Qualities of Leaders
The module on the Qualities of Leaders focuses on the issues of the character of the leader. It also looks at ways in which a leader can strengthen aspects of her character. The module can take about 5 - 7 hours, roughly one morning or a full day.
Exercise 2
This is a group exercise. Participants divide into groups of 5 – 8 participants and enumerate what they believe are the qualities required of a leader. The group work should take about 30 minutes. Each group will make a 5 minute presentation to the plenary. The plenary should not last more than 30 minutes.
Some of the qualities that are commonly found amongst leaders are as follows:
1. A leader is dependable and accountable. People like to follow someone they can trust, and whom they feel will be loyal and trustworthy both in terms of sticking to certain principles and in support of colleagues. A leader creates trust, is predictable, and has integrity.
Exercise 2.1
The pattern followed in Exercises 2.1 – 2.9 is that after each point there is a short individual exercise. Give about 10 minutes for each one to write down 3 points. Limit the points to 3 so that everyone can participate. Of course the points are not intended to be exhaustive. At the end of the presentation these points will be discussed in groups, followed by a plenary (Exercise 2.10).
How do you judge that a leader has integrity? How do you create trust and build up loyalty as a leader?
2. A leader is self-confident and motivated to lead. She is strong willed and ambitious to achieve certain clear goals. Self-confidence usually means the ability to self-critique and to accept criticism from others. It also means the leader has enough self-knowledge to know her strengths as well as to acknowledge her weaknesses and limitations. With this high degree of self-knowledge she knows what she is doing and how to do it.
Exercise 2.2
Each one to write down 3 points. How much self-knowledge do you have? What are your strong points and what are your weaknesses? How do you project your strong points, and how do you overcome your weaknesses? How ambitious are you, and in what ways are you ambitious? How do you build up your self-confidence?
3. She has emotional and physical stamina – a leader has lots of energy. A leader is not a person who limits herself to a narrow office job and limits her working hours to the minimum. Instead a leader can see what needs to be done, and has the strength to do this. She is self-directed and has initiative.
Exercise 2.3
Each one to write down 3 points. How do you strengthen your physical stamina? How do you strengthen your emotional stamina? What is meant by self-directed? What is meant by initiative and how have you shown initiative in the past month?
4. A leader is courageous and tenacious – she doesn’t give up easily. Inevitably there are always lots of problems and barriers, particularly so for a leader, who by definition, is trying to break into new territory. As a pioneer she will be going into unchartered territory, and creating new systems. She will definitely face opposition from vested interests and conservative elements who are against the empowerment of women in general or against the achievement of the goals she has set for herself. She may even face opposition from individual women or from established women’s groups, as the new group may be seen as a rival.
Exercise 2.4
Each participant to write down 3 points. What problems and barriers have you faced in your leadership experiences in the past, and how did you manage to continue in the face of opposition? Is courage a personal quality or is it something that depends on the amount of support you can get from those around you? Why do women face opposition and how can you overcome this opposition?
5. A leader is decisive. However, this does not mean that she makes all the decisions in the organization. Instead it is likely that the top leader will only make two or three major decisions a year. Lower level leaders will be making the day to day decisions. Micro-management where the top leader makes most of the decisions is a sure sign of failure, because it means the organization does not exist, and everything depends on a strong personality. Empowerment means that decision-making is made at all the different levels of leadership, with a clear designation of the decisions to be made at the different levels, and with a monitoring system for all decisions. This involves some management skills.
Another point to keep in mind is the stage of development of the organization. A new organization may require more personal attention from the top leader or leaders, whereas a well developed and successful older organization may have developed systems so that the top leadership does not need to intervene in most of the decisions. A new organization requires a lot of systems building, whereas an older organization may already have systems in place.
Exercise 2.5
Each one to write down 3 points. What decisions do you make and how often do you make them? Could these decisions have been delegated to someone else? Why is it important for the top leaders to delegate as much decision-making as possible?
6. Focused on the job. This means a leader does not bring in extraneous issues, like her personal problems or her personal prejudices which will cause everyone to lose focus on the key areas of achievement that are required. There are many areas where we will naturally disagree: a leader should expect disagreement on a large number of issues and should select a narrow range of objectives on which she can build up unity and consensus. The art and craft of leadership means that we can join together on a few critical issues on which there is full agreement. For example if the aim is to establish and maintain a clean water supply, then the leadership must unite the people round this issue in order to ensure that the best technology, workmanship and maintenance system are established. If the aim is to establish a good school, the aims and processes will be different.
Exercise 2.6
Each one to write down 3 points. What is your “job” in terms of what you want to achieve?
7. Ability to surround herself with good people. An effective leader undertakes challenges which she definitely cannot achieve on her own. Leadership means being able to organize a number of people who are willing to work together to achieve certain goals. For example an army may consist of 30 000 troops who have to act together as one body. A university may consist of hundreds of staff and tens of thousands of students. To ensure that such an organization succeeds, it is essential for the leader to be able to have good people who can unite together to achieve the common goals. Selection is one of the most important keys to leadership success. If you choose non-engineers to undertake an engineering task, for example, you are bound to fail. If you choose your friends and relatives to run an organization, this can only work if it is a family organization and if you have ensured that your friends and relatives are qualified and experienced to do the job. Many businesses are family businesses, and run along family lines, but once the business goes beyond a certain size the family system may not be the right system for success.
