Leadership – A core category of skills?
We have been carrying out a simple one-question survey that asks the following question:
“What categories do you use to organize your skills? Please pick the top five categories that you use to organize your skills. You may want to organize your skills to present them to other people or to plan your own career.”
You can take this short survey here.
One interesting and to me surprising result is that one of the most popular categories is Leadership!
Now this may be an artifact of who is taking the survey (we decided not to gather any demographic data on this survey to keep it as simple as possible, it was shared with several of our customers and we do not like to ask them to do too many surveys). Or it may be largely aspirational, as people aspire to be leaders in the future.
But it got me wondering if many people today feel that they need to have leadership skills to succeed in their jobs, whether these be conventional management jobs or not.
On TeamFit ‘Leadership’ is a rather common skill, having been claimed by 7% of our users and used on more than 6% of projects. Here are the top five skills associated with Leadership on TeamFit.
Project Management
Problem Solving
Business Acumen
Management
Coaching
Digging deeper, I spoke with a number of people about why Leadership is emerging as a core skill. The consensus is that as we move to team-based work, and see companies as overlapping teams of teams, leadership becomes part of everyone’s job. On a high-performing team each person will have a leadership role within their sphere of expertise and can take over team leadership depending on the issue at hand.
A smart manager creates space in front of people for them to move into. Help designers take their work to a higher level. Push analysts to dig deeper to find the insights that will change how we think about a problem. Encourage facilitators by staying quiet and listening carefully.
A compelling take on leadership for the modern age is the MIT Sloan Four Capabilities Leadership Model. This model was developed by Deborah Ancona, Tom Malone, and Wanda Orlikowski, with Senior Lecturer Peter Senge to help develop leaders for an age of uncertainty. The goals are to help people manage change.
The core components of this model are
Sensemaking: making sense of the world around us, coming to understand the context in which we are operating.
Relating: developing key relationships within and across organizations.
Visioning: creating a compelling picture of the future.
Inventing: designing new ways of working together to realize the vision.
As the TeamFit platform matures we will develop deeper insight into how skills connect people and contribute to getting work done. One of the things I will be looking for are the skills that contribute to each of these capabilities.
What skills are associated with Sensemaking or Visioning? Will there be different patterns and styles of Relating that we can pull out of the skills graph? How will these impact team performance and the probability of project success?