Skills and Style Approaches to Leadership
Introduction
The skills approach emphasizes skills that can be learned, thus representing a shift away from the perspective that people are born into/with leadership. In addition to exploring the skills approach, this module will provide a discussion of the style approach which provides a focus upon the behavior manifest in effective leaders.
The Skills Approach
Katz's Three Basic Administrative Skills
Katz (1955) suggests that three basic administrative needs must be present for managers to be effective: technical, human, and conceptual. This skills model of organizational leadership was based on the development of the bases of competencies and was part of a long-term research project entitled Making the Match between University Graduates and Corporate Employers (Evers & Rush, 1996). Using a survey-based analysis, four distinct bases of key competencies of a leader emerged:
1. Mobilizing Innovation and Change: the leader's ability to conceptualize, use creativity/innovation/change, take risks, and engage in visioning for the future.
2. Managing People and Tasks: involves coordinating, decision making, leadership/influence, managing conflict, and planning, leading, controlling, and organizing.
3. Communicating: the leader uses interpersonal, listening, oral, and written communication skills to communicate the organization's goals and the leader's vision.
4. Managing Self: the important keys to success are learning new skills, use of personal organization and time management skills, personal strengths, and problem solving/analytic or critical thinking skills. Technical skills can be included where the focus involves the general here and now or day-to-day workings of the organization (Evers & Rush, 1996). The skills that leaders felt were of the greatest use were visioning, creativity,