REALISTIC LEADERSHIP
Chapter 1: Evaluating The Role of Leader

From the time you get your first promotion, from the time you’re asked to supervise even one other person, maybe even from the time you’re first hired, you are put in the role of leader. Have you stopped to think what this means? What does a leader do?

You’re being asked to influence other people to work together to accomplish a common goal. You have to set a direction for others to follow. Somehow you have to create a team and give it a spirit. You have to exert a positive influence on the group while obtaining something of value from them. It’s a big job!
What kinds of things do you need to know or do in order to be effective? You will need:

1. To understand your own hidden assumptions, those unconscious attitudes that influence your everyday behavior.
2. To be aware of the many different styles of leadership and to be able to choose the most effective for you in each different situation.
3. To develop an understanding of other people, sensitivity to their needs, and responsiveness to their input.
4. To develop a variety of skills to manage all your resources most effectively.

Let’s look for a minute at the resources with which you work. We can summarize them in three categories:

1. THE PEOPLE YOU WORK WITH
2. THE EXTERNAL RESOURCES OF YOUR TASK
3. YOU INTERNAL RESOURCES (YOU!)

Throughout this book we explore the most effective ways to manage all three categories of resources. We will be balancing the need for human-relations skills and task skills. And we will especially focus on you, the most important resource of all. Your ability to develop self-awareness, shed personal bias, and learn from an objective analysis of any situation — these are the abilities that will make you a truly effective leader. Add these abilities to the specific skills you will be learning, and you’ll be dynamite!
The easiest definition of leadership is the ability to decide where you’re going and to know how to get there. There are many skills that can help you in both defining your goals and selecting the most effective strategies for achieving them.

__________________PEOPLE SKILLS____________________

You can’t be a leader without having a team behind you. You need their information, their efforts, their skills. You need their cooperation to get things done. The people who work for you are a vital resource, and your ability to deal with them will greatly influence your effectiveness. Even learning the concepts and skills presented in this book will be of value only if you also learn to read the feedback of the people you work with. Learn to read their responses and use this feedback to adapt ideas and techniques to your own particular situation. A leader can make or break a group effort. Here are some things you need to be able to do in order to support your team and facilitate its efforts:

• To listen, and to understand the messages you receive from others.
• To delegate effectively — not be overly bossy and yet still be able to evaluate performance accurately.
• To deal with conflicts and problems by encouraging openness and maintaining credibility.
• To express your own ideas clearly and persuasively, without forcing them down other people’s throats.

These skills will aid you in every situation: running a meeting, mediating disputes, diagnosing problems, planning a project — any situation involving other people.
In recent years there has been much emphasis on human-relations skills. Motivating people to their highest level of productivity requires that you understand their needs and desires. But as a leader, you must be able to manage both the human resources and the external resources that are available to you. In this book, we focus as well on task-related skills.

_________________________TASK SKILLS_______________________

A leader must always be looking for more effective ways to get results. Whenever there is a job to be done, chances are good that you will not be given unlimited resources to do it with. Good planning to accomplish a job therefore requires you to manage time and money effectively. You must be able to set priorities in order to know how to allocate resources. Analyzing and evaluating data enable you to make you to make decisions based on logic, not guesswork, as well as to have contingency plans ready when the unexpected occurs. Developing the initiative necessary as a leader means that you will have to learn to take risks in an appropriate and logical way. Here are some of the specific skills that are helpful in getting the results you want:

• To manage time effectively — that is, to get the maximum amount done without exhausting your resources.
• To gather information — the most balanced and accurate possible — and to know when to stop gathering and start doing.
• To use information well in planning — to understand what to trade off, to set priorities, to evaluate risks.
• To cope with the unexpected to know how to minimize losses and maximize gains.

It’s a big job to balance the needs of the people and the needs of the task Knowing how to fit together the jigsaw puzzle requires the effective use of the most important resource: you.

__________________INTERNAL RESOURCE SKILLS____________________

In order to be able to objectively consider all the input available to you, you must be clear about your own needs and desires. You can’t listen to another person’s real messages if you have preconceived ideas about what they mean. You can’t judge another person’s performance by unspoken and possibly unreasonable expectations of your own. You can’t manage time or resources effectively if you are making decisions based on your own hidden assumptions, instead of relying on more balanced data.

How do you avoid these pitfalls? The best way is to learn the art of self-analysis. I prefer to think of this as ’spring-cleaning’ your mind. Every now and then you need to take out all the old, time-worn ideas and assumptions you’ve stored in your head. Some of them have been there so long that you’ve probably come to ignore them. Take then out, dust them off, and regard each one carefully. Ask yourself the following questions about each one:

1. Why do I believe it?
2. From what experiences did I ‘learn’ it?
3. Does it logically and consistently fit in with other information that I have?
4. Is it functional? Does it really help?

The fourth question is the most important one. Assumptions are beliefs or attitudes based not on a logical analysis of all the data, but on personal experience. They are appropriate if they result in positive or productive behavior. Notice that I did not say that they are appropriate if they are ‘true.’ Since by definition they are based on less than all the data, we cannot know for sure if they are ‘true.’ They are appropriate if they are useful. If an assumption is not useful to you, then throw it out! Spring-cleaning your mind periodically keeps it clean and open. And it keeps you effective!
We will talk more about how assumptions can be ‘not useful’ when we talk about Self-Fulfilling Prophecies later in this chapter. Throughout this book I’ll be asking you to dust off your assumptions about many topics, such as power, manipulation, employees, work, right and wrong. How did you feel as you read those words? Take the time now to joy down your responses to the following questions:

• How do you feel about power?
• Is manipulation a dirty word to you?
• What do you expect from employees?
• Is work something people like or hate?
• Is there always a right way and a wrong way?

When you finish this book, you may wish to go back to the responses you made above and review them. You may find that you have gained some new insights into your own assumptions about some very important issues.
We will be looking at how you react to authority and how you expect people to react to your authority. We’ll explore ways of guiding people, as well as ways to encourage them to guide themselves. We’ll discuss the way your hidden assumptions affect your behavior, and how to use them for positive effects. Nobody is perfect, but diagnosing your own strengths and weak spots can help you be as effective a leader as is humanly possible.
You can learn many specific techniques to improve your weak areas. You can also develop a well-balanced perspective on events that will keep you happy and healthy while managing even the most troublesome office situations. Some of the skills covered in this book include:

• Distinguishing different styles of leadership, and selecting the most appropriate style for ach different situation.
• Applying theories of motivation, and using people effectively without abusing them.
• Maintaining an objective outlook that allows you to switch perspectives, and acting effectively in solving any kind of problems.
• Managing stress constructively so that you can stay enthusiastic without becoming exhausted.

Why must you do such a balancing act in order to be an effective leader? It is very simple. Research has shown that the most important variable in determining how a group works is the expectations of their leader. This process is called:

______________THE SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY________________

(to be continued)