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Leadership Is A Habit That Requires Practice

Source | www.forbes.com | Roger Trapp

It is probably fair to say that the argument over whether leaders are born or made has been settled. The fortune spent every year by organizations of all sorts and sizes on executive development is evidence enough for the idea that, while certain attributes of leadership may be genetic, much of what it takes to be a leader can be learned. However, that begs another question. How?

The answer, for most human resources departments, has been courses, with plenty of classroom learning. And yet, as many scholarly articles, such as this one in the Harvard Business Review, point out, the record of such initiatives is not that great. According to Martin Lanik, an organizational and industrial psychologist and author of The Leader Habit, the problem is that the classroom learning provides participants with knowledge but not the skills required to do the things that will make them effective leaders. Allied to this is a lack of recognition of the importance of habits to human behavior. It is because we are creatures of habit that – even when inspired by courses when we are on them and first return from them – we rarely change how we go about our work in the longer term, with the result that the organization fails to see the improvement in business it was expecting.

The idea at the heart of Lanik’s book is that it is only by turning skills into habits, that is, making them automatic, that an individual can really change and in the case of an actual or aspiring leader acquire what it takes to be effective. Lanik’s view is that the skills he is talking about – he and his team analysed management literature and compiled a list of 22 core skills of effective leaders – can be acquired like any others by practice, practice and more practice. In other words, setting out to be a leader is little different from becoming a pianist or a footballer. Even if there is some innate talent, it needs to be honed by hard work, determination and, above all, practical effort. As he writes: “Skills are what make us better at actually doing things.”

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Source
www.forbes.com
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