Dear Colleagues,
Travis Bradberry asks about metaphors used to describe leadership
skills, behaviors, and attributes:
"If core leadership behaviors like vision, decision-making,
communication, and results focus are considered to be soft skills,
then how do you define 'softer' skills such as emotional
intelligence, fairness, and developing employees? I've heard the
latter set referred to as 'intangibles' of leadership. How do you
refer to concepts such as these?"
Rather than attempt to answer this large and important question, I
would like to focus on how to ask the question.
This question entails three sets of issues that are often conflated.
Delineating them carefully permits robust answers.
Before unpacking the issues, it is helpful to be clear about what we
are discussing.
The subject header to this query was "leadership skills" The question
itself was described as involving "core leadership behaviors." The
actual question offered in the post involves three constructs:
1) Skills,
2) Behaviors or actions,
3) Attributes or characteristics.
In some cases, the terms used in the query are clearly one of these
three entities.
Emotional intelligence is an attribute, not a skill or behavior.
Emotional intelligence may imply a skills set and a range of
implementing behaviors, but it is not in itself a skill or behavior.
Once we distinguish these constructs, we can ask useful questions
about emotional intelligence as a leadership attribute. Is emotional
intelligence innate and revealed through behaviors? Does emotional
intelligence involve a set of learnable skills? Is it possible that
emotional intelligence involves a combination of innate qualities of
character, together with learnable skills and behaviors that in turn
shape further qualities of character? All are possible. This is the
case with so many aspects of leadership. I will not attempt to answer
these questions. I merely suggest that only by distinguishing issues
can be begin to do so.
Developing employees is an action or activity. Skills are required to
do it well. As is evident in many organizations, employee development
may be enacted without any skills at all, and the results may be
poor. Similarly, there are rare situational leaders who are so
skillfully able to work with employees in the course of normal work
that development takes place without a conscious plan or a
specifically articulated series of actions.
The term communication is used here is several possible ways. It may
indicate a skill, the ability to communicate. It may indicate a
behavior or an action, the act or process of communicating.
Fairness is an attribute or characteristic. It is revealed in
behavior, but it is not a behavior in its own right.
To understand these issues requires an appropriate level of care with
the constructs we use.
A skill is the ability to do something.
A behavior or an action is something that is done or enacted.
An attribute or characteristic is a personal quality. Personal
qualities affect the ways in which we think and act, but they are
distinct from skills and from the actions they affect.
Clarity in establishing constructs does much to unravel these issues.
On a second level, it is important to be clear that we are using
metaphors when we discuss "soft" skills or "hard" skills. None of
these skills is soft or hard. They are simply skills.
It has become customary to speak of those factors that can be
rendered in numbers as "hard," while referring to issues that are
rendered in words as "soft."
This seems to me a great mistake.
The metaphorical mistake confuses clear description with numbers.
The problem of this confusion is evident when one assigns
inappropriate numerical values to constructs that yield achieve
mathematically correct but meaningless information.
For the most part, Adam Smith described all of his empirical data in
words. He rarely used tables or even numbers. Despite this, the
clarity and accuracy of his work remains a monumental achievement.
Both symbolic interactionism and grounded theory address many of the
same issues. People with an ability to struggle with ambiguous data
and qualitative descriptions have been using symbolic interactionist
methods for half a century with good results. Growing out of the
symbolic interactionist perspective, the techniques of grounded
theory permit us to quantize qualitative data, which allows certain
advances.
Both systems are equally "hard" - and equally "soft." One of my
thesis students complained that he felt like he was adrift at sea
without an anchor in trying to use Blumer's open-ended symbolic
interactionist methods. I suggested that he try grounded theory.
The next month, he came back to complain of the tedium he experienced
in the endless coding of the same material through Glaser, Strauss,
and Corbin's grounded theory methods.
My reply was that for his task, he either had to accept the stress
and ambiguity inherent in symbolic interactionism or the tedium that
attended the specificity and coding structures of grounded theory.
Neither of these is physical science. What we study when we study
management is neither hard nor soft. So much involves judgment calls
and value judgments that one must use skill and art in the science of
management. This is even sp in deciding on how to assign numbers to
financial data and accounting techniques: the numbers remain
mathematically correct, but Enron, Anderson, and many more like them
show us that we can get mathematically correct numbers that fail to
represent empirical reality. All it requires is "aggressive
accounting" as we set parameters and assign numbers to them.
Rather than get on with a philosophical treatise, I will simply
suggest that we do well to define terms, clarify constructs, and
avoid confusing metaphor with clear description.
I will close by recommending Stephen Toulmin's new book, Return to
Reason. Reasoned argument from evidence remains the foundation of
good research. Leadership research yields the best results to those
who find reasonable ways to describe, summarize, and present
information on what leaders do in the social context that forms the
ground of leadership activities.
This naturally involves considering the attributes of individuals and
groups, the skills they posses, and the behaviors they enact.
Half the art of finding good answers lies in asking good questions
and structuring them well.
Best regards
--
Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Leadership and Organization
Norwegian School of Management
Visiting Professor
Advanced Research Institute
School of Art and Design
Staffordshire University