CHAPTER 5

Core Leadership Principles

People who produce good results feel good about themselves.

—Ken Blanchard

This chapter covers some leadership models that I use in training executives. There is a plethora of leadership material that managers can embrace. My goal is to bring out the best of leadership and deliver it in a format that is easily digested and applied. Since this whole book is based on the concept of leadership, one would entertain the fact of how a chapter could be dedicated to the subject. The reason is that leadership is much more than just the encapsulation of a word; it is a process and a mechanism that is unique to each individual. Two people can lead in a great way but can have very different ways of doing so. Sit back and enjoy the chapter—I assure you that it will take on a new form of interest that perhaps you have been already exposed to but could use a refresher on.

Although leadership can encompass many forms, styles, and models, I have found over the last 20 years of training executives that focusing on one style and mastering it provides a better leader-follower relationship. Knowing a second or third model of leadership is also a good attribute, but the focus has been on leading and not trying to compartmentalize knowledge into a box that is closed. Step outside of the box and expand your comfort zone to encourage followers through inspiration, hard work, and laser focus.

Here is a book all leaders should read that brings out the most important aspects of leadership. My first choice is Harvard Business School of Business—read this excerpt of topics and then contemplate how you can expand on your leadership competencies:

As Al Deming once said in his 14 points of Total Quality Management, continue learning. Here is a book to consider for your leadership library. It includes 17 skills that leaders should possess. Published by Harvard Business Review on January 3, 2017. A must read for executives and aspiring leaders. Here is a description provided by Harvard Business Review (all rights reserved for HBR):

The one primer you need to develop your managerial and leadership skills. Whether you’re a new manager or looking to have more influence in your current management role, the challenges you face come in all shapes and sizes—a direct report’s anxious questions, your boss’s last-minute assignment of an important presentation, or a blank business case staring you in the face. To reach your full potential in these situations, you need to master a new set of business and personal skills. Packed with step-by-step advice and wisdom from “Harvard Business Review’s” management archive, the “HBR Manager’s Handbook” provides best practices on topics from understanding key financial statements and the fundamentals of strategy to emotional intelligence and building your employees’ trust. The book’s brief sections allow you to hone in quickly on the solutions you need right away—or take a deeper dive if you need more context. Keep this comprehensive guide with you throughout your career and be a more impactful leader in your organization.

Transition to Leadership Role
Build trust and credibility
Emotional intelligence
Positioning yourself for success
Become a person of influence
Communicating effectively
Personal productivity
Self-development
Delegating with confidence
Giving effective feedback
Developing talent
Leading Teams
Fostering creativity
Hiring and keeping
Strategy: A primer
Mastering financial tools
Developing a business case study

Core Leadership Principles

Simon Sinek on the social media circuit has established a great rapport with his famous speech on knowing the “why” of leadership. He states in his video and other social media that people buy ideas from leaders because of what is in it for them and not because they have to or even need to. The trust-building aspect of business is interesting and too often overlooked—Are you sharing your “why” with constituents and followers? How might you be more successful if you do? Sinek answers these questions by using ideas from the Wright brothers in flight and Martin Luther King in his work titled How Great Leaders Inspire Action.

The first thing a leader must understand before requiring followers to take on a task is if they are directing correctly. Once you train someone else to take over one of your tasks, you will be freed up to move on to new, more strategic endeavors. However, many leaders hold on to tasks for multiple reasons. One of those reasons is a lack of trust, and trust is key to success. What is keeping you from delegating to some employees but not others? In addition, most importantly, how can you fix this problem?

The best way is to select the best delegate for the job. Consider how independent the person is, what he or she wants from the job, what his or her long-term goals and interests are and how they align with the proposed assignment, whether or not they are available to take on more, or not. Matching the task to the ability will provide a better outcome. Do not just dump a project on someone: engage the person in the process, reward him or her, and do not criticize him or her. Your goal is to get your followers to feel the same way you do about the task. The key to leadership is also to remember that your followers may be better at a task than you are and that is perfectly acceptable.

Delegation will free you up for the more conceptual ideas and concerns that you face. You can delegate to improve follower motivation and morale and manage the day-to-day workload more effectively. This gives followers a sense of ownership and empowerment. Effective leaders do not give up their lives for their jobs; they delegate well and free themselves up for things that are more important. Your goal to accomplish is “How can you empower people to complete the task on their own without your help?”

