Travails of leadership

Leadership seems to be a big kick for a lot of people, but I am not sure if they fully understand the challenges that accompany the same. These days, I am reading 'Winning' by Jack Welch, unarguably one of the most effective leaders in corporate America and perhaps world.

Since leadership is people centric, the biggest challenge before any leader is learning to understand the various types of pople who make up a team. People are driven by different motivations, which also determines the extent and manner in which they contribute to the team cause. Some people might be working just because they need some work ex to show in an application for higher studies. These folks might just be biding their time, not working in the most effective and efficient manner and completely unwilling to pitch in when the team is in a spot. Yet others with the same objective might have the goal of learning all aspects of work and managing the same before they head for education.

Another barrier to effective leadership is the flexibility the leader has in determining the structure of the team. For example, is the leader actively involved in recruting his team members. Or does the organization follow the select and allocate policy in recruitments, without involving the team leader?

In order to ensure effective leadership, it is also important to ensure that the leader and his immediate team have a similar background in terms of education, maturity etc. So in a call centre, where most of the calling agents would be young and undergraduates, they will on most occassions have a team leader who comes from a similar educational background and will not be too older than the agents themselves.

Organizational culture also plays a large part in determining effective leadership. One aspect of leadership involves setting expectations and reviewing performance. Both of these involve some candid discussions and some hard talk. In case the organization shies away from having hard discussions, it is likely that leaders will never be effective in eliciting a robust performance.

Coming back to 'Winning'. Jack has placed a huge amount of emphasis on picking the right leader as well. He lists integrity, maturity and authenticity as three integral charachteristics of a good leader. While he has also mentioned that good leaders tend to be extroverts, I do not agree with him. How I hope that he had also dealt with how organizations could enable effective leadership in a more structured manner.