Gaining the Skills of a Leader

You can't put the skills of a leader into practice before you understand what they are. And often, the words to describe these skills seem close together in meaning. Look to Table 1 for help distinguishing these terms and concepts.

Table 1 Concepts in Leadership

Making leadership decisions

Decision-making is the most important day-to-day job of a leader, involving resources, plans, mission, and goals. You create a plan and turn it into a mission ("This is how we are going to get to our goal. . . ."); you check it constantly, and then make small course corrections as new information comes in or as the unexpected pops up.

The only way that you can make decisions well is if you have information — and lots of it. If you are the leader of a volunteer group with a mission of raising 10 percent more money than in the previous year of fund-raising, your goals may center on having one or two very successful fund-raising events. To make decisions, you need to know the schedules of your volunteers and of the people whom you expect to contribute. You need to be in constant contact with insiders of all the groups that you think would be potential donors and know their schedules. You would want to know about the most effective means of contacting potential donors so that you can decide how much of your budget needs to go to advertising your event. You need to know about the availability of hotel ballrooms, meeting rooms, and caterers at sites that would appeal to your potential donors. All this information is necessary for you to make effective decisions as to the right date, time, activity, and means of publicizing the events that will enable you to accomplish your mission.

Setting a direction

Direction setting means choosing among various goals to get somewhere, to reach a goal. You haven't been given your position of leadership because you are the most popular person. Your group has a strong expectation that you are going to take them someplace that they don't think they can get to without your guidance — your leadership.

In day-to-day terms, direction setting means making practical decisions about the goals the group wants to reach. You will always feel some pressure to reach for the stars. But consider a few factors as you make your decisions about the goals your team can reach without undo stress:

• The skills of your group

• Their ability to work together as a team

• The resources you have available

• The competition for those resources elsewhere

Arbitration and mediation

As a leader, you have to settle arguments within your group. These arguments cannot be about goals —as a leader it's your job to select the goals for the group. But group members will argue with you about your mission; about the roles you've chosen for them; and about whether each person is pulling his or her weight within the group. Poor leaders, such as a head coach with an unruly team, have not been able to get their players to accept their individual roles.

A leader's job is to listen to team members before making decisions. If one person comes to you with a complaint about the performance of another team member, don't shrug it off. Gather information — don't solicit input from other members of the group, spend your time observing.

When you have enough information to make a decision, it is time for mediation. Try to avoid mediated solutions that involve changing the roles of team members. Look instead for ways to get two people working on the same task so that they share the load.

Often, your attempts to mediate are going to be unsuccessful. When you have to choose between the needs of an individual and the group, your choice should always be for the group. If you have to choose between one person and another, the person whom the decision affects deserves to know the exact reasons why he or she is being targeted.

Make sure you explain your decision in terms of goals and missions, and how you went about making your decision by doing the following:

1. State the action that you are taking.

2. Explain how your action fits in with the goal you are trying to reach.

3. Explain how your action fits in with the mission.

4. Explain the agreed-upon tasks of the mission, and each person's role.

5. Explain what is going wrong and why.

6. Explain how focusing on the individual is the solution.

The two things you can't say are, "Because this is the way things have always been done," and "Because I said so." Such statements are arbitrary, and contribute nothing to a person's understanding of what they've done wrong. Being arbitrary hinders a leader's ability to help the team and engenders bad feelings.

Facilitating

Facilitating is what you do to make it possible for other people to do what they need to do. In a crisis, such as a flood, the facilitators may be the people who bring the sand, the sandbags, and the coffee to the front-line workers who are actually filling the bags to shore up the levee. It's providing support, and a good facilitator looks for ways to make other people's lives easier.

A good facilitator does not necessarily need to have all the skills needed to solve a problem. You simply need to be able to remind your team, in the most unthreatening way, about the goal toward which you are both striving, and the mission by which you've agreed to reach the goal. Often, while in discussion, you discover things that are blocking your team from accomplishing the task, and you can then focus together on finding an appropriate solution.

Cheerleading

A leader has to decide how involved he or she wants to become with a team. The higher up you go, the more indirect your leadership is likely to be and the more likely that you will not have contact with many of the people you lead. An army general rarely sees the men and women he leads into combat, except, perhaps, at a parade ground review.

How, then, does a remote leader inspire a team to meet its goals and to find the mission worthwhile? Part of the answer is honesty, but a large part of the answer is cheerleading. Any leader has to be able to instill confidence in a group and do it in such a way that the group strongly wants to meet the goal. Leaders must motivate their followers. They must articulate the reasons people have gathered together to form an enterprise, to inspire them enthusiastically to do what is necessary to make it a success.

Often, leaders motivate with the promise of rewards. In ancient times, the rewards of war were the spoils of battle, but finding appropriate rewards is still a task of motivational leadership. Your job as a leader is to make a fence-sitter want to follow you, through the right combination of stimulation and rewards. That's what cheerleading is.