Skill Approach

Chapter 3
 Trail Approach
 Personality characteristics (stable) —
not useful for training and development
for leadership
 Certain people were born with special
traits that made them great leaders.
 Trail are who leaders are (i.e., their
innate characteristics)
 Skill Approach
 Skills are what leaders can accomplish.
 A leader-centered perspective on
leadership.
 An emphasis on skills and abilities that can
be learned and developed.
 The skill approach suggests that
knowledge and abilities are needed for
effective leadership.
 Skill Approach
 1955—Robert Katz (Harvard Business
Review : Skills of an Effective
Administrator)
 Katz’s article appeared at a time when
researchers were trying to identify a
definitive set of leadership traits.
 Katz’s approach was an attempt to
transcend the trait problem by addressing
leadership as a set of developable skills.
Three-Skill Approach

 Katz suggested that effective

administration (i.e., leadership)
depends on three basic personal
skills: technical, human, and
conceptual skills.
 Technical Skill
 Technical skill is knowledge about and
proficiency in a specific type of work or
activity.
 It includes competencies in a specialized
area, analytical ability, and the ability to
use appropriate tools and techniques.
 Technical skill is most important at lower
and middle levels of management and
less important in upper management.
 Human Skill
 People skills.
 Human skill is knowledge about and ability
to work with people.
 Human skill allow a leader to assist group
members in working cooperatively as a
group to achieve common goals.
 Conceptual Skill
 Conceptual skills are abilities to work with
ideas and concepts.
 A leader with conceptual skills is
comfortable talking about the ideas that
shape an organization and the intricacies
involved.
 A leader with conceptual skills works
easily with abstractions and hypothetical
notions.
 Conceptual Skill

 Conceptual skills are central to creating a

vision and strategic plan for an
organization.
 Understanding what an organization
stands for and where it is or should be
going.
 Skill Approach

 Technical Skills—deal with things.

 Human Skills—deal with people.
 Conceptual skills—the ability to work with
ideas.
 Skill Approach

 It is important for leaders to have all three

skills, but depending on where they are in
the management structure, some skills are
more important than others.
 Skill Model
 1990—Mumford and his colleagues (a
leader’s effectiveness depends on the
leader’s ability to solve complex
organizational problems).
 Leadership capabilities can be developed
through education and experience.
 The skills approach suggests that many
people have the potential for leadership.
 Skill Model

 Mumford’s group’s skill-based model has

five components: competencies, individual
attributes, leadership outcomes, career
experiences, and environmental influence
 Skill Model

 The skills approach frames leadership as

the capabilities (knowledge and skills) that
make effective leadership possible.
Competencies

 Problem-Solving Skills
 Social Judgment Skills
 Knowledge
 Problem-Solving Skills
 Problem-solving skills are a leader’s
creative ability to solve new and unusual,
ill-defined organizational problems.
 The skills included being able to define
significant problems, gather problem
information, formulate new understandings
about the problem, and generate
prototype plans for problem solutions.
 Social Judgment Skills

 Socail judgment skills are similar to Katz’s

(1955) early work on the role of human skill
s in management.
 Social judgment skills are the capacity to u
nderstand people and social systems.
 Social Judgment Skills
 They enable leaders to work with others to
solve problems and to marshal support to
implement change within an organization.
 Social judgment skills are the people skills
that are necessary to solve unique
organizational problems.
Social Judgment Skills

 Perspective taking
 Social perceptiveness
 Behavioral flexibility
 Social performance
 Perspective Taking
 Perspective taking means understanding
the attitudes that others have toward a
particular problem or solution.
 Perspective taking means being sensitive
to other people’s perspectives and goals—
being able to understand their point of view
on different issues.
 Social intelligence
 Social Perceptiveness
 Social perceptiveness is insight and
awareness into how others in the
organization function.
 A leader with social perceptiveness has a
keen sense of how employees will
respond to any proposed change in the
organization.
Social Perceptiveness

