I saw a recent post
that raised the question as to whether leadership skills are innate (and
cannot be learned). Leadership is a bit of an ill-defined term, so I’m
not exactly sure about the context of the original discussion
triggering the post, but at face value I have to say that innate skills
can help but instilling a continuous learning process about one’s own
leadership style (and that of others) can also help dramatically. What
I share below intends to illustrate not only that one can build
knowledge to help with leadership skills but also that one may find
little progress on a day-to-day basis until one day when it all comes
together.
Two
areas that created an “ah-ha” for me with respect to helping me
recognize my leadership style were related to going to business school
and getting support from a client executive to develop the business
skills one of his line managers. Had it not been for these two events,
I probably would have turned out as an engineer focused on individual
contributor work as opposed to a person focused on business within the
technology space. While either of the outcomes is perfectly fine, I am
happier that I have found the business slant is more the “natural me”.
The
first step in going to business school helped me to develop my
leadership skills by explicitly forcing me to focus on thinking about
and analyzing business issues, as opposed to passively addressing
business issues while working on the job. Business school also gave me
an extra level of confidence in knowing that I had spent dedicated time
to try to improve my knowledge.
The second step
may have occurred, in part, by chance. During a management consulting
engagement I was involved with, I was sitting in a three-person,
executive review meeting with one of the partners of my consulting firm
and the president of the company. The upshot of the meeting was that
one of the functional managers was not performing too well and both the
president and the partner wanted me to coach the functional manager to
help him take his management skills up by an order of magnitude or the
functional manager would be fired. What followed from there was some
behind the scenes work in analyzing how to approach the situation and
then direct assistance with the functional manager to improve the
business. After that particular client engagement, things started
“clicking” for me, and I was able to get into both interim and direct
management roles more regularly to foster my leadership skills.
The
upshot of all this is that combining knowledge, practice, and a real
environment to foster one’s management and leadership skills helped me
to breakthrough and reach a new level (one-time, discontinuous
improvement as opposed to gradual change). While the process of
improvement may have taken many years with slow growth, I was suddenly
able to get things to click together.
I have found similar discontinuous improvements in other areas of
life. For example, in tennis, I remember going to tennis camp and
getting a breakthrough on getting better control with my one-handed
backhand. In drumming, I started to study a completely different style
of music (jazz fusion instead of just progressive rock music drumming).
The knowledge had to sit for awhile, but one day it all clicked and
took me up a notch when I least expected it. If I hadn’t prepared for
the time when the conditions and environment were right, I wouldn’t
have reaped the benefits. Sometimes I think working on leadership
skills might be in the same vein.
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