hello everybody. Welcome back, and today, we will be discussing the skills approach, and this is a little bit different from the traits approach. But remember these, all these early Leadership Theories are very similar. So before we get into the material today. Let's do what we always do, and let's open in a word of prayer so Dear Heavenly Father, thank you so much for the opportunity to come together again this week, Lord. Thank you for how you bless us each and every day. Thank you for helping us to see another week and to be here and Lord, I pray that as we talk about the skills approach that, you know, my prayer every week is that we would find a way to apply this material in a way that would be pleasing for you, Lord. And I pray that that that anything that any distraction, anything that's going on in in our classmates lives here that you will remove those distractions, that you will help them to be at peace during their study time and during their time to work on the class, that you will help them to be able to listen and have this information and be able To use it in powerful ways. For you, in Jesus name, I pray Amen. All right, so as I said, today, we're going to be talking about the skills approach to leadership, and we will be, you know, we're going to define what that is. We're going to explain how this approach can be used. We're going to discuss the strengths and the weaknesses of it, and then we're finally, we're going to apply it to your own leadership position. So skills approach that is very leader centered. So the trait approach was leader centered as well. And if you thought about it, we didn't really talk about the follower, in the in in that we only talked about the leader. And that's the same thing. That's the same thing with this one. So in the skills approach, there's a it's focused on the skills and abilities that can be learned and developed, as opposed to the things you were born with. So remember, the trait approach was very much like, Hey, you're tall enough, you're attractive enough, you're in smart enough to be a leader. This approach is, hey, you know, there's different attributes that you have. There's this gentleman, his name was Katz, and he came up with this really cool approach, and he talked about, and I'm going to bring up his chart, he's going to he talked about three skills that you need one sec. Give me a second to bring up the image. This is not the one I want. This is the one I want. So in Katz's in Katz's world, let me switch my screen, turn on my picture. All right, there you all are in Katz's world. You needed conceptual skills. We'll talk about what that is. You need the human skills, and then you need a technical skills. And then for each level, you can see here, each level, a level, you needed different skills. So in Katz's world, when, when you need high technical skills, then, then you you start out in the organization at a lower level. So your lower level manager, maybe your team lead or your supervisor, Team supervisor would need high technical skills, meaning they would have to really understand the ins and outs of whatever you're doing. So when I worked for the government, I started out needing very, very high technical skills. So I was the subject matter expert. Even as I moved into a leadership position, I was still known as the technical expert. So somebody would come to me, and they would ask me very technical questions about the systems that we operate in. So I needed a lot of technical skills, but what I needed less of was conceptual skills, and that's the ability to see that big picture, right? And but I still needed them, but it but it was very, very small, and then human skills were kind of in the middle, and I needed a lot of those. So you can see here from this chart that technical skills I needed the most of human skills, I needed a lot of and then I barely needed any little conceptual skills. If I moved into middle management, those needs would change a little bit where. I would need a lot of the technical skills, but a little bit less human skills were about the same, but I needed a lot more conceptual skills. And then if I would have become at that organization, if I would have become the person in charge, I would have needed no technical skills, or very, very, very little, just a very little bit, but mainly, I needed human skills and conceptual skills. And you can actually see this play out quite a bit. And where you can see this play out quite a bit is in in organizations with CEOs, right? Just because you were the CEO of fast food restaurant doesn't mean that you are fast food chain, then doesn't mean that you can't become the CEO of IBM, right? You can. You can become the CEO of IBM, or if you're the CEO of IBM, you could go and be the CEO of Jersey Mike's, which sells subs, right? You can do that because you only need human skills, or mainly, you need human skills, and you need conceptual skills. So one of the things I remember is that those skills, what one can accomplish, are independent from those traits that you are born with, right? So leadership skills are you can use these knowledge and these competencies to accomplish goals. So let's talk about technical skills. What are technical skills? And that's proficiency in a specific work field. So, you know, in the military, for me, it was a specific system, and this system was highly complex, and I had to have knowledge of this system. In in my current job, well, one of my jobs, but in my current job with a RV travel company, I need to have highly technical skills when it comes to parks and understanding different campgrounds and things like that. In another one of my jobs, I need to have a high skill set in education and understanding the different degree programs and things of that nature. So in those jobs, I need to have a lot of skills that are technical. I need to have analytic ability I need to be able to use appropriate tools and techniques. I need to understand the products that the company is going to design and and this, this skill set is when really, really, really important at the lower levels of the organization, and even as you get into the middle parts of the organization, human skills, on the other hand, are the ability to work with people. So, you know, technical skills, think of those as being able to work with things, and human skills are being able to work with people, right? So this is when a leader would need to know how to work with followers, need to work with peers, need to work with superiors, and those kind of things. So the ability to be able to work with those different entities is what human skills is. And if you think about it, Katz is really right, right? You need human skills at all levels. But certainly if you're a technical expert, you can go off in a corner and be a technical expert of pointing at something you can't see of a Mac computer. You can be a technical expert of a Mac or, you know, but human skills, really, if you're a leader, a formal leader, remember, we talked about formal and informal, but if you're a formal leader, you're gonna have to have human skills. You're gonna have to be able to work with