Exercise 2.7
Each one to write down 3 points. How do you select “good” people? What is meant by “good” people? Is this a reference to professional ability or to character? What happens if I choose to surround myself with only my friends or my family members?
8. Ability to retain good people. Not only must the good leader be able to select good staff, but she must be able to retain them, as generally the goals cannot be achieved in a short time. A leader can be judged to some extent by the people who are prepared to follow her consistently and for a long period of time. At least 3 years may be needed to achieve even short term goals, and maybe a decade or more may be needed to achieve medium and long term goals. A high staff turnover is therefore a recipe for failure.
Retention of good staff depends on a number of factors. The most important factor is dedication to the goals of the organization. This can be seen in many voluntary organizations whose members work for nothing in order to achieve certain goals. This is the case in many churches whose members may join together to do charitable works based on their shared beliefs. The liberation struggle against colonialism in Africa also saw many Africans joining together to overcome colonialism, and they succeeded in doing this against the odds, where the colonialists held very much more power and money than the liberation forces.
Staff retention will also depend on the career prospects. People may be prepared to endure immediate difficulties if they believe that these challenges will improve their own academic and career prospects in the medium and long term. Programmes to improve the academic and professional competencies of staff may help to maintain staff even when salaries are low. An example of this is the teaching service and the civil service, where staff may have good prospects of further academic and professional training, but are not as well paid as in the private sector. A person may decide to remain in the public service because of the possibilities of professional growth. A garbage collector in a developed country may earn much more than a doctor in a developing country. Many Western doctors come to developing countries in order to improve their professional qualifications and experience, even though the pay is minimal.
Job satisfaction may be another reason for remaining in a job. A teacher may love working with children, and may be willing to accept the lower pay because of the job satisfaction.
An organization needs to be seen as a good employer, providing adequate pay, tenure and other benefits, as well as good working conditions.
Exercise 2.8
Each one to write down 3 points. What is the balance between personal dedication, career prospects, job satisfaction and pay in your organization or in your experience?
9. Leadership is basically the empowerment of others, rather than being able to give orders: a leader inspires rather than orders. She enables people to use their own initiative, qualifications, skills and experience to achieve common goals. Job satisfaction depends on a certain degree of professional autonomy.
However leadership depends on the nature of the task. Lower level tasks, such as, for example, cleaning toilets, may require less professional autonomy than higher level tasks, such as building a bridge or performing a delicate operation on the brain. There is a difference in skills between a brick layer, an architect and an engineer, although all work with bricks. For simpler (though no less arduous tasks) the procedures may be highly structured, for example that public toilets must be cleaned every hour and the cleaner must sign her name recording the time the job was done. The hours of work of the cleaner may be rigorously prescribed, for example from 8 a.m to 5 p.m. For such jobs records may be kept of the exact hours of work done by the worker. The cleaning of toilets may be more of a management task than a leadership challenge.
However where highly skilled professional jobs are concerned, the type of leadership and organization required are quite different. It is not possible for the top leader to go into the details of the different highly technical and specialized jobs done within a single organization. Even related jobs like accountancy and economics may require highly differentiated and specialized skills. Teacher training and curriculum development are also closely related but require very different training, skills and experiences.
The issue of how to empower is an important one for a leader. It entails the leader knowing enough about the functions required to make a judgement of the type and character of the person on the one hand, and the qualifications, skills and experiences required to do the job well on the other hand. Empowerment requires both judgement of the character of personnel as well as judgement of the technical and professional knowledge of the person.
Exercise 2.9
Each one to write down 3 points. How far does empowerment depend on judgement about character and personality, and how far does it depend on technical and professional know how in your experience?
10. Conclusion. Leadership depends on both character and professional competencies. Certain character qualities are required of leaders, and different professions may require different qualities. For example a military leader may require the same or different character qualities from a business leader or a political leader.
Much also depends on the culture of the people: people who are highly educated will want to have a say in setting out the objectives as well as the strategies of the organization in a more unstructured way, whereas less educated people may be happier when the situation is more structured. The issue of how democratic a leader is depends very much on the nature of the tasks in hand and of the culture. We would lose confidence in the aeroplane pilot who decides to ask the crew or the passengers for decisions on how he or she should operate the plane! If there is an emergency, for example if the house is on fire, no one expects a democratic meeting to be held about how to go about putting out the fire. Instead everyone may be prepared to follow the instructions of an autocratic expert, such as a fireman.
On the other hand most staff, particularly high level professional staff, will be very upset if decisions which they have to implement are made without their participation.
An intellectual leader may concentrate on how to spread her ideas amongst many groups and individuals, and would set up more democratic systems for ideas sharing and development.
Exercise 2.10
This is a group and plenary exercise. Each group discusses the 9 points as well as any others they have worked out regarding the characteristics of leaders. This should take about 60 minutes. Each group will then present their findings to the plenary session. This should take about 40 – 60 minutes. Finally each participant will write down how she will strengthen her own competencies in the identified areas. This can be done as homework which can be collected the next morning.