Trait Approach Flashcards

Question

Competencies, Commitment, Character

Answer 1

• In assessing leaders at any level in an organization, we must always ask three questions: • Do they have the competencies to be a leader? • Do they have the knowledge, the understanding of key concepts, facts, and relationships that they need to do the job effectively? • Do they have the commitment to be a leader? • Yes, they aspire to be a leader, but are they prepared to do the hard work of leadership, engage with others in fulfilling the organizational mission, achieve the vision and deliver on the goals? • Do they have the character to be a good leader and strive to be an even better one? • Do they have the values, traits and virtues that others – shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, regulators and the broader society within which they operate – will use to determine if they are good leaders?

Answer 2

• The knowledge, skills, understanding and judgment that leaders need • Four competencies: Strategic, business, organisational, people How do we do it?

Answer 3

Forged from individual aspirations and the preparedness to be fully engaged and make personal sacrifices in return for opportunities and rewards

Answer 4

Why character matters • Competencies determine what a person can do • Commitment determines what they want to do • Character determines what they will do Shapes decisions we make • Character: • Determines how leaders perceive and analyse the contexts in which they operate • Determines how leaders use the competencies they have • Shapes the decisions they make, and how these decisions are implemented and evaluated • No consensus on definition of character, but a focus on traits, values, virtues • Traits. Habitual patterns of though, behaviour, and emotion that are considered to be relatively stable in individuals across situations and over time • Values. Beliefs that people have about what is important or worthwhile to them. Can be seen as guideposts for behaviour • Virtues. Clusters of traits, values, and behaviours that are defined as “good”

Answer 5

• Person with inexhaustible energy, imposing physique, superior intelligence, magnetic personality, extraordinary technical skills… • Popularised under the label of the charismatic leader. • Regulations are an intrinsic part of all organisations, but the leader transcended all rules in that he made the rules. People are often presented as an Individual

Answer 6

• A misinterpretation of reality to assume that the job of top management rotates around the orbit of a single person. • Different types of management teams, not single individuals, are now required to meet the demands of knowledge work. • Everybody is needed, but nobody is needed too much. • Issues of management succession, concept of followship, and integrity and trust. There is a whole team of achievers

Answer 7

• The ultimate defect of charismatic leadership is its attitude towards succession. • The charismatic leader likely to be blind to the succession problem. • Likely to pick a number two man who has never assumed responsibility for a substantive decision and ill prepared for changing external circumstances. • In too many business corporations, the selection process was left to the judgment of one person, i.e. the CEO to pick his/her own successor. • “Top management could not create leadership, at best it could only create the conditions that prepared for it.” What is often projected from trait perspective but GOOD LEADERS SHOULD LOOK AT THE ONE BELOWS and bringing them up. Good leaders understand that they have a rein, which many times it has been forgotten. Its should have good management principles

Answer 8

• “The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers… Both roles are important and badly needed. But without followers, there can be no leaders.” • Performance, and not personality, is the key to leadership. • Effective leaders train themselves to think as part of a team, the needs of the participants and goals of the institution no longer dependent exclusively on one person. • The durability of an institution is not so much to creating great man as to allowing ordinary men to do outstanding things. Followers ability to lead, how willing are they to lead. How to engage generational couples The why and explanation becomes more important

Answer 9

Drucker insisted Integrity be the one absolute trait of leadership (non-negotiable). Its absence should disqualify a person from a management position. • Three areas in which integrity is especially crucial: • Crises - In times of peril it is imperative that there be someone around whom everyone trusts to make a decision. • Legitimacy - Trust in the leader is not only the cement for followship but also the basis of institutional legitimacy, the foundation of authority. • Ethics - People follow most enthusiastically when they are convinced of the ethical correctness of what they are doing.

Answer 10

1. Purpose 2. Performance 3. Motivation 4. Practice

Answer 11

• Management needs a meaningful mental model of the firm’s purpose in order to communicate vision and energise work. • Success based on applying talent and intelligence to the right things.

Answer 12

• Focus of contribution should be on measuring the job results of the assigned task and not the personal attributes of an individual. Managing performance, keeping people on track Managers don’t really like looking into performance, having a tough talk , think that things manage themselves

Answer 13

• Focus of contribution should be on measuring the job results of the assigned task and not the personal attributes of an individual. Managing performance, keeping people on track Managers don’t really like looking into performance, having a tough talk , think that things manage themselves

Answer 14

• The job as the avenue to self-development • Improving traditional executive skills and increasing receptivity for change and accepting new challenges

Answer 15

• The key to effectiveness is practice, acquired through constant learning Is the person not learning? ○ Is it a capacity for willing issue? Many time we focus on the big idea • Inculcation of good habits rather than inheritance of natural gifts

Answer 16

• While the job is the key for improving effectiveness, it also has pervasive conditions that interfere with productivity • Distrustful corporate culture, misallocation of resources, and normal organisational activities programmed executives for inefficiency and fruitless operations • Operational pathologies – working hard on the wrong things • Overcoming the operating trap • Activist factor: are we just doing activities for the sake of doing it and not contributing to the bottomline of the organization? • Time element: how do you use time? Are we using it well, being productive? Make it explicit and aware how important time is? • Nonsoloist dimension: understanding we cannot do work in solo • Information and communication systems: passing information from one to other