HR Definitions

Leadership is seen by many organisations as the most important performance area. They believe that without good leadership, their organisation cannot succeed in reaching its objectives.

The problem with the term leadership is that definitions are varied and the label gets misused quite frequently.

In simple terms, a leader is someone who has followers. The moment people do not want to follow, leadership has ended.

In some instances, people who would not normally see themselves as leaders rise to a leadership position overnight because their style, knowledge, and articulation of a problem or course of action, inspires people to follow. Once the objective is met, they often relinquish the leadership.

Much has been written about two types of leadership, transactional, and transformational. Although there is a great deal of debate over these terms, we view the definitions as:

• Transactional Leadership is the day-to-day influence of management on the normal daily activities in the workplace.
• Transformational Leadership involves the creation of a vision, gaining commitment to that vision, and motivating the workforce to strive to achieve this vision. It involves the management of change.

In developing Leaders for organisations, are we trying to bring many managers up to the level of transformational leaders, or are we trying to merely improve their people management skills as part of their normal management function?

Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard, in developing their "Situational Leadership Model" fully covered the process for transactional Leadership, the Leadership that we at HRworkbench® see as a component of Management Competence. This is a very popular model that aligns the behaviours of managers with the needs of the person being managed dependant on their willingness, and ability, to complete a particular task.

At HRworkbench® we like to separate Leadership out from Management, and see the term Leadership as transformational, involving activities such as:

• Creating and articulating a vision for the organisation
• Developing strategic direction to achieve the vision
• Gaining commitment to the vision and strategic direction by all people involved in the organisation
• Creating an environment where people are motivated to achieve the vision
• Ensuring that the organisation has the resources deployed to enable the vision to be achieved

Do we need Leaders at all levels of the organisation? Probably not.

Do we need Leaders at all? Definitely! Our environment is changing at an ever increasing pace and organisations must continually re-evaluate their vision and strategies to be able to move with those environmental changes.

Leadership is used to set the direction for the organisation, align the resources to that direction, and motivate the people in the organisation to achieve the objectives.

Best practice in Leadership involves many things, all finely tuned to both the organisation and the environment in which the organisation operates.

360-degree Profiling
Leadership Assessment
Leadership Development
Staff Training/Staff Development