Select
International has drawn up a profile for what they call ideal "professional"
employees.
Leadership Style (leaders who can empower, coach, and teach)
Adoptability
Team Work/Interpersonal Skills
Management Ability
WALLY'S COMMENT ... This is yet another perfect employee profile but with a twist.
Lots of professional employees don't have any reason to be leaders. They're
individual contributors performing a specific administrative or professional function they
best way they know how. Many of them don't even need to be team oriented since they
work in isolation and share their work with other people. They need to be sensitive
to the people who use their work, able to communicate with them, and willing to adapt
their output to their user's needs, but they don't need to be team oriented.
The stuff about leadership style is pretty much nonsense as well. Despite all of
the hype in recent years about how leaders are different than managers and how we all need
to be coachers and encouragers, the fact is that most of the effective leaders I've seen
exhibit a variety of behaviors that they tune to the situation they find themselves in.
There simply isn't one leadership style that works or that works in all situations.
One of the best leadership studies that I've seen that points this up is a book called
"19 Stars" by Edgar Puryear. The book takes a look at the careers of
Generals Marshall, Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Patton, looking at their differences in
style and technique, as well as the factors that preparation and luck played in their
careers. You can purchase 19 Stars at
