TITLE : IMPROVING LEADERSHIP PERFORMANCE: A PRACTICAL NEW APPROACH TO LEADERSHIP.

Preface

This book represents a new departure in the study of leadership. We believe that leadership is like most other human activities. The skilful person tends to perform better than an unskilful one. Yet the concept of skill is virtually unused in leadership theory. Early theorists took the view that it was the individual's personality which determined the degree of leadership success. When relatively little progress was made with this approach, theorists turned to the idea that it was what leaders did-their leadership style-rather than what they were, which determined their success. Thus we now have a vast and confusing vocabulary of terms describing the way leaders behave, such as autocratic, democratic, authoritarian, employee-oriented, person-oriented, task-oriented, to mention only a few of the more common ones. However, the question of leadership skill is rarely, if ever, mentioned. Theorists are very concerned with what style or approach leaders should apply in different situations, but not with how well they apply them. This we believe is one of the major limitations of modern leadership theory. In this book we have attempted to overcome this limitation by describing both a framework for the analysis of the interpersonal skills of leadership and methods for their training and development.

Our aim is to help managers to develop the interpersonal skills needed to fulfll their leadership role effectively. We have no desire to develop a grand theory of leadership. To use an analogy, we would regard ourselves as tool developers rather than theory builders. We would rather supply managers with a set of behavioural tools from which they can select the one most appropriate to handle a particular leadership situation, than develop a grand theory which explains everything but has few real practical implications. Unfortunately, much of modern leadership theory seems to fall into the latter category.

We have taken a different approach to the study of leadership partly because our original interest was interpersonal skills training rather than leadership itself. Our interest in leadership grew out of what has come to be known as the 'Bradford Approach' to interviewing training. This was initially developed by Gerry Randell and his colleagues in the context of performance appraisal interviews. * However, it was later extended by ourselves and others into such areas as grievance, disciplinary and audit interviewing.

The more we extended this work, the more it appeared to us that our basic approach-regarding the effective handling of relationships between people in terms of precisely defined interpersonal skills-was not limited to any one particular type of interaction. That is, although we were ostensively training people to carry out a particular kind of interview, we were in fact training people in skills which had much wider managerial applications. In particular, it seemed we were training people in skills which would be useful in virtually any interaction between manager and subordinates. Rather to our surprise, therefore, we came to the conclusion that, implicitly, we were training people in leadership skills.

We were aware, of course, that interpersonal skills training had been successfully applied in such areas as counselling, encounter groups and mental health, and developments in such areas had been a major source of influence in our approach to managerial problems. Indeed, we have occasionally received informal feedback from our course members that the training had also had beneficial effects on their personal and social lives. Nevertheless, there was, as far as we know, neither a fully developed practical nor theoretical framework for the application of an interpersonal skills approach to leadership theory and training. This book is our attempt to develop such a framework.

One other consequence of arriving at the study of leadership through interpersonal skills training is a belief in learning through practice with feedback and guidance. Simply reading a book may provide knowledge, but actual performance is unlikely to improve to any great extent until the reader has tried something out in practice, received feedback on what has been achieved and guidance on how to do better next time. In training in interpersonal skills, we have typically used interview role plays for this purpose. Obviously we cannot do this for individual readers. What we have done, however, is to include exercises which will enable readers to practise many of the skills discussed and check their answers against the 'model' answers in the appendices. In the fmal section of the book, we also describe both a formal training course in interpersonal skills and a number of ways in which individual readers can practise their interpersonal skills and obtain feedback and guidance for themselves.