Kurt Lewin developed leadership style in the 1930s. Many subsequent leadership styles are based on his original work. He looked at the authoritative versus the autocratic leader, free-rein versus laissez-faire leaders, and participative versus democratic leaders. In Lewin’s experiments, he discovered that the most effective style was democratic. Excessive autocratic styles led to revolution, while under a laissez-faire approach, people were not coherent in their work and did not put in the necessary energy that they did when they were being actively led. Leadership is a knowledge-based game: a game that you win when you have the most knowledge of the subject of leadership. However, the game is just a game until you are in the real world facing real issues with real people. Then the stakes increase and your leadership execution matters. Thus, the perfect leader has a combination of three styles when executing leadership prowess in organizations—authoritarian, delegative, and participative. Although there is a lot more to leadership effectiveness, focus on these three qualities in your leadership style and watch your success become imminent. Unseasoned or insecure leaders tend toward an authoritative/autocratic style in an attempt to demonstrate control. If you find yourself with this tendency, step back and empower your group by loosening control and letting them run with the company mission and vision. Take care of your people and they will take care of your company’s mission.

Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee identified six emotional leadership styles in their 2002 book Primal Leadership. Each style has a different effect on people’s emotions, and each has strengths and weaknesses in different situations—visionary, coaching, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting, and commanding:

Visionary—new direction
Coaching—developing followers
Affiliative—teamwork emphasis
Democratic—draw upon people’s knowledge/skills
Pacesetting—setting high standards for performance
Commanding—crisis management

Four of these styles (visionary, coaching, affiliative, and democratic) promote harmony and positive outcomes. However, the other two (commanding and pacesetting) may create tension, and you should only use them in specific circumstances. Leading people incorporates the particular situation involved. When promoting harmony, a leader is presenting a positive environment in which people can strive, and when things are unstable and the environment permits more control, reverting back to commanding and pacesetting may be necessary to get followers back on track. Attempt to keep a positive self-talk by focusing on your strengths to inspire yourself and others. When beginning a project or onboarding a new hire, pacesetting and commanding may be the norm but quickly move away toward the coaching as soon as the follower becomes acclimated to the organization.

After some detailed university studies that detailed a wide array of research, Blake and Mouton, around 1991, surfaced with a leadership grid that offered solutions to what they called a leadership dilemma. The managerial grid by Robert R. Blake and Jane S. Mouton presented a grid that showed both proper and improper leadership styles. Team leadership rose to the top with committed people who felt that they had a “common stake” in the organization. Leaders were found to earn trust and respect at this place in the grid, whereas in the other four quadrants, leadership effectiveness was not optimal.

Path-goal leadership emerged and this was the first leadership model with theoretical underpinnings that not only directly related to leadership effectiveness but also was tied to empirical research in the area of motivation under the auspices of Expectancy Theory. Based on the situation, the leader was able to select the right behavior to positively affect the follower. Outcomes between leaders and followers seemed to work well according to Path-Goal Theory with increased effort, improved satisfaction, and performance.

Paul Hersey (January 26, 1931—December 18, 2012) was a behavioral scientist and entrepreneur. He was founder of Situational Leadership. Hersey published Management of Organization Behavior, which has been developed into several editions. He developed a model similar to Blake and Mouton, but he built in a prescriptive method to applying leadership behavior to both the task and the follower-readiness level. Paul used the last quadrant for delegating in which he turned over responsibility for decisions and implementation. The other styles were for developmental levels similar to Blake and Mouton’s Leadership Grid. Both scholars viewed leaders as concern for task and concern for relationship, with delegating holding less concern for task and/or relationship. Paul, however, incorporated the readiness level of the followers and the task in which the follower was selected to engage. Therefore, situational leadership offers three tenets that leaders must embrace to be successful. One, determine the task for either the individual or group; second, assess the readiness level of the follower; and finally, pick the most appropriate style at that particular time. The first being tell, then sell, then participate, and the last, as referred to above, delegate.

The sources of management power, which are keys to successful leadership, help leaders select the appropriate style and establish rapport with followers. In a notable study of power conducted by social psychologists John R. P. French and Bertram Raven in 1959, power is divided into five separate and distinct forms. Legitimate power, which comes from the leader’s position in the firm; reward power, allowing leaders to give or withhold tangible and intangible rewards; coercive power, providing leaders the ability to punish followers; expert power, which is based upon special knowledge, skills, and expertise that the leader possesses; and referent power, which comes from subordinates’ and coworkers’ respect for the personal characteristics of a leader, which earns their loyalty and admiration. Coercive power is used more at the telling stage leadership style, while an expert uses it at the delegating stage. The consequences of using power are resulting in gaining commitment and compliance or offsetting resistance. Another way to consider this is to look at the spectrum of position power (coercive) to personal power (expert). Leaders have the most success using personal power when developing and leading followers. Even astrological signs have encompassed the art of leadership. If you were born under Capricorn, Aquarius, Aries, or Pisces, you are a natural born leader. Does that mean other signs result in the lack of leadership? Definitely not.

