One can speak of leadership from times as remote and exponents as important as Jesus Christ himself, who knew how to instill in his followers so much confidence and identification with his ideals, that even without him being present, they knew how to carry on with the mission that had been outlined. Also, another example can be cited, as you will see above, is that of the organization of the Jesuits, who, following the commandments of Loyola, its founder, have been able to train leaders.
Throughout history, there have been many personalities who have spoken about leadership either directly or indirectly; likewise, there have been numerous attempts to conceptualize it, so there are different definitions on the subject.
One can speak of leadership from times as remote and exponents as important as Jesus Christ himself, who knew how to instill in his followers so much confidence and identification with his ideals, that even without him being present, they knew how to carry on with the mission that had been outlined. Also, another example can be cited, as you will see above, is that of the organization of the Jesuits, who, following the commandments of Loyola, its founder, have been able to train leaders.
It is truly impressive to know that from very remote times, back in the 16th century there was already talk of leadership and how current and timely the ideas raised in those remote times by Loyola can be, when talking about the close link that existed between self-knowledge himself and leadership. Loyola and his colleagues were fully convinced that men perform best in positively charged environments, so they exhorted their leaders to create "environments more of love than fear."
There are many authors who have addressed the issue of leadership and among them we can highlight: Chiavenato, Fiedler, Stoner, John P. Kotter, among others.
It should be noted that although leadership is closely related to administrative activities and the former is very important to the latter, the concept of leadership is not the same as that of administration. Warren Bennis, writing about leadership, in order to exaggerate the difference, has said that most organizations are over-managed and under-led. A person may be a fair and organized effective manager (good planner and administrator), but lacks the leader's motivational skills. Other people may be effective leaders - with the ability to unleash enthusiasm and devotion - but lacking the managerial skills to channel the energy they unleash in others. Faced with the challenges of dynamic engagement in today's world of organizations,many of them are appreciating managers who also have leadership skills.
Professor of International Business and Organizational Behavior at the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland Josef J Di Stefano, in research published in March 2001, concludes that one of the dimensions influencing the success of leaders It is the vision, which is communicated by the leader and must be shared by the members of the organization. This communication should be made with optimism for the future and with strong expressions of confidence and enthusiasm.
Peter Drucker has been a forerunner in management and leadership studies for the past thirty years. He has written convincingly about the ramifications of the changing economy, especially about the technology-driven shift to the “knowledge economy”. Peter Drucker highlights the human implications of this change. How do workers thrive in this environment? Skills that were once critical only to top executives have become indispensable to everyone.
No one can succeed, or even survive, just by following orders. The employee is increasingly self-controlled and makes decisions autonomously. With the rapid pace of change, roles and tasks are constantly evolving, so new judgments and learning along the way are necessary.
Who succeed in such an environment? Those who have the capacity to learn, innovate, take responsibility for their actions and take risks. These characteristics are not like the technical skills required by a lawyer, an accountant, or a salesperson. They are born out of self-understanding, not vocational training. As Drucker argues in the Harvard Business Review, in this new environment, “Careers that are successful are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities, who know their strengths, their work method and their values. " Of course, in no trade can you succeed if you lack the necessary technical skills, but while those skills alone may have been a formula for success.
Daniel Goleman has done extensive research on self-knowledge in the field of management and, as a result, has written two major bookstore hits: Emotional Intelligence and The Practice of Emotional Intelligence. He has studied in particular how some top executives have succeeded while others have failed.
We know what we expect these leaders to do: point a direction and set a vision, motivate teams to achieve goals, overcome obstacles, and produce change to improve. Companies generally have procedures to identify smart, talented, and ambitious employees with the potential to take on leadership roles.
But those selection methods don't always work well. Many proposing stars destroy themselves, never realizing their early potential. No one really understands why some talented individuals succeed while others fail, why the brilliant young manager doesn't make it to CEO. Daniel Goleman has focused his research on this puzzle, and his perceptions are not only valid in the world of top executives.
As Goleman understands "Emotional Intelligence", it comprises five basic competences:
- Self-knowledge: the ability to recognize and understand one's moods, emotions, and motives. Self-direction: The ability to control or change the direction of detrimental moods and impulses, the inclination to suspend judgment and to think before acting. Motivation: passion for work for reasons other than money or position. Empathy: the ability to understand the emotional makeup of other people. Social prowess: expertise in managing relationships and creating communication networks, the ability to find common ground and create good understanding.
