The 8 essences of leadership

What kinds of personality and skills are you missing? Working out which types of leadership you have on your team can work wonders for your effectiveness as a group and help you to recognize how you and your colleagues can individually make their best contributions.

Although the ghost of the Great Man still haunts leadership studies, most of us have recognized by now that successful organizations are the product of distributive, collective, and complementary leadership. The first step in putting together such a team is to identify each member of the team’s personality makeup and leadership style, so that strengths and competences can be matched to particular roles and challenges. Getting this match wrong can bring misery to all concerned and cause considerable damage.

My own approach to leadership assessment is to see and understand that attitudes and interactions with people are the result of a complex confluence of one's inner theater (including relationships with authority figures early in life), significant life experiences, examples set by other executives, and formal leadership training.

As these influences play out over time, one typically sees a number of recurring patterns of behavior that influence an individual’s effectiveness within an organization.  I think of these patterns as leadership “essences,” reflecting the various roles executives can play in organizations and it is a lack of fit between a leader’s essence and the context in which he or she operates is a main cause of team and organizational dysfunctionality and executive failure. The eight essences I have found to be most prominent are:

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• The strategist: leadership as a game of chess. These people are good at dealing with developments in the organization’s environment. They provide vision, strategic direction and outside-the-box thinking to create new organizational forms and generate future growth.
  
• The change-catalyst: leadership as a turnaround activity. These executives love messy situations. They are masters at re-engineering and creating new organizational ‘’blueprints.’’
  
• The transactor: leadership as deal making. These executives are great dealmakers. Skilled at identifying and tackling new opportunities, they thrive on negotiations.
  
• The builder: leadership as an entrepreneurial activity. These executives dream of creating something and have the talent and determination to make their dream come true.
  
• The innovator: leadership as creative idea generation. These people are focused on the new. They possess a great capacity to solve extremely difficult problems.
  
• The processor: leadership as an exercise in efficiency. These executives like organizations to be smoothly running, well-oiled machines. They are very effective at setting up the structures and systems needed to support an organization’s objectives.
  
• The coach: leadership as a form of people development. These executives know how to get the best out of people, thus creating high performance cultures.
  
• The communicator: leadership as stage management. These executives are great influencers, and have a considerable impact on their surroundings.
  

Working out which types of leaders you have on your team can work wonders for your effectiveness as a group.  It helps you to recognize how you and your colleagues can individually make their best contributions. This will in turn create a culture of mutual support and trust, reduce team stress and conflict, and make for more creative problem solving. It also informs your search for new additions to the team: what kinds of personality and skills are you missing?

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Phil Mora is a business consultant and CMO at Bold. I specialize in digital marketing, business development and entrepreneurship. A creative problem solver with a talent for strategic thinking and communication, I combine lessons learned from more than 15 years as a high-tech industry executive with my roots as a software technologist, product developer and digital marketeer. When I am not working on client projects, I am obsessed with with sports, fitness, wellness, nutrition and anything holistic: you’ll find me at the gym or outdoors training hard. I look forward to connecting with you!
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