The Skills Approach

The Skills Approach

o    The skills approach emphasizes the capabilities of the leader.

o    The advantage of this approach is anyone can become an effective leader.

o    Similar to the trait approach, the skills approach takes a leader-centered approach except that it focuses on the skills and abilities instead of the "Personality" traits which are usually innate.

o    The original research came from the "Skills of an effective administrator" Harvard Business Review published in 1955 by Robert Katz.

o    A multitude of researched was done in the 1990's by Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding, Jacobs & Fleishman.

o    Katz identified 3 basic skills based on his observation of executives in the workplace. Katz emphasized that the skills tell "What leaders can accomplish" as opposed to trait which emphasized "Who leaders are". The skills approach theorizes that leaders can be developed and trained.

·         Technical

§  Having knowledge and being proficient in a specific type of work or activity.

§  Technical skills is not important at lower levels of management and less important at higher levels.

§  Ability to work with things.

·         Human

§  Ability to work with people.

§  Being aware of one's own perspective on issues and at the same time being aware of others perspectives.

§  Leaders adapt their own ideas with those of others.ility Model"

§  Create an atmosphere of trust where employees can feel comfortable, secure, encouraged to be involved in planning the things that affect them.

·         Conceptual

§  Ability to work with ideas and concepts.

§  Works easily with abstractions and hypothetical situations.

§  Creating visions, strategic plans.

§  Is most important at top management levels.  

 

  What are Schemas?

Northouse presents the concept of the schema, but he does not explain it very completely. Cognitive theorists have constructed the concept of a schema to help explain how we think, learn, remember, and experience the world. A schema is essentially a network of ideas surrounding a specific concept. Such concepts could include mothers, fathers, bosses, African Americans, Hispanics, and even yourself. Schemata (the plural of schema) function in a way that organizes our experiences and allows our information processing to be efficient. Their affect can be good or bad, depending on the circumstances.

For example, suppose you meet a new person at work. The person is African American. Because of your schema about African American persons you probably assume that you already know some things about this person. You might, depending on the nature of your schema, assume that he or she has rhythm, or basketball-playing skills, or other characteristics you associate with the concept African American. You may learn some things about this person that are not congruent with your existing schema. You may ignore them, forget them or classify this person as a special exception to the concept. All of these will contribute to maintaining the existing schema.

 

People have a natural tendency to resist changing our schemata on the basis of new information. For example, people who are highly prejudiced against African Americans are likely to be very resistant to change in that schema. Although a good leader will have a large number of schemata about different people, his or her schemata are more likely to be flexible and receptive to new information.

 

o    Skills Model - Mumford and colleges identified a new skills based model of organizational leadership.

·         Started in the early 199s with funding from the DOD.  Focused on 1800 army officers representing 6 grades levels.

·         They attempted to explain "Effective Performance".

·         They used a "Capability Model" to explain the relationship between a leader's skills and knowledge.

·         The skills model does NOT focus on "what leaders do", but on the capabilities.

·         It is composed of 5 different components

§  Competencies

§  Individual attributes

§  Leadership outcomes

§  Career experiences

§  EnvirEnvironmental influences

 

 

1.     Competencies

· style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">         Problem solving skills

§  Ability to solve new, unusual, and ill defined problems. It includes gathering problem information, formulate new understandings, and generating prototypes plans for solutions. These skills do not work in a vacuum, but in the organizational context.  Leaders must understand their capacities within the organization.

§  An example is being the director of Human Resources for a medium sized company trying to develop a plan to reduce the costs of healthcare costs.

·         First - identify full ramifications for employees changing benefits.

·         Second - gather information about how benefits can be scaled back.

·         Third - Find a way to teach and inform employees about he change.

·         Fourth - Create scenarios for how the changes can be instituted.

·         Fifth - Look closely at the solution itself. How will this change affect company's mission? Careers?

·         Last - Are there issues in the organization that infringe on the implementation of these changes?

·         Social Judgment skills

§  Capacity to understand people and social systems.

§  Working with others to solve problems and marshal support to implement changes. Similar to Katz' views, but delineated into the following:

·         Perspective taking

·         Understand the attitudes others have towards a particular problem.

·         This is empathy applied to the problem solving. Being sensitive to other people perspective and goals.

·         Another tem for this is "Social Intelligence"

·         Social Perceptiveness

·         Having insight into how others within the organization function.

·         What is important to others? What motivates them?

·         A leader with this skills has a keen sense of how employees will respond to any proposed change.

