Ten Traits

Today I came across an excellent chapter from the book Focus on Leadership. In this chapter, Bennis is suggesting that the following ten traits should exist in a life of a leader. How can our churches incorporate some of these traits when training leaders? Is it about time for us to start doing so, or should we just be satisfied with the status quo of our leaders?

Source:

Bennis, Warren. (2002). Become a tomorrow leader. In Spears, Larry C. & Lawrence, Michele. Focus on leadership: Servant-leadership for the twenty-first century, pp. 102-107. New York, NY: John Wiley.

Warren Bennis

Tomorrow’s leaders must learn how to create an environment that embraces change, not as a threat but as an opportunity. Some leaders will be successful at this; others will fail.

1. Successful leaders have self-awareness and self-esteem. They sense when a different repertoire of competencies is needed, without being threatened by the need to change. They have the diagnostic ability to understand what new things are required, or what things should be unlearned, plus the behavioral flexibility to change. GE’s Jack Welch had enough diagnostic ability to say, “The way I was doing things is not going to work,” and then he was also able to change his behavior.

2. Leaders ensure that boundaries are porous and permeable. You need the foresight to see things before the curve, before others do. And the only way you get that is by being in touch with your customers, with society, with the outside world, and by having the boundaries permeable and porous enough to get your information. That’s why people at the periphery are usually the most creative and often the least consulted.

3. Competitive advantage will be the leadership of women. I suspect that by the year 2005, about 50 percent of the vice presidents for finance will be women, and women will appear much more often in top management positions. One of our competitive advantages will be the full deployment of the talent of women in our workforce. We must dispel the myth that the only way for a woman to succeed is to act like a man. One irony is that male leaders have been trying to shed the same macho character traits that women have been encouraged to imitate. Dr. Helen Tartakoff, a Harvard psychoanalyst, said that generally women have exactly the opposite character traits, and that these feminine traits contain the potential for improving the human condition. What has got to change is not women’s character traits but corporate cultures, because most of them have been playing male chauvinist games for too long. The power structures and avenues of opportunity have excluded women for years. Successful leadership doesn’t depend on masculinity or femininity. It’s not about being tough or soft, assertive or sensitive. It’s about having a particular set of attributes which all leaders, both male and female, seem to share.

4. Leaders have a strongly defined sense of purpose and vision. They also develop the capacity to articulate it clearly. Leading means doing the right things; managing means doing things right. Too many organizations are over managed and under led because the people at the top are better at making policies, practices, and procedures than they are at creating a compelling, overarching vision. They are managers, not leaders. They are looking at how to achieve make sure that the vision is still relevant and salient, and has some resonance. Again, without meaning and resonance, vision statements are only stale truths.

To communicate a vision, you need more than words, speeches, memos, and laminated plaques. You need to live a vision, day in, day out, embodying it and empowering every other person to execute that vision in everything he or she does; anchoring it in realities, so that it becomes a template for decision making. Actions do speak louder than words.

5. Leaders generate trust. Leaders will have to be candid in their communications and show that they care. They’ve got to be seen to be trustworthy. Most communication has to be done eyeball-to-eyeball, rather than in newsletters, on videos, or via satellite. The leader must generate and sustain trust, and that also means demonstrating competence and constancy. “Strike hard and try everything,” wrote Henry James. You’re never going to get anywhere unless you risk and try and then learn from each experience. Leaders have to play even when it means making mistakes. And they have to learn from those mistakes.

6. Leaders have a bias toward action. Not just reflection, but action. A combination of both of them, of course, is what we all want. And then you need to get feedback on how you are doing. You have to cultivate sources of reflective backtalk by getting people around you whose counsel you treasure, people who are capable of telling the truth, people you can depend on, people who have the future in their bones. You need these people. You can’t do it alone. You need people who can take the vision and run with it.

7. Leaders create not just a vision, but a vision with meaning— one with significance, one that puts the players at the center of things rather than at the periphery. If companies have a vision that is meaningful to people, nothing will stop them from being successful. Not just any old vision will do: it must be a shared vision with meaning and significance. The only way a vision can be shared is for it to have meaning for the people who are involved in it. Leaders have to specify the steps that behaviorally fit into that vision, and then reward people for following those steps. Then they need some feedback loops, to make sure that the vision is still relevant and salient, and has some resonance. Again, without meaning and resonance, vision statements are only stale truths.

8. Leaders must become very comfortable with advanced technology and the changes that it will bring. On my seventieth birthday, my children were all there; they’re in their late twenties and early thirties. One of their birthday gifts to me was two hours of instruction on using the Internet and the World Wide Web. Two of them gave me gifts of software. In this high-tech, high-touch world, we’re going to see a totally new breed of people for whom advanced technology is just a natural part of life. Leaders will have to be not only comfortable with advanced technology but, at the same time, engage even more hands-on than ever before. They will also need more interpersonal competence.

9. Leaders must act big if they are small, and small if they are big. What we see in the global economy is that both small and big companies can be successful. It’s just a matter of finding the right scale for a particular organization and industry, and then providing the right structure and leadership. As Rosabeth Moss Kanter points out, companies worldwide are becoming PALs: they are “pooling, allying, and linking.” This is particularly true of small companies, which are creating networks, joint ventures, R&D consortia, and strategic partnerships that cut across corporate and national boundaries. They are “buying the power of bigness,” as Jay Galbraith says, to gain scale in marketing, purchasing, and manufacturing. Small firms also have new technologies on their side—like computer- based manufacturing and distribution, sophisticated marketing databases, the latest telecommunication systems—all of which are formidable competitive weapons that allow them to build global markets quickly. But this in no way signals the end of the large corporation. Giant companies have some very formidable advantages: economies of scale, resources, skilled people, know-how, social clout, long-term planning, and stability. They just wish they could get all the benefits of size without all the problems of bureaucracy and the other diseconomies of scale that size brings with it. To compete, these giants have got to behave like small, fast-moving companies. They have to recreate themselves as collections of small, independent, manageable units. Hence the worldwide focus on reengineering, downsizing, subcontracting, decentralization, spin-offs, and intrapreneuring.

10. Ultimately, leaders make federations of corporations. Most successful organizations combine the best characteristics of both big and small companies. The most practical solution, particularly for the large corporation, is federalism. Federations work better than monolithic organizations because, along with strength, they offer flexibility. They are more nimble and adaptive. They have all the inherent advantages of being big but all the benefits of being small.