"The study of Leadership is the study of how men and women guide others through adversity, uncertainty, hardship, disruption, transformation, transition, recovery, new beginnings, and other significant challenges."
- Kouzes and Posner, "The Leadership Challenge"

Much has been written about leadership and leadership development. Two useful references are Kouzes and Posner's The Leadership Challenge, a seminal book for practitioners, and The Nature of Leadership, a more academically-inclined offering by Antonakis et al. For our purposes, we consciously focus on the phrase 'guide others' in the quote above. Thus, our attention will be directed at leadership development within the context of social interactions or human relationships.

In a separate section, we offered a distinction between leadership and leader development. It must be noted, however, that the two are not independent. For one thing, personal awareness - "know thyself!" (leader development) is often viewed as a pre-requisite to effective leadership emergence (leadership development). Furthermore, attributes such as emotional competence, among others, span understanding of one's own emotions (leader development) as well as reading and empathizing with the emotions of others (leadership development).

Having established that a basic necessity for a leader is the management of human relationships, we now ask: What makes a relationship or interaction constructive? What represents effective leadership?

In response we list some of the more important characteristics of successful human relationships. Leadership development is about raising the awareness of these and enhancing a leader's capability to incorporate each into the organization's culture:

Mutual Trust. Trust is key component of all human interactions, and especially between managers and subordinates. Often, colleagues withhold information or participation, and/or suppress emotion, because they fear ridicule or criticism. A trusting and supportive environment turns colleagues from spectators into participants.

Empowerment. To add value, every member of the organization needs to contribute. This means each member must bring forward the appropriate skills for her sphere of responsibilities. None of these matters, however, if the leader fails to empower, delegate, or allow the person to go ahead and do what needs to be done.

Credibility. In order to obtain approval and a mandate from followers, the leader must be able to: (1) establish that s/he has the skills and inclination to get the job done. The first step is often to show that the leader has relevant subject matter expertise, for example, has worked in a relevant industry for a sufficient amount of time and held a sufficient breadth of roles to credibly know what is going on; (2) deliver on promises.

Openness to Ideas and Risk Taking. Courage to listen and to take risks that can move an organization forward, and often also the courage to allow a culture of risk taking by others. This means allowing failure, even praising it.

Transparency. Increasingly, it has become understood that a leader realizes more success by including others in thought processes, information gathering, and decision making. The more people know about the organization, its assets, and challenges, the more they can contribute to solutions, and the less anxiety they feel about being left in the dark.

Formulation and Sharing of Vision and Direction. A requirement of leadership is that there be a "direction." The leader must provide a vision for the future; one which followers can relate to and draw inspiration from. A common understanding of "where we are going as a team" makes decision making easier for all concerned. At each decision point a person can ask "is this consistent with our vision?" The answer helps guide all actions and ensures that everyone's efforts are focused on and directed at achieving the same ultimate goals.

Effective Work Environments. Place people in appropriate settings for the tasks at hand and give them the appropriate physical tools to get the job done.

Effective decision making environments. This is hugely meaningful, because so much decision making is supposed to take place in group settings. in fact, we create various group settings precisely in order to make decisions. Some of these groups include investigative panels, committees, Board meetings, town councils, executive team retreats, military planning, senate, congress, and parliament. All involve groups of people, striving to make progress by making decisions, often on behalf of much larger numbers of people.

Opportunities for Personal Growth. The key observation is that while many activities are classified as personal growth, they are all ultimately available to help the person in question to make the broader organization more effective. Since personal growth opportunities make people happy and help the organization, they may be viewed as 'win-win.'

Mentoring. Share perspective and historical experiences. Stories can be very useful to share expertise [SOP]

Healthy competition. Some tension in group settings can be constructive. [LPFACT]

Group facilitation skills. Group collaboration is the most dominant model of operation in human activities. There is now often too much information, although only a subset t of it is relevant and important. Challenge is to sift through for the relevant bits. Need to empower people to do so, and to guide them through the process. Top leaders usually feel very comfortable making decisions on their own when they have sufficient information. In our increasingly complex world, this is very difficult to achieve, at the very least requiring input from various people. The more common situation is one in which it is simply not possible to provide a chief executive with all the necessary knowledge in every topic of interest. This is why it is deemed far more efficient to have the chief preside over a meeting which brings together those who can collectively represent all the necessary information. This assumes, of course, that such groups function well. In reality, this assumption is far from true. The key is often to put together small working groups working closely together, sharing perspectives, reflecting on those different perspectives, and learning that dialog is a positive vehicle for learning

Developing Social Leadership Skills

There are many ways to develop interpersonal leadership skills. These often begin with:

Reading or attending presentations, raising awareness of important competencies, skills and abilities, followed by gaining awareness of particular deficiencies in one's social skills by soliciting feedback from subordinates, peers, managers, mentors, or executive coaches. These exercises are often referred to as 360 degree reviews. Once deficiencies are identified, a road map may be created for obtaining or improving relevant competencies. Note that the quality of awareness raised in such a process depends on the state of a person's leader development or human capital. Some people are seduced into thinking that the mere raising of awareness is sufficient progress to be called leadership development. It's better than nothing, but such learning means little unless it is translated into changes in behavior. Formal training sessions can provide a more hands-on experience. Numerous sessions are offered, some tailored to organizational needs, others open enrollment. These, however, often suffer from a lack of realism.

The best way to develop leaders is in real world situations. However, there is little value to experiences unless one makes a conscious effort to glean the important lessons and put them into practice. Below is a list of real experiences which can be used to develop leadership awareness and skills. The all-important feedback mechanism may be built-in by soliciting ongoing feedback from mentors, subordinates, superiors, peers, clients, suppliers, partners, and;/or executive coaches. Mentoring can be a useful way to obtain feedback on specific events or actions and their outcomes. The wisdom of a mentor can help to understand why certain actions or decisions worked well or not, and to direct the leader to different actions or behaviors in future.

Useful experiences include:

• Transition to a new job with very different expectations and competency requirements. Changes in job responsibilities and activities, which thrust the person into new situations and challenges, which require new knowledge and decision making skills
• Assignment to a new project, selected to yield a set of previously unencountered experiences.
• Transfer to a new setting, with multi-cultural exposure
• Exposure to stress (physical and or emotional). Such settings can expose one's social weaknesses and increase mental toughness.
• Dealing with human conflict, both internal and external to the organization
• Managing change in an organization, calling for heightened sensitivity to the concerns of others and to ongoing and timely communication
• Responding to an adverse macroeconomic environment, often requiring collaboration with those who can provide forecasts of favorable and unfavorable implications

With all these resources available, why do many of us believe we have a serious leadership crisis in all spheres of human activity? The answer may be partly addressed by the article "Interpersonal Barriers to Decision Making," by Chris Argyris [HBRDM]. The observations made in this document are eye-opening, as they highlight human weaknesses that make leaders interact socially in sub-optimal fashion, leading to sub-optimal and even destructive decisions and actions. This despite the leaders' understanding that particular actions or decisions are counter-productive. It appears that fear of risk taking, fear of sharing emotions, competition, envy, the seeking of power, and ego get the best of us despite our awareness that these exist and should be resisted. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this article is that it applies in its entirety today, despite having been written over 40 years ago.

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