 What is important to others? What

motivates them? What problems do
they face, and how do they react to
change?
 Behavior Flexibility
 Behavioral flexibility is the capacity to
change and adapt one’s behavior in light
of an understanding of others’
perspectives in the organization.
 Being flexible means one is not locked into
a singular approach to a problem—
maintains an openness and willingness to
change .
 Social Performance

 Social performance includes many related

skills that may come under the umbrella of
communication (persuasion, mediator,
coach).
 Social Judgment Skills
 Social judgment skills are about being
sensitive to how your ideas fit in with
others.
 Can you understand others and their
unique needs and motivations? Are you
flexible, and can you adapt your own ideas
to others? Can you work with others even
when there are resistance and conflict?
 Knowledge
 Knowledge directly influences a leader’s
capacity to define complex organizational
problems and to attempt to solve them.
 Knowledge is the accumulation of
information and the mental structures
used to organize that information.
 Knowledge
 Leaders with knowledge know much about
the tasks, people, organization, and all the
different ways these elements are related
to each other.
 It is knowledge and expertise that make it
possible for people to think about complex
system issues and identify possible
strategies for appropriate change.
Individual Attributes

 General Cognitive Ability

 Crystallized Cognitive Ability
 Motivation
General Cognitive Ability

 General cognitive ability can be

thought of as a person’s intelligence.
 Crystallized Cognitive Ability

 Crystallized cognitive ability is intellectual

ability that is learned or acquired over time
(this type of intelligence is not diminished as
people get older).
 It is the store of knowledge we get through
experience (e.g., problem-solving skill,
conceptual ability, and social judgment
skills).
 Motivation

 Three aspects of motivation

(willingness, dominance, and social
good) prepare people to become
leaders.
 Personality

 This attribute reminds us that our

personality has an impact on the
development of our leadership skills.
Leadership Outcomes

 Effective Problem Solving

 Performance
Effective Problem Solving
 Problem solving is the keystone in the
skills approach.
 In the model, problem-solving skills, as
competencies, lead to effective problem
solving as a leadership outcome.
 Good problem solving involves creating
solutions that are logical, effective, and
unique and that go beyond given
information.
 Performance

 Performance outcomes reflect how

well the leader has done her or his job.
 Performance is the degree to which a
leader has successfully performed the
duties to which he or she has been
assigned.
 Career Experiences

 Career experience helps leaders to

improve their skills and knowledge over
time.
 Leaders can develop their abilities through
experience, according to the skill model.
 Environmental Influences

 Environmental influences are a part of the

skills model but not usually under the
control of the leader (e.g., the skill levels
of subordinated, high-sped technology).
 Skill Model
 The model is characterized as a capability
model because it examines the
relationship between a leader’s knowledge
and skills (i.e., capabilities) and the
leader’s performance.
 Leadership capabilities can be developed
over time through education and
experience.
 Skill Model

 The skill approach suggests that many

people have the potential for leadership.
 The skill approach frames leadership as
the capabilities (knowledge and skills)
that make effective leadership possible.
Summary of the Skills Model

 At the heart of the model are three

competencies: problem-solving skills,
social judgment skills, and knowledge.
 Through job experience and training,
leaders can become better problem
solvers and more effective leaders.
Summary of the Skills Model

 These three competencies are the central

determinants of effective problem solving
and performance, although individual
attributes, career experience, and
environmental influences all have an
impact on leader competencies.
 How does the skills approach
work?
 The skills approach is primarily descriptive:
It describes leadership from a skills
perspective.
 Rather than providing prescriptions for
success in leadership , the skills approach
provides a structure for understanding the
nature of effective leadership.
 How does the skills approach
work?