One conclusion can be drawn from Goleman's work, which is that companies are getting wrong results in the selection and training of leaders, since they are looking for skills that are not what are needed. Rising stars in corporations are often distinguished by their lively intelligence, but that is not what empowers them to lead. To seek leaders endowed with qualities that are irrelevant is to beat the blind.
The Jesuit method goes one step further by identifying not only the "what" but also the "how", a program to create those skills. Central and irreplaceable in the process were the spiritual exercises. The Jesuit novice left his thirty-day immersion in the program with valuable personal skills, including:
- The ability to systematically reflect on your weaknesses, especially those that manifest as habitual tendencies, the ability to switch off daily distractions in order to reflect, and the habit of doing this on a daily basis.
A method of making alternatives and making decisions.
The art of the creative leader is to build an institution and to work on human and technological materials to form an organism that incorporates new and lasting values. To create an institution is to infuse work with a value beyond the technical requirements, satisfying both individual and collective needs. The leader is primarily an expert in promoting and protecting values.
A newer definition of leadership is provided by Peter Senge in his book "The Fifth Discipline", when he states:
“In an intelligent organization (that is to say, in which all its members and the organization as a whole are capable of constant learning) the leaders are designers, guides and teachers. They are responsible for building organizations where people continually expand their aptitude to understand complexity, clarify vision and improve shared mental models, that is, they are responsible for learning. They are also responsible for designing better learning processes through which people can productively confront the issues or situations they face and develop their mastery… Adopting that stance constitutes the first act of leadership, the principle of inspiring (literally "breathe life") into the vision of smart organizations…
From the aforementioned concepts, it is possible to summarize leadership in the following way:
It is any process of influencing people to try with goodwill and enthusiasm to achieve the goals of the organization. People need to be encouraged not only to develop a willingness to work but also a willingness to do so with honesty, intensity and confidence. After having a leader well identified, their work can be enhanced by training their basic skills of an intellectual, interpersonal and technical nature.
Identifying the skills required for effective managerial work has occupied the attention of many specialists in recent years. Numerous works, investigations, surveys, forums, etc. have been dedicated to the topic. The reason that explains this interest is clear, based on the skills that are identified, the centers and specialists that work in the training of managers design the programs that offer interested institutions and professionals, write books, publish articles in specialized magazines; In short, offers of products and services that satisfy needs in this area are proposed to the “market”.
The need for knowledge and skills for effective management can be as broad as desired. It can include technology-related aspects of the type of business the company operates in, work processes, the market, the economic environment, management of indicators and financial ratios, marketing problems, financial operations, just to name a few.
Given this wide spectrum of alternatives, we must select the sphere in which we must focus. For this we can orient ourselves by the more general definition of what it is to direct "obtain results through other people". If we start from this, the sphere of greatest interest is that related to interpersonal relationships. According to Robbins, "The Center for Creative Leadership estimates that more than half of managers and administrators have some sort of difficulty in relationships with people… A survey from Fortune Magazine revealed that the biggest reason for manager failure was their Inadequate Interpersonal Skills… Would it surprise you to learn that more managers are likely to be fired due to the poverty of their interpersonal skills than to the lack of technical skills in the position? ”
The Manager must be an agent of change and manager of social development, whose action generates satisfaction for workers, investors, users and society in general. You must be prepared for constant personal and professional growth, in order to enrich the process of leadership and development of the direction of the work team. It corresponds to him to be a Professional with holistic vision and systemic thinking that integrates the understanding of modern managerial philosophy and its practical application, oriented in a prospective way to the improvement of the human, labor, communicational, spiritual and productive quality of the organizations, making them more competitive in global markets, within a context of competitive sustainable development.
The results of the managers' management will be determined by their attitudes towards third parties, the search for opportunities, bargaining power, communication, flexible thinking capacity, positive attitude towards knowledge, positive, realistic and objective sense towards business management, supported by an adequate motivation towards effective communication as a means of action and interrelation between those involved in the business system.
