, participative, and delegative -Likert's four leadership styles - exploitive authoritative, benevolent authoritative, consultative, and participative -Goleman's six emotional leadership styles - visionary, coaching, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting, and commanding.
2. Leadership Is A Process Of Becoming. Although certain people seem to be born with innate leadership qualities, without the right environment and exposure, they may fail to develop their full potential. So like learning how to ride a bicycle, you can also learn how to become a leader and hone your leadership abilities. Knowledge on leadership theories and skills may be formally gained by enrolling in leadership seminars, workshops, and conferences.
Daily interactions with people provide the opportunity to observe and practice leadership theories. Together, formal and informal learning will help you gain leadership attitudes, gain leadership insights, and thus furthering the cycle of learning. You do not become a leader in one day and just stop. Life-long learning is important in becoming a good leader for each day brings new experiences that put your knowledge, skills, and attitude to a test.
3. Leadership Starts With You. The best way to develop leadership qualities is to apply it to your own life. As an adage goes action speaks louder than words.Leaders are always in the limelight. Keep in mind that your credibility as a leader depends much on your actions: your interaction with your family, friends, and co-workers; your way of managing your personal and organizational responsibilities; and even the way you talk with the newspaper vendor across the street.
Repeated actions become habits. Habits in turn form a person's character. Steven Covey's book entitled 7 Habits of Highly Effective People provides good insights on how you can achieve personal leadership.
4. Leadership Is Shared. Leadership is not the sole responsibility of one person, but rather a shared responsibility among members of an emerging team. A leader belongs to a group. Each member has responsibilities to fulfill. Formal leadership positions are merely added responsibilities aside from their responsibilities as members of the team.
Effective leadership requires members to do their share of work. Starting as a mere group of individuals, members and leaders work towards the formation of an effective team. In this light, social interaction plays a major role in leadership.
To learn how to work together requires a great deal of trust between and among leaders and members of an emerging team. Trust is built upon actions and not merely on words. When mutual respect exists, trust is fostered and confidence is built.
5. Leadership Styles Depend On The Situation. How come dictatorship works for Singapore but not in the United States of America? Aside from culture, beliefs, value system, and form of government, the current situation of a nation also affects the leadership styles used by its formal leaders.
There is no rule that only one style can be used. Most of the time, leaders employ a combination of leadership styles depending on the situation. In emergency situations such as periods of war and calamity, decision-making is a matter of life and death. Thus, a nation's leader cannot afford to consult with all departments to arrive at crucial decisions.
The case is of course different in times of peace and order---different sectors and other branches of government can freely interact and participate in governance. Another case in point is in leading organizations. When the staffs are highly motivated and competent, a combination of high delegative and moderate participative styles of leadership is most appropriate.
But if the staffs have low competence and low commitment, a combination of high coaching, high supporting, and high directing behavior from organizational leaders is required.
Now that you are reminded of these things, keep in mind that there are always ideas that we think we already know; concepts we take for granted, but are actually the most useful insights on leadership.
Introduction You browse through a handful of Six Sigma books hoping to find a definition for leadership. Chances are you'd be hard pressed to find one unifying definition. Instead, you'll get a garden variety of definitions that will help you zero in on the true essence of leadership. Given evolving business and manufacturing trends and rapidly changing technologies, leadership has taken on a multi-faceted dimension. The same is true when speaking of leadership in Six Sigma. Don't be discouraged. While it is true that someone new to Six Sigma can be puzzled by the myriad of concepts, principles, charts and metric analysis, Six Sigma is, in the end, an approach based on pure common sense. And as one navigates through the discussions and literature on Six Sigma, one realizes that leadership boils down to applied common sense. As you learn more about Six Sigma principles and leadership, you'll find that numerous writers will use the phrase, applied common sense, over and over again. Six Sigma Terms Provide Clues to Leadership Assuming even basic knowledge of Six Sigma, what have you observed regarding the terms that are frequently raised? This question is essential because if we closely examine the terms and phrases that are frequently used by writers to describe Six Sigma processes, they can clue us into what makes an effective leader. Establishing a link between such terms to effective leadership is a good starting point. To cite a few: quality, speed, process flow, sustained improvement, customer satisfaction, team work, openness, factual data, cost reduction, innovation, operational efficiency, success factors these are only a few of the recurring concepts in Six Sigma leadership. There are many others, particularly if you venture into the more technical aspects of Six Sigma, but for the moment, we are focusing on leadership. Taking those terms therefore, how do we come up with a working and realistic definition of leadership in Six Sigma? In its simplest form, we'll adopt the definition given by Peter S. Pande in his book, The Six Sigma Leader ( McGraw Hill, 2007). Pande says that the essence of Six Sigma leadership is balance and flexibility. The interesting point he makes is that leadership is not about absolutes nor a defined set of steps. It is a set of principles that can be applied for greater success and sustained results for an organization. He explains, "It's based on the idea that outstanding leadership is an artful, but learnable, combination of skills that combine balance and flexibility to drive goals and performance." In reading Pande's definition, our first reaction was, how can balance and flexibility be chopped into smaller segments to arrive at a clearer understanding of leadership? To say that a leader must be balanced and flexible is a rather sweeping broad statement. Let's see if we can take these two terms and tie them up with the terms we mentioned earlier. This is what we propose: a Six Sigma leader knows how to use factual data about the company's mission and objectives, its employees and their functions and uses this data to come up with the critical success factors for the organization so that the company delights its customers with low costs. So leadership in Six Sigma presupposes that these four essential ingredients constitute the guiding principles for improving: factual data, critical success factors, customers and low costs. A Six Sigma leader is also someone who can balance the high quality low cost ratio for the company to continually improve by taking members of his team to buy in to his brand of leadership. When there's a buy-in on the part of ALL members in a team, the chances for success are higher and the risks for poor operational results are greatly diminished. Quantum Leaders We'll now go into a higher realm of leadership in Six Sigma. This time, we'll refer to what David H. Treichler and Ronald D. Carmicheal ( The Six Sigma Path to Leadership, American Society for Quality, 2004) call the Quantum Leader. Six Sigma is a model for leadership training where managers and executives are trained to be results-oriented. Treichler and Carmichael ask, " buthow many leaders actually achieve quantum results?" Quantum results, they say, are those results that take an organization to higher levels of performance. If we compare Treichler's definition of leadership to that of Pande's, it isn't that all different, although Treichler goes one step further. He says quantum leaders are capable of making dispassionate decisions based on data that has been systematically gathered and analyzed, ensuring that the political realities of an organization and fear factor are managed and controlled effectively. Treichler and Carmichael says that management must tell employees that it does not shoot messengers and that a company's leaders must not only provide lip service to Six Sigma practices but actually provide the resources, training and opportunities so that employees are empowered to do their jobs and take responsibility - not out of personal gains, but to contribute to business gains. As Treichler so aptly put it, " leadership cannot get it at the conceptual or intellectual level. That is mere lip service to Six Sigma. Instead, leadership must live Six Sigma, lead by Six Sigma, and infuse Six Sigma into every business decision."
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