You Need More Than Leadership Skills
I’ve focused a lot on my writings on various leadership models and frameworks: The Six Domains of Leadership™ (SDL), Situational Leadership, Tuckman’s Group Development. See “Situational Leadership and the Six Domains of Leadership” for just one example. And I’ve been reading on a relatively new one from Patrick Lencioni’s company, Working Genius. And there are many more out there.
All of these are extremely helpful to improve your leadership skills. So you would be permitted to think that focusing only on improving your leadership skills would be enough. However, this would be incorrect. As corroborated by a recent experience, leadership skills are not enough to ensure success.
In our leadership development organization we took our own survey (some say “eat your own dogfood” although I prefer “drink your own champagne”). While I’ve been coaching with this model for over 10 years, as I analyzed my own results I noticed that one of my values, results orientation, seemed to be, at best, buried in the model. It was not explicit yet leaders are judged by their organizations most often by results. Results is not the only metric, but it is a significant one. A leader can be viewed as an excellent leader in any model. If they don’t deliver results, they are at best fighting an uphill battle. At worse, they are out the door.