Transformational leadership focuses more on an inspiring style: a partnership has developed, and people are transformed into self-reliant, emotionally mature workers who can accomplish more than they ever thought possible. The state-of-the-art paradigm within leadership is the theory of transformational—transactional leadership proposed by Burns in 1978, who titled the book Leadership, published by Harper and Row. Following this idea, Bass and Avolio in 2000 published the MLQ: Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire with Mind Garden, Incorporated publishers. Over the last two decades, the MLQ has been developed and validated as a true leadership instrument to measure leadership style.

The Bass Transformational Leadership Theory posits that the leader transforms the followers to accomplish more than they would without them. The leader is a role model. Bass used four tenets to explain:

Individual consideration, where the leader coaches to followers to be motivated to complete tasks and improve performance—be a role model.

Intellectual stimulation, provided by a leader to challenge followers and encourage them to learn and grow and disseminate information to the team—inspire and motivate with a vision.

Inspiration by a leader provides an impetus for continuous improvement and higher performance. The leader uses a charismatic approach to inspire greatness; giving the follower the drive to continue progress when the leader is not there and the follower is working alone or on the team—inspire followers to un-tap their potential.

Idealized influence refers to the leader showing that engaging in continuous development is the right thing to do and will help not only the follower but the team and all the stakeholders involved—demonstrate genuine concerns for others to bring out their best.

Bernard Bass, in his book titled Transformational Leadership, with Ronald Riggio, published in 2005, shows how transformational leadership’s focus on the followers helps them realize their leadership potential. Leaders become social architects that affect the culture of the organization. Transformational Leadership challenges employees to be innovative and creative in their thinking.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

—Stephen Covey

When leaders build the transformational leadership relationship with followers, the bonding builds as trust, confidence, and personal desire to improve continues to grow.

In summary, can you accept the challenge of leadership? Core leadership principles are introduced in this chapter. It is now time to reflect on what you learned and see where you stand in your own personal leadership style. Six-factor leadership is a toolbox filled with ideas and concepts. Even the best tools unopened and unused are useless. Go out and change the world.

Conclusion

Leadership is not about you; it is about your people, your followers, your constituents, and your customers. This chapter focused on core leadership principles. The heart of leadership is based on leadership theory and practice, but the real leadership is in the workplace, in the field, on the hospital floor, and on the front lines of any customer service job.

Mastering the concepts of leadership is as easy as mastering any other skill but it takes practice. Remember to use all six pillars when practicing leadership but focus heavily on the models that are introduced in this chapter.

Key Takeaways

1. As a colleague of mine once said, David Wolf, former dean at Barry University, Miami, Florida, USA, “Run it like you own it!” The benefit of working for someone else is that you have the opportunity to run-it-like-you-own-it and still go home at night without worrying about losing it. The only key to success is productivity and performance. Leaders are social architects that use all their skills to build a great cultural environment. As Peter Drucker once said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” True, but strategy will help a leader develop the right culture with sustainable value for all stakeholders.
2. Situational leadership is one of the paramount models of leadership. Transformational leadership has also received a great deal of traction over the past few decades. Authentic leadership has a true spirit of individuality to it also. Path Goal Theory is the only theoretical model that stands the test of time in the academic circles today because it is empirically based. Your goal is to pick a leadership model or theory and use it to the best of your ability. Remember that the people that you need also need you, and in order to lead them, you need a strong leadership presence.
3. Search through movies and novels and look for leadership characteristics. Learn about the leaders that are great and those that may have thought they were great but led the “Black Hat” of leadership style. Black hat leaders are very charismatic and have a cause, that they very well may be true to, but is wrong in many ways. Learn what to do as a leader and also what not to do.
4. Develop a strong sense of discernment. Remember that with your experience and knowledge, you are unique and a real asset to your career, your profession, your personal life, and your followers. Discernment is knowing ahead of time what to think, what to feel, and most importantly, what to do. With discernment, you can manifest the ability to make smart judgments and decisions. When selecting followers to be leaders and developing them, you can use discernment to pick the best candidate and use onboarding to develop them. One city manager of Boynton Beach once mentioned that he sends a letter indicating that a follower was selected for leadership, sends them to graduate school for leadership training using the Situational leadership model, and prepares them for leadership. Thus, discernment describes a wise way of judging between things, or a particularly perceptive way of seeing things.

Phronetic social science is an approach to the study of social phenomena based on a contemporary interpretation of the classical Greek concept of phonesis, variously translated as preactical judgement, practical wisdom, common sense, or prudence.

Source: Linkedin.com, by Bent Flyvbjerg, May 24, 2016 titled “What is Phronesis and Phronetic Social Science?”

Nonaka and Takeuchi, two seasoned leaders, captured the true essence of discernment in their article in Harvard Business Review, “The Big Idea: The Wise Leader” in May 2011. Become a phronetic leader.

Never did we expect more of leadership—and never have we been so wrong...Phronetic leaders practice moral discernment about what’s good and act on it in every day.

—Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi