Our core business at Human Assets is ensuring you have the leadership pipeline you require for your business to be successful. Fundamental to this is setting out what skills are required for leaders. Each organisation, quite rightly, wants to ensure its own particular priorities are reflected in its own specification - the competency framework or Indicators of Excellence. At the same time, it is helpful to have in the background a generic framework of leadership skills. You can use this generic framework as a check on your competencies - for example, do they under- or over-emphasise any of the generic areas? The generic framework can also be used to make comparisons between organisations in terms of leadership strengths and deficits.
A recent paper in The Leadership Quarterly provides a straightforward and practical generic framework of leadership skills. It consists of four skills categories, with the most fundamental first:
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Cognitive
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Interpersonal
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Business
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Strategic
Research around the model confirms that cognitive skills are the most fundamental, upon which most leadership activities draw. For example, the interpersonal skills of persuasion and negotiation draw on cognitive skills.
The paper also confirms that all four skill requirements increase with leadership level but the relative importance of the four areas differs with level. For leadership positions higher up the organisation, not surprisingly, strategic skills and business skills become of greater relative importance than at lower levels.
We at Human Assets are strong advocates of organisations having their own unique specification of leadership requirements that fully recognise your priorities and values. We are also firm believers in providing specifications that stick to the essentials of leadership in your organisation, allowing for diversity in the way that individuals tackle the leadership role. Our Indicators of Excellence reflect these considerations. They set out succinctly what leaders must do to have maximum impact in their roles. These indicators can be categorised into the four headings discussed in this article, allowing comparison between roles and benchmarking between clients in terms of leadership requirements and strengths.
You can find more detail on the indicators of excellence approach in our recent guide to talent management, Holding on while letting go, and we would welcome your comments and enquiries that should be directed to Charles Woodruffe. Charles can be reached on +44(0)20 7434 2122 or charles.woodruffe@humanassets.co.uk