In Goleman's research on Emotional Intelligence, the following conclusion is reached: "Now we are judged according to new norms: not only does sagacity, preparation and experience matter, but how we deal with ourselves and with others… By tracking data on the talents of stellar performances, two skills emerge that had relatively little influence in the 1970s, but have become crucially important in the 1990s: team building and adaptation to change. ”
Analyzing insufficiencies of MBA programs (Master in Business Administration), Minztberg argues that, in his ideal management program, he would emphasize the training of interpersonal skills, to collect information, to make decisions in conditions of uncertainty, to manage conflicts, to motivate people, among others.
Once the center of attention has been identified, the second aspect to analyze is the spheres with which a manager is related, which can be summarized as follows:
The Environment, made up of people or institutions that are outside the organization such as: suppliers, customers, banking institutions, ministries, community organizations where the entity is located.
The Board or Management Team, which constitutes the body in which strategies, objectives, policies and other decisions are formulated or approved, results are analyzed, and the execution of tasks is coordinated.
The Organization itself, that although it works with a certain structure, technologies, systems, procedures, etc., constitutes the main object of the manager's work. From the point of view of managerial skills, the fundamental sphere of their relationships occurs with personnel, that is, human resources, which are the ones that really guarantee the conversion of inputs into results.
The main skills that can contribute to greater impact and better results in your relationships with each of these spheres can be summarized as follows:
In his relations with the environment, the manager must set two main objectives.
- The first, to identify the main trends, (technological, economic, political, social), that may constitute opportunities or threats to the current and future development of your organization. The second, to provide the environment with all the information that makes it possible to identify the possibilities of its organization, in the supply of products and services that satisfy the needs and demands in better conditions (quality, cost, time) than those of the competition. Achieve in the environment what Benedetti, in her poem Tactic and Strategy, sets as the objective of her strategy "… that you finally need me…", that is, that the environment not only identify the possibilities of the organization in.
In this sphere, the skills identified as having the greatest impact are those related to: the strategic management approach, communications, and those required to achieve effective negotiations.
In his relations with the management team, the manager does several things: find out about situations and approaches that can help him make decisions, present his criteria and promote an exchange, resolve conflict situations between team members and between different organizational units; finally, promote consensus and commitment in decision making.
The skills that are considered most important in the manager's work in this area are those related to: interpersonal communications, conflict management, teamwork, leadership and motivation, problem diagnosis and decision-making, and conducting productive meetings.
The manager's relationships with the organization, that is, with all its members, play an important role in the results of their work. They allow you to receive feedback on the way in which the defined guidelines and policies have been interpreted and applied, to know the existing states of opinion, to identify new problems that require attention. In addition, to be able to exert a direct influence on the “front line” executors, promote enthusiasm and motivation, generate initiatives, foster affective relationships, resolve conflicts, among other results.
Two skills that have not been mentioned, but cannot be missing in a managerial skills development program are: effective time management and change management.
Time is the means within which the leader carries out all his activities. The manager who does not know how to manage his time well is difficult to manage other things well, Drucker says.
Finally, the speed with which the conditions of the environment in which organizations move - new technologies, new competitors, more demanding customers - are required from the leader behavior and skills that allow him to make changes - in strategies, programs, structures, etc. - that allow your organization to adapt - preferably to anticipate - the changes that may affect you. “Species need to adapt and change, as the environment where they live varies, if they want to survive. Those species that change, survive and prosper; those that remain in the same state, become extinct… ”. These conclusions formulated by Charles Darwin, in The Evolution of Species, more than a century ago have absolute validity in the contemporary business world.
As a way of minimizing the impact of the aforementioned, the work that has been carried out by a specialist from our country is highlighted, which proposes the following “skills system”. Dr. Alexis Codina, in his book "Themes of Direction" volume 1, highlights the following:
- Strategic direction or approach. Interpersonal communications. Negotiation strategies and techniques. Conflict management. Teamwork. Leadership and motivation. Problem diagnosis and decision making. Time management and delegation. Productive meetings. Change management.
The skills that lie between these extremes are aimed at guaranteeing the processes of interaction, influence and motivation that they foster, from the formulation and implementation of the strategy and the processes of change, to obtaining results.
