A Different Way of Looking at the Leadership Environment

What does the New Wiring/Plumbing Look Like?

Bob Molenda, Likes to go from nothing to something

5 min readMay 31, 2024

Article 8 in a Series

By Two Guys From Stillwater, Minnesota

John Buettner and Bob Molenda

What does the New Wiring/Plumbing Look Like?

Let’s summarize where we are now: We looked at historical and present Leadership Criteria and put them into one of two broad categories. We know that the Criteria did not change over many centuries and they still work. We know that other external things have changed and cause problems. How do we handle these external changes? We added new criteria to accommodate the external issues in the Leadership/Followership environment. We emphasize Mission Orientation and the value of Followership and Teamwork in the present virtual environment.

We know that Missions need to be defined and communicated in order to be successfully completed and that teams of followers will be used to accomplish the mission at hand. Leaders are needed to keep followers inspired, focused, rewarded, communicated, understood, nurtured, towards accomplishing the Mission at hand under the changed environment that we are all experiencing. So, Leaders deal with both Mission and Follower attributes.

One way to look at this is that we are using information about leaders that others have documented for the past 2,574 years. The contributors are people like Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, Machiavelli, recent surveys and The United States Marine Corps. What we are trying to say is that we want to correctly attribute credit for all the work on leadership that has been done in the past. We do not want to omit others who have also made contributions to this topic, but if we did omit anything, we want everyone to know that the omission is not intentional. The good news is that a lot is going on in the field of Leadership.

This is the chart of Leadership Value. This is where we are at this time with this article.

It shows the separation of the Leadership Criteria into Left (Tan color) (Leadership Characteristics, Habits) and Right (Blue color), Leadership Mission-Oriented Characteristics.

We organized these Criteria (Leadership Traits, Characteristics and Virtues) into two broad categories that are related to either The Mission and/or the Personal Leadership Characteristics.

Total Leadership Value on the Chart is some combination of Leadership Characteristics and Leadership Mission-Oriented Criteria.

There is a total of 81of these Criteria. In addition to the two ‘buckets’ that we put them in, we divided each of the buckets into four titles so that it makes even more sense.

On the Leadership Characteristics Bucket are the titles: Intra-Personal; Justice; Loyalty; Inter-Personal.

On the Mission Oriented Characteristics Bucket are the titles: Dependability; Endurance; Judgment; Decisiveness.

We took things apart with our screwdrivers and wire cutters. This model is rewired and includes some new components to deal with the external changes. Can you find the new components? Look for the “*”!

Think of the 81 criteria as solar collectors, wired into panels, then into batteries, then inverters, finally providing power for the Enterprise itself.

When we look at the chart, it looks like the Domain Model mentioned in one of our earlier articles. Remember that one ? It was the Leadership Competency Model that went from Intra-Personal to Inter-Personal to Business to Leadership qualities, representing a transition from innate and environmental-driven characteristics to increasingly more teachable characteristics for leaders.

Can you see where the recent external changes have been added to the two buckets? Can you see where the COVID crisis has changed things, or the high speed of computers and networks have come into play? Here is a good one! Can you see where AI will affect Leadership in the future? How about LLMS (Large Language Model Systems)? In addition to this we are already living in a far more connected world than ever before, making it more of an accessible neighborhood for everyone. Did you ever think a chart might tell such a story?

Let’s not forget that we set out to make some kind of ‘tool’ that anyone could use to select, elect, choose, follow, dismiss or recommend a leader in today’s world. This is why we wanted to get to where we are with the above chart. We’re not quite there yet because we have to measure the relative difference between the importance of the Leadership Characteristics and the Mission-Oriented Characteristics. We need your help to do this.

The big question is, “What is more important, The Mission-Oriented Characteristics of the Leader or The Personal Leadership Characteristics in working with Followers?”

That is what the chart is all about. Which of those two categories is most important, in your opinion? It does not matter if you are a follower, a leader or a stakeholder. Leadership affects us all!

When you are on a mission and you are the leader, alone in the dark with no communications or orders from anyone else, what do you use for guidelines? How important is the mission to the team and leadership if ethics, honesty, integrity or loyalty are compromised? When you are in a position to select a leader, what is most important to you? Is it the Personal Character of the Leader or is Completion of the Mission at any cost? Are followers obligated to do something unethical to complete a mission?

You must be thinking that all of these Leadership Characteristics are important. Even a great leader could not be that perfect to excel in all these characteristics. Then again, the mission and the followers might dictate which of the characteristics are more important at any given time. How can we use this to select a good leader for a mission? When we think about it, a good leader would need to have talents and skill sets within both categories of characteristics. Is this why leaders get the big bucks? Other sources(Found in Article 4) show survey results on the importance of individual competencies of leaders. We ask an even more basic question related to the two categories at the bottom of the diagram.

We have arrived at the Leadership Value Chart, separated Leadership Characteristics into two ‘buckets’ and are wondering which one of the two ‘buckets’ is most important in your opinion.