It appears that we feel the need to make the idea and practices of leadership extremely complex. As a society, we developed Situational, Transactional, Transformational, Behavioural, Leader-Member, Path-Goal, Contingency, Trait and Great Man Leadership Types, among many others. To RANA, leadership boils down to three relatively simple and key leadership actions.
Action 1: The ability to do things effectively
Our past articles have concentrated on beating the Process Leadership drum. As simply put as possible, Process Leadership is the concentration of knowledge, skills and motivation present in a person. Process Leaders are able to do things because they have acquired the knowledge, skills and motivation to do so effectively. Being able to do things effectively is not enough for the exercise of leadership; a second action is necessary.
Action 2: The ability to help others do things effectively
Knowledgeable, skilled and motivated Process Leaders also have the ability to bring to others the capacity to do things effectively. They may facilitate work groups; they may coach groups and individuals; they may also provide advice to those who own an organizational process; and, they may help reconstruct a process that isn’t working or design one that is needed. Process Leaders interact with those around them, sometimes in a managerial or supervisory capacity, sometimes simply as part of the power of the person’s capacity to make things happen. Then, there is the collective to consider, i.e., the organization.
Action 3: The ability to help collectives work together effectively
Human beings coalesce their activity into collectives called organizations. Some are huge, others small with a great many in between. Process Leaders have the capacity to help make an organizational collective work effectively. It stands to reason that if groups or teams of people inside organizations are doing things effectively, then collating those groups into an effective whole is much easier than dealing with a collective in constant disarray and turmoil. Hence, the Process Leader helps the whole organization do things effectively.
“Aye, there’s the rub”, you fans of Shakespeare might say. There’s a lot of “to dos” inside an organizational collective; we are human beings and prone to making mistakes so a goodly number of them won’t be done effectively. This is a fact of life. However, why not increase the chances of success in an organization by ensuring the presence of knowledgeable, skilled and motivated Process Leaders? One reason for not proceeding in this direction lies in the confusion over the plethora of solutions being offered in this day and age by competing consulting companies. It’s to the point of wondering, “Who has the shiniest new toy to play with”, rather than dealing with the obvious: people knowing how to do things well is the key to any organization’s success.
