Eight Characters in Search of a Plot – the Capabilities that Underpin Great Leadership

Leadership. Setting challenging and worthwhile goals; inspiring others to follow and enabling them to realise your vision; making a long lasting and beneficial difference.
If you are reading this post the likelihood is that you are interested in those behaviours that underpin great leadership and are seeking to develop yourself and, perhaps, those around you. There is a wealth of material out there to help you and any number of training, coaching and advisory organisations who will come to your assistance (for a small consideration). But the commitment to develop leadership behaviours has to come from within the individual; yourself or those with whom you are working. So can you find a way to make sense of all of the available information and can you find a structured approach that will enable you to 'Keep It Simple Stupid' and focus on the elements that will work for you or your team? Yes you can. I did and it works for me – and may work for you. Welcome to the eight key leadership capabilities.

Nature or Nurture – The Case for Leadership Development

In my last full post I put forward my thoughts on what constitutes great leadership and was encouraged by the quantity and quality of the responses. Those responses have caused me to modify slightly my three criteria for great leadership although the essence of each remains:

1. Great leaders set challenging and worthy goals.
2. Great leaders inspire others to attempt those goals.
3. Great leaders provide the capability for others to realise those goals.

Now, I am interested in helping others to develop their leadership capabilities. Actually, I am interested developing myself and would like to make 'helping others to develop' what I do. Either way, I have a vested interest in leadership development. Yet it seems to me that there are two obvious questions that need to be addressed before we go further down the 'leadership development' path.

1. Can leadership capabilities be developed?
2. Should leadership capabilities be developed?