Chapter 3 - Skill Approach

• Focus is primarily descriptive – it describes leadership from skills perspective

• Provides structure for understanding the nature of effective leadership

-> difference between skills and trait: skills can be learned and traits you have been born with (changeable through exogenous shock)

• Katz (1955) suggests importance of particular leadership skills varies depending where leaders reside in management hierarchy

• Mumford, Campion, & Morgeson, (2007) suggest higher levels of all skills needed at higher levels of hierarchy

• Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding et al. (2000) suggest leadership outcomes are direct result of leader’s skilled competency in problem solving, social judgment & knowledge

Perspective

• Leader-centered perspective

• Emphasis on skills and abilities that can be learned and developed

Definition

Leadership skills - The ability to use one’s knowledge and competencies to accomplish a set of goals and objectives

If you sum up multiple skills you get those big 3

• Technical Skill

• Human Skill

• Conceptual Skill

You need all those skills for a succesful road trip: drive a car (tehnical), entertain (human), know where to drive / how to arrive (conceptual)

= having knowledge about and being proficient in a specific type of work or activity.

• Specialized competencies

• Analytical ability

• Use of appropriate tools and  techniques

 Technical skills involve hands-on ability with a product or process

= having knowledge about and being able to work with people.

• Being aware of one’s own perspective and others’ perspectives at the same time

• Assisting group members in working cooperatively to achieve common goals

• Creating an atmosphere of trust and empowerment of members

= the ability to do the mental work of shaping meaning of organizational policy or issues (what company stands for and where it’s going)

• Works easily with abstraction and hypothetical notions

• Central to creating and articulating a vision and strategic plan for an organization

Leaders need all three skills – but, relative importance changes based on level of management

Here: skills that are important depending on the organizational hierarchy

-> human skills are important no matter which level

Top Managers

• don’t need technical skill, because they have the middle management

• need human skill to communicate below them (inside the organization) and also to communicate to the outside (to whole environment, all stakeholders)

• need conceptual skills to know where the organization is going

Middle Managers

• are the first followers

• need conceptual skills to understand the visions of the top managers

• need technical skills to communicate / frame the vision to the bottom (rest of employees below them) need to transalte it for the rest in technical terms

• need human skills to interact with people at the top and below them

Supervisory Managers

• human skills are important, because they deal a lot with people

• technical skills are needed to do their job

 -> human skills are important no matter which level

Orange example: needed complementary goods – had no human skills

• When we are evaluating skills we need to keep the task in mind

• Professor bonding with students is also a technical skill as it is part of their job

• Danelle: working with costumers = having human skills is also a technical skills, because dealign with costumers is part of her job

• Patrick: he has good technical skills in the kitchen, but he also works with people at the front, in which he is lacking. Of course those are human skills, but it is also oart of his job he is missing this technical skill

• Kelly: part of success is having good relations with providers, so dealing with them is also a technical skill  good with kitchen, but bad with relations to providers

• First approach to conceptualize and create a structure of the process of leadership around skills

• Describing leadership in terms of skills makes leadership available to everyone

• Provides an expansive view of leadership that incorporates wide variety of components (i.e., problem-solving skills, social judgment skills)

• Provides a structure consistent with leadership education programs

• Breadth of the skills approach appears to extend beyond the boundaries of leadership, making it more general, less precise

• Weak in predictive value; does not explain how skills lead to effective leadership performance

• Skills model includes individual attributes that are trait-like

• The Skills Approach provides a way to delineate the skills of a leader

• It is applicable to leaders at all levels within the organization

• The skills inventory can provide insights into the individual’s leadership competencies

• Test scores allow leaders to learn about areas in which they may wish to seek further training