Leadership skills?

Question

What are some types of skill a leader should have in any given situations, such as working on a school project to leading a team in a huge corporation?

P.S. Please don't give obvious answers such as communication skills.

Thanks,
Garvin

Answer 1

I'm going to do it anyway: communication skills. What should a good leader communicate? I think a good leader needs to build consensus in a group. S/he needs to provide a good rationale for doing what a group is doing. S/he has to have the ability to bring disparate points of view together and make everyone feel that they have contributed and, therefore, OWN or have a stake in the solution. A good leader does not rush to a solution, but is good in a crisis. Yet, she tries to be forward thinking enough to avoid crises. She makes leaders out of the people around him/her, shares the power, makes people think for themselves, forwards other people's ideas and other people as well as his own and gives people the credit for it: their esteem builds and they will give as much credit to their leader for seeing their talent. One of the best Presidents we had in this area was Lyndon Baines Johnson. He surrounded himself with good people and he would have looked a lot better if at some other time in history. Like a Greek tragedy, history touched upon his tragic flaws.

Answer 2

I think that being easy to work with / not being a jerk is an under-rated skillset.

Television tends to portray these guys are the heroic or super-competent person, but 99 times out of 100, they're neither but they are a Jerk (See House, Shark, etc).

I cannot tell you how many a**holes exist in the modern world that cause billions of dollars of lost productivity because they piss people off so they don't do their jobs right, or demean otherwise productive and decent employees.

Unintentionally, this sets up vicious cycles, for other talented people in the organization, when they see this kind of behavior they leave, and this creates a situation where a**holes tend to surround themselves with two kinds of people.

- People who are acceptably like themselves but not threatening.
- People who are timid or unwilling or unable to speak up.
- People who have sado-masochistic tendencies.

It's not to say these groups don't have talented people within them, it is to say you strip away other groups of people who tend - on average to be MUCH more talented.

It kills companies.
I've seen it in the marketplace, and I do what I can to avoid it.