Module 3 – Behavioural Leadership Models

Hopefully you’ve managed to have a good think about the qualities of leader and what your qualities are as a leader.

Now, in this segment, we’re going to start to look at another approach to leadership theory, an approach which will hopefully give you another perspective, another way of approaching leadership, another way of thinking about leadership, and in particular, your leadership.

You’re probably getting the idea now that this program is not just about the theories, it’s about personalizing it that so that you can have change as a leader. Now what we’re talking about today is the behavior models of leadership, or one in particular.

What this suggests is that there are particular skills sets which we can deploy as leaders. If we can see leadership as a collection of skills, then we can develop those. Maybe some of your skills are stronger than others, but nevertheless you can work on them, develop them and choose whether you’re going to develop your weakest skills, or and I suggest this is a good thing to do, is to actually make the most of your strongest skill areas.

So, the model that you’ve got in your text suggests that leadership can be built around some nurture skills, skills that can be developed. And the list that we’re showing there is maybe quite straightforward. Communication ability, your ability to communicate, and you’ll probably realize that I believe that this is vitally important for a leader. To communicate powerfully with their voice, whether it’s one to one, or with a group, to be able to display a certain amount of rapport with the group and the ability also to communicate powerfully in a written form. So, communication is vitally important if you’re going to motivate people.

There’s also other things which maybe you didn’t think about but are definitely areas that you can work on. Strategic analysis. As a leader, you’re taking people on a journey, a journey of change, a journey of transformation, one way or another. But you need to analyse the situation. You don’t have to go through master’s degree, MBAs and all the rest of it. All you need is some simple models which give you structure, over which you can think about the situation, the context within which your business unit find itself in. The ability to motivate a team, that’s an area we’ll come back to.

Financial and business analysis. This may be more controversial, but the idea is that you do need certain skill sets in business, the ability to understand some business theory and some financial analysis is seen as being key. The ability to select people, maybe a surprise on your list, but clearly, if it’s all about leading people, motivating people, getting people to buy into your vision. Then also you need to have the right people, and you need the ability to pick the right people for the right jobs to work around you.

There’s also then self-control and self -belief. Now we’ll talk more about this in due course, but you as a leader must be sure that you’re heading in the right direction. You must have that belief in yourself, the mission, the vision, that you’re taking out to your team. But also, you must be controlled in what you do, disciplined. And this might be an area, if you’re not getting the results you want, that you might want to think about. And then finally, judgment, the ability to make the right decision at the right time, and this is a significant skill area.

So that’s the list of skills that we’re presenting for one version of a behavior model of leadership.
Your task today is to think about which of these skills are your strong areas. Which are the ones you can work on and how might you want to work on them. And we’ve got some ideas in the text. So best of luck with that and we’ll look at another approach to leadership in the next segment.