- A leader is someone who influences people towards the things they’re aiming for
- Leadership is complex and context-dependent
With those things in mind, here are the fundamental skills of a leader:
A leader knows what needs to be done and is able and willing make it happen, and does it in such a way that others are influenced towards the leader’s aims.
I covered the last of this description in part 1. This post and the next are about the first part.
On knowing what needs to be done
If you don’t know what to do (whether you know it tacit-intuitively or learned-deliberately), there is no use in anyone following you. In the unlikely event that people are following you, you are almost certainly leading them badly.
To lead effectively, you need to know some combination of the following things in your area of leadership:
- Your immediate or local purpose: What game you’re playing and the rules of the game, including what success looks like, and when and how rules can be broken or re-written;
- What constitutes good performance: You need a model of what it means to play the game well at the level that you’re playing at, and ideally at least one level above – what does “better” look like? Leadership takes place at all levels, but it usually lifts people upwards. Good performance is a mixture of strategy, tactics and technique.
- How the game is best played in different conditions: The best way to play will be different in different places, with different players or equipment, or whether you or your team are tired or playing hurt.
- What wider systems are most relevant to your game: This is the meta-game. Why should you play this game at all? What shapes the rules and provides the authority by which they are enforced? Who plays the game, and what’s the culture (purposes and values, attitudes, norms and standards, manners and behaviours) that shapes the game? What enables people to play well? Who pays for the game (what are its economics)? What are the risks and rewards of the game (What are the stakes? What is risky? What is safe? What constitutes an acceptable risk?)
- What to do when no one knows what to do: How do you find your way when the best next steps are not obvious, or even impossible to know?
In short
A leader needs both general wisdom and context-specific knowledge and judgement or taste. These are usually acquired by experience.