Situational Theory and Contingency Theory.

by Charles Plant | Jun 21, 2013 | Leadership Development

If leadership isn’t really a trait and it isn’t totally a skill, maybe it’s a behaviour. There are sort of two schools of thought that propose that leadership is behavioural in nature.

Situational Theory suggests that different situations require different behaviours or styles of leadership. To be successful, what you need to do is adapt your behaviour to fit that new situation.

What you might say? You can’t adapt behaviour. And yet we’re all very good at adapting our behaviour to ft the situation. You don’t behave the same way at a party if your boss is there as you behave when you’re getting together with friends from university. (Or if you do then you’re probably committing multiple CLMs (Career Limiting Moves.))

Contingency Theory on the other hand says that a leader’s effectiveness is contingent on how well her style matches the specific needs of the situation. Under Situational Theory, you adapt your behaviour whereas in Contingency Theory you match your behaviour.

People must be getting rich developing theories and never coming to a conclusion as to what leadership really is.

As a trait, you can’t improve leadership. If it is a skill, you just need to go to a few classes and we know that only works for such things as setting a vision. If leadership is a behaviour then, how do you improve it? Well coaching seems to work but that is difficult and expensive.

Ask yourself how you lead. Do you do it naturally or think about it? Do you do it from the head or the heart? Or is it a bit of all of the above. At this point in time, I’m seeing the merits and shortcomings of all of the theories and perhaps, like you, getting frustrated by the subject. But I’m not finished yet.

Skills Theory

by Charles Plant | Jun 19, 2013 | Leadership Development

On the other side of the spectrum from Trait Theory is a theory of leadership known as Skills Theory. Developed as a theory by Robert Katz in 1955, it postulates that leadership is a combination of:

• Technical skills related to the field in which one operates.
• Human skills relating to communicating with people.
• Conceptual skills related to setting vision.

According to Skills Theory, learned knowledge and skills are significant factors in becoming an effective leader. It doesn’t deny the usefulness of inherent traits but argues that developing skills are essential to leadership. This of course, is the foundation for all of the effort devoted to leadership development.

To my mind, the whole theory falls apart in the use of the term ‘skills’. I don’t see that ‘playing well in the sandbox’ is skill but more of a behaviour. Maybe I’m being a mite pedantic but I see a real difference between skills and behaviours.

Technical skills may be skills but human skills are better defined as soft skills, or behaviours. In reading that last sentence I’m not sure myself if it makes sense. Being able to use Excel is a technical skill but I wouldn’t call ‘being nice to people’ a skill but more of a behaviour. After all, your mother didn’t tell you to skill yourself but to behave yourself.

Maybe that’s it. Skills are what you learned in school and behaviours are things that your mother tried to teach you.

The problem is that a lot of us really nice people in the field of leadership development are trying to teach leadership (which is half skills and half behaviours) as a set of skills that can be learned.

Since learning skills is way easier than learning behaviours, we don’t make much headway in teaching behaviours and that’s why much of the effort in leadership development is wasted.

Back to the original question: What is leadership? I can’t agree with Skills Theory as a good definition of leadership either. Right now, I’m looking for a definition of leadership that combines traits, skills, and behaviours all in a nice package.

Trait Theory

by Charles Plant | Jun 18, 2013 | Leadership Development

To many people, leadership is a set of traits or innate abilities. Those who adhere to this mode of thinking are proponents of what is called Trait Theory. (They also happen to be the ones whose mothers told them they were natural born leaders.)

Trait Theory postulates that people are born with certain traits or qualities that predispose them to success or failure in leadership roles. These traits are hard wired in your brain and genetic. There is some debate on how many traits that one can use to describe people and various proponents of trait theory say either three or five are enough to define people. In looking for stuff on this topic I found lists of personality traits that are hundreds of elements long.

According to the Five Factor Model, the following are the five key personality traits.

• Openness to experience
• Conscientiousness
• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Neuroticism

(Now if you’re like me, you just looked at this list and tried to evaluate where you fit on each of these dimensions. Don’t worry, we like you just the way you are.Well most of us do anyway.)

The main problem with Trait Theory as I see it is that it means that people can’t change or it is so difficult to change people that it isn’t even worth trying. There go all the efforts at using coaches and psychology then to influence traits. If this were true as well the self help industry would be eliminated. Bye Bye Tony Robbins.

So too would leadership training.

This gets into the nature or nurture argument that I tend to think is a waste of time. Yes, there are some genetic traits that are part of one’s makeup but there is so much more that is learned that Trait Theory is too restrictive.

Back to basics: What is leadership?

by Charles Plant | Jun 17, 2013 | Leadership Development

I may be confusing myself again but some work I’ve been doing with a client along with the research I’m doing is leading me to question the nature of leadership. Essentially I’m asking the question I’ve asked before, what is leadership?

There appear to be three central views of leadership:

1. As a trait or personality characteristic.
2. As a set of behaviours or skills.
3. Or finally as a process.

It is the last of these that I haven’t considered before. If you consider leadership as a set of traits then it would be very difficult to train leaders. If you consider it as a set of behaviours then leadership training is difficult and time consuming yet not impossible.

If you consider leadership to be a process then it should be relatively easy to train someone to be a better leader. Interestingly enough, this may be what I’m seeing through research.

I suppose the best situation would be to have a leader with the right traits and behaviours working within a process that supports effective leadership.