Leadership in Times of Uncertainty continued
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Vol. II, Num.5, Page3 ~ Online
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Leadership in Times of Uncertainty | Leading or Managing? | Leadership Styles | How is Leadership Developed?
An Important Message to Business Leaders
The next basic ingredient of leadership is integrity, keeping commitments, doing what you say. It is the basis of trust. You can't have trust without integrity, and it cannot be acquired, but must be earned.

Two more basic ingredients are curiosity and daring (courage). The leader wonders about everything, wants to learn as much as he can, is willing to take risks, experiment, try new things. He does not worry about failure, but embraces errors, knowing he will learn from them.

Leadership Styles

Daniel Goleman proposes that the bedrock of successful leadership is emotional intelligence. The leaders who achieve the best results are emotional polymaths, capable of combining emotional competencies into different leadership styles.

Here are the basic leadership styles from the Harvard Business Review article of Goleman (March 2000):

  1. Coercive: demands immediate compliance
  2. Authoritative: mobilizes people toward a vision
  3. Affiliative: creates harmony and builds emotional bonds
  4. Democratic: forges consensus through participation
  5. Pacesetting: sets high standards for performance
  6. Coaching: develops people for the future

Leaders apply the style that best suits the challenges of the present moment. Not unlike Blanchard and Hersey's Situational Leadership, Goleman says that leaders have to take into account the needs of the people being led as well as the situation at hand.

Bennis says that three things are at the top of the list for leading during a period of unprecedented and transformative change.

  1. Staying with the status quo is unacceptable.
  2. The key to competitive advantage will be the capacity of leadership to create the social architecture capable of generating intellectual capital.
  3. Followers need from their leaders three basic qualities: direction, trust and hope.

Restructuring or re-engineering a company will not produce the results needed for prosperity. It takes innovation. It means getting the best out of people by empowering them, supporting them and getting out of their way. Attracting and retaining talent doesn't happen under bureaucratic or command and control leadership. Intelligent leadership aims to release the brain power of knowledge workers.

A leader is a dealer in hope –Napoleon Bonaparte

For Bennis, full, free self-expression is the essence of leadership. Leaders know who they are, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how to fully deploy their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses.

This ties in with the work done by the Hay McBer Group on emotional competencies. Self-awareness is the foundation for building competencies in the other three areas of emotional intelligence: self-regulation, social awareness and social skills. Leaders must develop their self-awareness in order to increase their leadership skills with others.

Most of the research agrees:

  1. Leaders are made, not born, and made more by themselves than by any external means.
  2. No leader sets out to be a leader per se, but rather to express herself or himself freely and fully.
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Copyright © 2001 Simmonds Publications
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