- Good interpersonal skills are essential for leadership. Interpersonal skills are important to persuade others of your point of view, but the best leaders set such a compelling example that others follow through sheer admiration even if they have terrible interpersonal skills. The latter amounts to a useful add on – it is not the essence of leadership.
- The person in charge of a unit should also be its leader. Determining direction is increasingly a knowledge based skill. In any group, different people will have different knowledge. Any one of them can take the lead on a topic on which they are the expert. Leadership is no longer a monopoly of the one person in charge.
- Leaders are people who make decisions for their teams. Managers make decisions-making decisions for a group is essentially an administrative task – leadership has to do with discovering or creating new directions and getting there ahead of others. Again, this statement is part of the myth that leaders are, first and foremost, people in positions of formal authority.
- Leadership is mostly about influencing others. Influencing is generally regarded as a deliberate attempt to persuade others to do something. True leadership involves setting an example that others want to follow – hero worship if you like – but the leader doesn’t have to want to influence you as a primary objective. The leader’s main objective is to compete, to be the best in a particular field, to get somewhere first. If admirers follow, that is a side effect. Influence is necessary to get group support, but then we are talking about selling and this is not, fundamentally, leadership, however useful it may be for other reasons.
- All good leaders have a clear long-term vision. The best leaders ACT, others admire and try to emulate. Some leaders do have a vision, others improvise and react in a more entrepreneurial fashion. Expressing a vision enthusiastically is a good way of motivating doubters but this is motivation – it is not essentially leadership.
- Aggression: working for status by criticizing or blaming others, showing
hostility against the group or some individual; deflating the ego or status
of others.