Leadership and Management Training: Scholtes' Leadership Competencies

This list of 5 competencies is taken from Peter Scholtes' book "The Leaders Handbook" - I hope it helps you in developing your leadership and management training strategy for your business. Anyone familiar with W. Edwards Deming will recognise them.

Leadership Competency: The Ability to Think in Terms of Systems and Knowing How to Lead Systems

Leadership used to be about a chain of command - who reports to whom. Deming taught us to see systems: Suppliers and Inputs, via Processes to Outcomes and Customers. The system is the method by which we achieve results. The failure to achieve the desired results is caused by the system. Without focusing on systems we are liable to over focus on people and believe that improving the people is the same as improving the system. Undertsanding systems thoroughly is key to effective modern day leadership.

Leadership Competency: The Ability to Understand the Variability of Work in Planning and Problem Solving

Being able to differentiate between common cause variation (caused by the system) and special cause variation (caused by a unique event attributable to a knowable influence) is vital. Otherwise "trends" are spotted where they don't exist or missed when they do. Likewise people can be blamed for systemic faults over which they have no control or rewarded for chance outcomes. Unless the manager understands variation he or she cannot understand fully past performance nor predict future results. Without this undertsanding they will not understand their systems. Churchill of course used Prof Lindemann to analyse his key statistics.

Leadership Competency: Understanding How we Learn, Develop and Improve; Leading True Learning and Development

Lifelong learning and improvement are no longer optional. Deming's / Shewhart's "Plan, Do, Study, Act" process is a never ending learning cycle. Your leaders and managers must understand this process and its value. They must also understand (and show they understand) the communication preferences of people as they learn; for example NLP (neuro linguistic programming) preferences, Honey & Mumford learning styles or Jungian communication preferences (e.g. Myers Briggs).

Leadership Competency: Understanding People and Why They Behave as They Do

People generally behave in a way consistent with how we expect them to behave. (Any participants from my management training workshops will recall my "Hat Game" and smile here!) Self-fulfilling prophecies are everywhere at work! If a manager wants to know why someone behaves the way they do, he or she must first examine their own expectations of them. Managers and leaders also need to understand motivation - try reading Alfie Kohn's "Punished by Rewards" as a start. Some knowledge of Transactional Analysis would also be useful in better understanding relationships.

Leadership Competency: Understanding how the 4 Competencies above Interact with each other

One cannot fully understand one competency if one cannot understand the others nor how they affect each other - they are interactive, interdependent and concurrent. Modern business leadership challenges demand more than simplistic solutions.

Leadership Competency: Giving Vision, Meaning, Direction and Focus to an Organisation

All the members of the organisation need to be able to answer these questions with a good degree of clarity: Who are we? What business are we in? What business are we not in? Where are we headed in the long term? What are our priorities in the short term? What values and principles should be characteristic in all our relationships and in what we do? What is my personal job and how do I fit into the larger organisations systems? What's the best way to do my job? What is expected of me? By whom? How will improvements in my job be accomplished? How will I be involved in those improvements? What forms of feedback will let me know how I'm doing?

For more information - and before you dive into leadership and management training - read Scholtes' book!

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