Business Tips Alexander Pepper says that leaders can be made
In this business tv show, Alexander Pepper, Partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers tells us that leadership can be taught, and in doing so, many leaders are made:
“I’m sure that honing you leadership skills can have an impact on your business. I also believe very passionately that there’s a lot of leadership skills can be taught so some leaders are born but an awful lot of leaders are made and have helped to make themselves by learning the tools of leadership. I think that’s very clear, that’s common ground. I think what’s much more difficult is to decide what good leadership is and there are as many opinions about that as there are people available to offer opinions.
There’s this concept a situation or leadership which is that what good leadership in one context is is bad leadership in another context and that’s probably right. I mean I can think of a story about a guy who leads a professional services firm, a successful organisation that was taken into a merger. The merger was difficult as mergers often are; he would be adjudged to have made a number of mistakes along the way and was eventually, you know he was kind of forced to leave. Went on to a different organisation, a company that had done a lot of acquisitions but hadn’t really imilated the stuff that had been done, needed to get back to its core business, needed a tough leader who was prepared to make some difficult decisions and do a lot of cost cutting. Same man did a fantastic job and is now hero in that organisation for having saved it. So that is probably an answer if situational leadership, the right skills in the right place is works the wrong skills in the right place doesn’t work. Or the right skills in the wrong place depending on which way you look at it.
I think a great leader is somebody who has situational awareness, contextual awareness, either is able to flex their style to the context or knows their style so well that they recognise when the time comes that its for them to move on somewhere else and find somewhere where the context is a better fit for them, for the kind of skills that they’ve got, you know having said that there are one or two key things that you will find in any business leader, effective senior business leader.
Communication skills are extremely important, you know the President Reagan story is that he was a great communicator and an average president but a combination of the two was actually pretty effective. So communication skills are vitally important in business leadership today and you can learn communication skills, you can, anybody can be taught to get up to a certain level. Maybe they won’t be a charismatic communicator but you can still be taught to be effective. That’s one thing.
The concept of strategic intelligence that actually senior business leaders are people that have a part of their brain that is tuned in such a way that they have strategic insights. They’re not just tacticians sort of stuck down in the hurly burly but they’re able to stand back, have a view of the future, have a view of what’s going on in the market and bring some strategic intelligence to bear. That’s probably a common characteristic you find about the place but when you get onto the personal characteristics it’s more difficult. You will find great leaders who are very autocratic and have a strong sort of narcissistic streak, you will find other great leaders who are very humble and have a very faceless streak and very democratic in the way that they do things and I think it’s very situational.
One thing will work well in one company; one thing will work well in another company.”
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Duration : 0:4:59
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