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Not everyone has the same leadership skills or even the necessary skills in equal measure. That imbalance doesn't matter. If you have been chosen to lead, you have to figure out how to overcome the weaknesses in your leadership tools and how to turn them into strong points. In order to do this, you have to understand the difference between jujitsu and karate.
Both are Asian forms of martial arts, and both look good when you watch a Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan movie. But the two forms of combat couldn't be more different. Jujitsu emphasizes the exploitation of an opponent's strengths, which you are taught to turn into your own. Karate is an offensive method of fighting when a warrior is rendered weaponless on the battlefield. Karate relies upon your own strength to disable an opponent.
Karate depends on the forward thrust, jujitsu on using your opponent's strength as you retreat. Karate leaders push at problems. Jujitsu leaders let the problem come to them. Every leader needs to know when to lead with strength, and when to use weakness to its best advantage. Not every problem can be solved with only one method or the other. As a leader, you have to determine how each fit with your own needs and personality.
Cooperating
Cooperation is important to any enterprise. In Amish country, if a barn burns down, neighbors show up spontaneously and help to build their neighbor a new barn. Each of the men and boys in the group has all the skills needed to do the job, and all the women band together to facilitate their work, bringing tools, nails and pegs, food, and drink to the work site so that the frame of a large barn can be raised in a single day.
Leaders have to get their followers to cooperate, but this can be done more than one way.
Cooperation karate
If you have a natural talent at eliciting the cooperation of others and it's one of your major strengths, you probably have good selling skills. You are bold and unafraid to ask someone to help you. You are concise in your thoughts, a natural conversationalist, someone who can articulate the goals and visions of a group in a direct way. You instinctively put people at ease when you speak to them, and you have a quiet confidence that automatically elicits trust from people.
You are the first person to record the goals of the group on paper, the first to organize a discussion, the first to take responsibility. If you were a soldier during World War I, you'd be the first over the trench wall, yelling, "Follow me," and everyone would, confident that you knew what you were doing.
Cooperation jujitsu
You are a quiet consensus builder. You ask others for their opinions and keep silent about your own. You gather information and intelligence and carefully put it together. Only then do you make your presentation, relying more on the facts to help you make your case than on an appeal to vision.
People trust you precisely because they know that you are not likely to lead them into a minefield, and that you will proceed cautiously, making certain that the way is clear before bringing your group along. In this, you are more like a platoon leader in the jungle, taking the point, map in one hand and radio in the other, eyes keenly focused on the underbrush ahead. When a surprise springs out of the undergrowth, you are prepared. Your people are properly deployed to deal with almost any threat, because you have spent much of your free time teaching them how to respond and preparing them for the fact that there is no such thing as the unexpected, only the unanticipated.
Listening
 | If you don't make listening a critical skill, you can never be a leader. Listening provides advance warning about problems at all levels, and helps a leader to become more effective at defining the possibilities of goals and missions. But how you listen is just as important as what you hear. |
Karate listening
The karate listener says, "Tell me. I want to know," and actively hunts out information without waiting for bad news to find its way to him or her. The karate listener has people inside the organization responsible for keeping the leader informed. The karate listener, however, then goes out and gets more information so that he or she does not become a victim of a staff that filters out information that they don't think the leader wants to hear.
Jujitsu listening
The jujitsu listener listens by walking around, by taking in and monitoring the flow of memos and e-mail by which members of a group communicate, and by constantly evaluating situations and people within the group. If you are a weak listener, then you need to build the kind of listening organization that a strong listener probably already possesses.
 | How do you build a listening organization? You begin by building listening posts across your entire organization and, especially, at every point where your group interfaces with the outside world. If you have a business organization, you have a post at every point of customer contact. If you're running the Little League team, your phone list has the names and numbers of every parent and all the league officials. |
After your listening posts are active, get every person in your organization involved. Often, somebody won't tell you, the leader, when something is wrong, but he or she will tell a friend or colleague. The colleague has to be encouraged to report the information to you for the good of the mission and for the good of the goals of the group.
Placing others above yourself
Effective leadership requires that you be altruistic, placing the needs of the group above your own needs. The leader who concentrates on the trappings and perks of leadership rarely survives for long, while the leader who sees to the needs of the group will prevail during any crisis.
Altruistic karate
The karate leader is the hostess at the party who grabs the tray of hors d'oeuvres and offers it up to each new guest, taking their drink order as she passes out canapés. She takes it upon herself to introduce strangers to each other — on the grounds that if they are at her party and friends of hers, then they ought to be friends of each other.
Altruistic jujitsu
The jujitsu leader asks, "How can I help? What can I do to make your life easier?" That means that if your team's working through the night, you might leave the office at 3 a.m. to get them pizza and walk their dogs. You are the "glue" that holds the enterprise together until it becomes successful.
As you can see, you don't have to have strengths to be a leader. Your weaknesses can be exploited to the benefit of others — and to the enterprise you are leading.
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