Skills Approach Application
According to the three-skill approach of Katz, the individual's leadership abilities vary depending on where leaders are in a management hierarchy. The practical implication of skills approach to leadership is that leaders can improve their capabilities in leadership skills through training and experience.
Advantages of Skills Approach:
The skills approach to leadership describes leadership from a skills standpoint and provides a structure for understanding the nature of effective leadership. According to three-skill approach of Katz the importance of certain leadership skills varies depending on where leaders are in a management hierarchy. In Mumford’s skill model theory he proposes that leadership effectiveness is directly correlated to a leader’s competencies in problem-solving skills, social judgment skills, and knowledge. The biggest takeaway from these studies was the outcome that these skills can be learned and developed. The practical implication of skills approach to leadership is that leaders can improve their capabilities in leadership skills through training and experience. Hence they assist in defining a structured approach to leadership education and development and help to frame the curricula of organizational training and leadership development programs.
How to use this approach:
The learner can use the characteristics of the skills defined in this approach to do a comparative self –evaluation of oneself to identify one’s strengths and weaknesses with regard to these three skills; technical, human, and conceptual. This assessment provides insight into one’s own leadership competencies and based on the development areas identified, learners can take specific trainings to enhance their leadership effectiveness.
There are many questionnaires available based on these studies to assess individual's skills. They provide a useful self-help, but a word of caution here is that they cannot be used in research because they have not been tested for reliability and validity. A typical questionnaire is the "Skills Inventory" and you can also take the quiz designed by TechnoFunc called TechnoFunc’s Skill Inventory to assess your skills and development areas.
Self-Leadership Development Plan:
Given below are the steps to define a leadership development plan for yourself using the key concepts from this approach:
1. Do a self-assessment – Use TechoFunc’s Quiz
2. Identify your strengths and weaknesses
3. Identify your training needs.
4. Explore the relevant area on TechnoFunc’s website to learn more about the skillset you need to develop and explore the tools provided here to increase your effectiveness.
Related Links
You May Also Like
-
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (SFP) Leader Theory
Pygmalion theory of Leadership is a model of SFP at work involving supervisory expectancy based on the pygmalion effect. This effect is a type of self-fulfilling prophecy (SFP) in which raising leader's expectations regarding subordinate performance boosts the group's performance. Managers who are led to demand more from their team, lead the team to better performance. There is some evidence that the SFP effect does exists.
-
The style approach emphasizes that one style of leadership behaviour cannot be effective in all situations. Earlier theories treated leadership exclusively as a personality trait and behavior approach has widened the scope by including the behaviors of leaders and what they do in various situations. Explore how you can benefit from the concepts to understand your own behaviors and what are some of the leadership tools based on the style approach to leadership.
-
Idiosyncrasy Credit Model of Leadership builds upon the awareness that when the emergent leader meets the team's expectations, idiosyncrasy credits are awarded. These credits depend on how the leader fulfilled follower's expectations and what is the impact of the leader's decisions on the follower. When the balance of credits shifts, another leader will emerge.
-
McClelland's Theory of Needs is a human motivation theory which states that an individual's specific needs are acquired over time through our culture and life experiences. As per the three needs theory, these acquired needs significantly influence the behavior of an individual. The three main driving motivators are the needs for achievement, affiliation, and power.
-
The social identity theory of leadership views leadership as a group process. Social identity is a person's sense of who they are based on their group membership. Social identity theory sets agendas and goals generated by social categorization, defines who we are based on processes associated with social identity, and motivates to conduct ourselves based on what followers think of the leader.
-
The open systems model of leadership acknowledges the influence of the environment on organizations. An open system regularly exchanges feedback with its external environment. The environment also provides key resources that are necessary to sustain and lead to change and survival. Leadership in an open system should focus on influence, open communication, and patterns to control expanding the number of variables created by external dynamics.
-
All the teams are dynamic in nature and they take time to come together, they form, develop, and grow in stages, over a period of time. Teams go through five progressive stages: Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing and Adjourning. In this article, we want to introduce you to these stages of team development and certain strategies that you can use to help the team grow and develop in each of these stages.
-
Communication has as its central objective the transmission of meaning. The process of communication is successful only when the receiver understands an idea as the sender intended it. How does a message or an idea travel from one person to another? To transmit our message, we engage in a sensitive and complex process of communication, with different elements like sender, message, channels, receiver, noise, and feedback.
-
Neo-Emergent Leadership theory supports that leadership is created through the emergence of information. Leaders can only be recognized after a goal is met. Follower’s perception of leaders is influenced by the ways these goals were accomplished.
-
Have you ever resonated that there seem to be as many different ways to lead people as there have been great leaders? When we recall the success of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon Bonaparte to Steve Jobs and Jack Welch, we also notice that they all used different approaches that were suitable to their specific situations and circumstances. Over the last century, researchers and psychologists have developed simple ways to describe the “Styles of leadership” and in this section, we will explore these commonly known leadership styles.
