Leadership and the X Factor

For as long as people have been studying and writing about leadership, the debate about whether leaders are born or made has existed. The adherents of the born leaders school often like to talk about some magical ingredient - some X Factor - that leaders have, and that the rest of us mere mortals simply don’t possess.

My view is that both sides of the debate are true. And I don’t find sitting on this fence too uncomfortable!

If you subscribe to the school of innate leadership, then it becomes just too easy to accept that you and others can do nothing about becoming a better leader. Sure, not all of us can become a truly great leader in the mold of [insert your favourite great leader here]. But I don’t look like Daniel Craig, play golf like Tiger Woods or sing like Luciano Pavarotti either! That element of greatness - the X Factor - if you like, does separate the great from the excellent and the good.

But the school of learned leadership also has its advocates, for the obvious reason that leadership can be taught. But here’s the critical thing - it must be learned, practiced and constantly developed too. I can’t imagine that Tiger Woods simply relies on his innate golfing abilities to be one of the world’s most successful golfers. Obviously he practices, and I bet that he also regularly works on something new in his game as well.

How are you going at working on your leadership skills?

I often begin a leadership workshop or training session by asking the attendees to give me a list of the top leadership traits. Every single time in these sessions, the people there get 95% or more of the most common leadership traits in about ten seconds flat.

So what? Does that make all them good leaders?

That’s the point isn’t it. It’s not the knowing, it’s the doing that’s important.

It’s not just having the theoretical knowledge of what leadership is all about, it’s doing something with that knowledge by practicing it.

Truman Capote, the great American author and creator of the so-called “non-fiction novel” made a very interesting comment to his biographer, Gerald Clarke, (Capote: A Biography http://www.geraldclarke.com/capote.htm) about what it takes to become a good writer.

You might want to think about Capote’s comment as it relates to being a good leader. Capote said:

To be a good writer and to stay on top is one of the most difficult balancing acts ever. Talent isn’t enough ... There has to be some extra X factor, some extra dimension, that has kept us [writers] going. Really successful people are like vampires: you can’t kill them unless you drive a stake through their hearts.

Talent isn’t enough!

Your knowledge, your boss’s knowledge, your teammate’s knowledge of leadership will never be enough. It probably never has been, and it certainly won’t be in the future. True success will come only to those who don’t just know it, they don’t just think it, they definitely don’t just talk about it ... they just do it.

Capote actually finished his comment about success as a writer by saying:

... the only one who can destroy a really strong and talented writer is himself.

If you aren’t refreshing, practicing or learning new leadership skills, are you destroying your own potential to be a strong and talented leader?

"Leaderful" Teams

This weekend is the start of the Australian Football League (AFL) competition. In a couple of hours I am heading off to see my team the Richmond Tigers play (http://www.richmondfc.com.au/).

The start of the season is always a wonderful time. At that stage it seems that your team is potentially capable of anything. Every supporter of every team is convinced that this is “their year”. No one has won, and no one has lost. Ah ... the possibilities.

But from a leadership perspective, what I have found increasingly interesting over the past couple of years, is that clubs and coaches are no longer appointing just one captain and a vice-captain. Instead, they talk about the “leadership group” or “co-captains”.

Of course, leadership groups have always existed in all sporting teams, in businesses and in organisations. What’s interesting to me now is that this being formally acknowledged. I wonder why?

A well-known Australian - Ric Charlesworth (http://www.riccharlesworth.com/) (Australian representative hockey player, former Federal politician and coach of the Australian women’s hockey team that won the Gold Medal at the Sydney Olympics) wrote about creating “leaderful teams” in his book The Coach: Managing for Success. What did he mean by this?

Charlesworth’s theory, that he implemented in the undeniably successful women’s hockey team, is that there are a number of downsides of appointing a single team captain - just one leader. Not only does it put a lot of pressure on that one individual, but perhaps more importantly, it often means that the rest of the team tend to sit back and wait for the leader to tell them/show them what to do.

His alternative is to create a team atmosphere where everyone is a team leader - the so-called “leaderful team”. But Charlesworth doesn’t mean some anarcho-syndicalist commune! Instead, he argues that at different points in a game or in the life of a team, different team members with different strengths will assume the role of leader.

And that’s the evolution that we are seeing in AFL teams at the moment. There’s no longer one leader, there are many.

How does your work or sporting team do it? Does this approach make sense to you?