·         Reacting to others with flexibility. This is the ability to change one's behavior in light of an understanding of others perspectives in the organization.

·         Being open and non dogmatic

·         Social Performance

·         Includes a wide set of skills.

·         Leaders should effectively be able to communicate their own vision to others.

·         Skills of persuasion are essential.

·         Function as mediators.

·         Knowledge

§  Refers to the accumulation of knowledge and the mental structures used to organize information. This is called Schema (summary, diagrammatic representation or outline)

§  Organized information (schemata) become more meaningful than the bits that comprises it.

§  Knowledgeable people are called "experts" and can process complex information of the intricacies of a particular field.

2.     Individual attributes

·         General cognitive ability

§  Simply said, this is a person's intelligence (fluid intelligence) which includes perceptual processing, information processing, general reasoning, creative and divergent thinking capabilities, and memory skills.

§  This is linked to Biology and not to experience.

·         Crystallized cognitive ability

§  Learned and acquired intellectual ability through experience.

§  Grows continuously and does not fall off win adulthood.

·         Motivation

§  Model suggests three types of motivation.

a.       Leaders must be willing and motivated to tackle complex organizational problems. A person must be willing to lead.

b.      Leaders must be willing to express dominance.

c.       Leaders must be committed to the social good of the organization.

·         Personality

§  A wide range of traits that can influence leadership such as Openness, tolerance for ambiguity, and curiosity.

§  Skills model theorizes that a leaders' personality characteristics helps people cope with complex organizational situations.

3.     Leadership outcomes

These outcomes are strongly influenced by leader's competencies. When leaders exhibit these competencies, they increase the chance of problem solving and overall performance.

·         Effective Problem Solving

§ This is the keystone in the skills approach.

§ In voles creating solutions that are logical, effective, and unique.

·         Performance

§ This refers to how well a leader did their job.

§ Standards external criteria are used to measure good performance such as merit increases, recognitions, etc.

4.     Career experiences

§ Career experience have an effect on a leader's ability to solve problems.

§ Research conducted by Mumford, Harding et al. in 2000 suggests that leaders can be helped by

·         Challenging job assignments.

·         Mentoring.

·         Appropriate training.

·         Hands-on experience.

§ Career experiences can also positively affect an individual characteristics (enhance intellectual capabilities or motivation)

§ Leaders learn and develop higher levels of conceptual capacity if the kinds of problems they confront are progressively more complex.

§ According to this theory, leaders can develop and are not "born leaders"

5.     Environmental Influences

§ Represent factors outside the leaders' competencies, characteristics, and experiences.

§ Examples include lacking technology, aging factory, subordinates skills, etc.

How does the skills approach work?

The skills approach is descriptive, describing leadership from a skills perspective. It provides structure for effective leadership.

The 3 skills approach suggests the importance of certain leadership skills depending on where the leader are in the hierarchy.

Mumford and colleagues provide a similar but more complex picture of skills needed for effective leadership. The model contends that leadership outcomes are the direct results of a leader's competencies in problem solving, social judgment, and knowledge. Each contain a large repertoire of abilities. Environmental influences and career experiences play a direct or indirect role in leadership performance.

The skills approach provides a map for how to reach effective leadership in organizations.

Strengths

·         It is a leader centric model that stresses on the development of some skills. It conceptualize and creates a structure of the process.

·         It is intuitively appealing. It makes leadership available to everyone.

·         It incorporates an expansive view of leadership that incorporates a wide variety of components such as problem solving, knowledge, social skills, etc.

·         It capture the intricacies involved in leadership because it has many variables.

·         Provides a structure that is consistent with the curricula of most leadership education programs.

Weakness

·         The breadths of the approach extend beyond the boundaries of the leadership (such as motivation, personality, critical thinking, etc.) This makes it more general and less precise.

·         It has a weak predictive value. It does not explain how variations can affect performance.

·         It claims NOT to be a trait model, but major components of the model include trait-like attributes like personality variables.

·         It may not be suitably or appropriately applied to other contexts. The model was constructed by using a large sample from the military. Can it be generalized?

The approach is relatively new and has not been widely used in applied leadership settings. Despite the lack of training on the skills approach, the scores allow individuals to lean about areas they can seek training in. 

Leadership Instrument

There are many questionnaires to assess individual's skills. They provide a useful self-help, but they are not used in research because they have not been tested for reliability and validity. A typical questionnaire is the "Skills Inventory".