 The three-skill approach of Katz suggests

that the importance of certain leadership
skills varies depending on where leaders
are in a management hierarchy.
 How does the skills approach
work?
 Katz:
 Lower levels of management— technical and
human skills are most important.
 Middle levels of management—technical,
human, and conceptual skills.
 The upper management levels— conceptual
and human skills.
 How does the skills approach
work?
 Mumford and colleagues:
 1. The skill model contends that leadership
outcomes are the direct result of a leader’s c
ompetencies in problem-solving skills, social
judgment skills, and knowledge.
 How does the skills approach
work?
 Mumford and colleagues:
 2. the model illustrates how individual attribu
tes such as general cognitive ability, crystalli
zed cognitive ability, motivation, and person
ality influence the leader’s competencies.
 How does the skills approach
work?
 Mumford and colleagues:
 3. the model describes how career experien
ces and environmental influences play a dire
ct or indirect role in leadership performance.
 How does the skills approach
work?
 The skills approach works by providing a
map for how to reach effective leadership in
an organization: Leaders need to have
problem-solving skills, social judgment skills,
and knowledge.
 How does the skills approach
work?
 Workers can improve their capabilities in
these areas through training and
experience.
 Although each leader’s personal attributes
affect his or her skills, it is the leader’s skills
themselves that are most important in
addressing organizational problems.
 Strengths

 1. A leader-centered model that stresses

the importance of developing particular
leadership skills.
 To conceptualize and create a structure
of the process of leadership around
skills.
 Strengths

 The early research—highlighted the

importance of skills and value of skills
across different management levels.
 The later work placed learned skills at
the center of effective leadership
performance at all management levels.
 Strengths

 2. To describe leadership in terms of

skills makes leadership available to
everyone (people can learn or develop).
 3. The skills approach provides an
expansive view of leadership that
incorporates a wide variety of
component.
 Strengths

 4. the skills approach provides a

structure that is very consistent with the
curricula of most leadership education
programs.
 Criticisms
 1. the breadth of the skills approach
seems to extend beyond the boundaries
of leadership (e.g., motivation, critical
thinking, personality, conflict resolution,
cognitive and crystallized cognitive ability)
—more general and less precise in
explaining leadership performance.
 Criticisms
 2. The skills model is weak in predictive
value.
 The model can be faulted because it does
not explain how skills lead to effective
leadership performance.
 Criticisms
 3. the skills approach can be criticized for
claiming not to be a trait model when in fa
ct a major component in the model includ
es individual attributes, which are traitlike
(e.g., cognitive abilities, motivation, and p
ersonality variables).
 Criticisms
 4. the skills approach may not be suitably
or appropriately applied to other contexts
of leadership.
 The skills model was constructed by
using a large sample of military personnel
and observing their performance in the
armed services.
 Application

 Because the skills approach is a new

theoretical formulation, it has not been
widely used in applied leadership settings.
 The approach provides a way to delineate
the skills of the leader, and leaders at all
levels in an organization can use it.
 Application

 This approach helps us to identify our

strengths and weaknesses in regard to
these technical, human, and conceptual
skills.
 From a wider perspective, the skills
approach may be used in the future as a
template for the design of extensive
leadership development programs.
 Application

 This approach provides the evidence

for teaching leaders the important
aspects of listening, creative problem
solving, conflict resolution skills, and
much more.
 Summary

 The skills approach is a leader-centered

perspective that emphasizes the
competences of leaders.
 Katz: three-skill approach (technical,
human, and conceptual).
 Summary

 Mumford and his colleagues: skills model

of leadership—five components of effecti
ve leader performance (competencies, in
dividual attributes, leadership outcomes,
career experiences, and environmental in
fluences).
 Summary

 Strengths—
 1. a leader-centered model (the
important of the leader’s abilities).
 2. it available to everyone (we all can
learn to develop and improve).
 Summary
 Strengths—
 3. it provides a map (explain how
effective leadership performance can be
achieved).
 4. it provides a structure for leadership
education and development programs.
 Summary
 Criticisms—
 1. the breadth of the model seems to
extend beyond the boundaries of
leadership.
 2. the skill model is weak in predictive
value (it does not explain how a person’s
competencies lead to effective leadership
performance).
 Summary
 Criticisms—
 3. the skills model claim not to be a trait
approach, but individual traits such as
cognitive abilities, motivation, and
personality play a large role in the model.
 4. the skills model is weak in general
application because it was constructed
using only data from military personnel.