people. You're also not to be able to assist people and working together. You know, we all have seen examples of where, you know, two people hadn't liked each other, Jim and Ron don't get along, or Sally and and Jim don't get along, or whatever. And we all have seen examples of that. So being able to have people work together is an important skill. In addition, you have to be able to adapt people's ideas. I mean, you're not only your own ideas, but other ideas, and kind of assimilate all that together, and that's part of it. And then you have to be able to set up an area of trust. So remember, these are all human skills, so trust is important, assisting people working effectively with different groups. And then finally, we get to conceptual skills. Conceptual skills is, remember, technical skills deal with things, human skills deal with people. And conceptual skills is abstract. That's like the stuff that's out out there somewhere, right? It's abstract. So you have to be able to talk about ideas that shape an organization and the intricacies involved, right? So you have to be able to talk about, you know, it with this, there's a lot of environmental scanning, and there's a lot of horizon scanning. So you have to be able to look at something. And say, You know what, five years from now, this is going to be big, or six years from now, this is what's going to be important. You have to be able to put more broad organizational goals into words. So you have to be able to explain what is the purpose of the organization, what is the vision of the organization. What are those things? You have to understand the economic principles, or economic principles, depending on how you want to say it, and how they affect people, right? And then you have to be able to create a vision and a strategic plan for the organization. So it's really interesting. So we are going through a strategic planning exercise at one of the places I work right now. And in that strategic planning exercise we have somebody who I would call middle management trying to run the organization and have the whole organization have the same conceptual skill set that this person thinks he has, and so this whole conceptual framework he's trying to push down on everybody in the organization, not recognizing that conceptual skills aren't needed throughout the whole organization. They're only needed by people at the top right and the people at the bottom need to have those technical skills and be able to execute those orders. Remember that that conceptual skills are typically they're most important at the high level of the organization. So high level managers that have weak conceptual skills, they can generally steer the organization to ruin. And we see, we see that a lot. Certainly, I see that in my organization as well. So where did the skills model come about? So it started with a study of about 1800 US Army officers. So there's enlisted ranks in the military and there's officer ranks. This started with officers, and it went all the way from Second Lieutenant to Colonel, which may not mean anything to you, but I'll put it to you this way, to senior, not the senior senior senior, but to senior leaders all the way down to brand new, first in their position and some of the researchers, they asked questions that that were like, What accounts for why some leaders are good problem solvers and others are not. Why are some good at solving problems but others can't? What specific skills do high performing leaders exhibit? And then, how do these individual characteristics of the leader, career experiences, environmental influences those kind of things? How do they affect their job performance? And because of that, they were able to get a approach and a model. It's called the cape, a capability model of leadership, where the knowledge and skills, the capabilities, remember, those technical skills and the leaders performance and what was important, and that's what led them to come up with these different approaches. So the person that's big in this. His name is Mumford there. I think there's a band also by the name of Mumford, but, but this is Mumford the researcher, and they have a skills based model that has five components, and those are competencies, individual attributes, career experiences, environmental influence and leadership outcomes. So individual attributes include two types of cognitive ability, motivation and personal personality. So there's general cognitive ability, and that's a person's intelligence. So that could be perceptual processing, information processing, general reasoning skills, kind of those things, memory skills, those are general cognitive abilities. So sometimes you're going to hear the term somebody's in a cognitive decline, right? That means maybe their memory is not working so well, maybe their their ability for general reasoning is not working so well. Maybe their recall is bad, you know, whatever. So, you know, I would say for myself that I've certainly, as I've gotten older, have noticed a general cognitive decline in certain areas with memory and things like that. This, well, we'll not talk about that. There's also, in addition to general there's crystallized cognitive ability, and that's your intellectual ability, so that's acquired over time, that's learned through experience, that grows over the lifetime, and it does not fall off in adulthood. So you're not going to hear your crystallized cognitive ability is declining, just your general so that includes the comprehension of complex information, the acquisition of new skills and information, and your written and oral communication. Additionally, there's motivation, right? And motivation is important, and that's it's an essential quality of developing leadership skills. There's willingness, dominance and. Social good. So willingness, which is part of motivation, is the ability and desire to take on complex problems. So if you don't have to, yeah, like when I worked at big defense contractor, one of the things is there's people that just want to sit in their cue ball day and solve these problems, and that's all they want to do. And that's okay. And I'll never forget my manager saying that to me, they don't want anything more. They just want to sit in a cubicle collect their paycheck and whatever. And if you know, when we're talking about this skills approach, if you don't have the willingness, then then you're certainly not going to you're not going to succeed. Dominance is again, this goes back to our last lecture, and it's the exertion of influence over others. So remember, the influence component, and it's social good is, are you trying to advance the overall human good and the value of the organization? Some people aren't interested in that. Again, they just want to take their paycheck and go home, which is fine, right? And a personality and those impact the development of leadership skills, right? In what you know, some people are seen as a very positive person with a good personality. Others aren't seen in those light, and that certainly impacts what their technical skills are, in addition to individual attributes, there's also competencies that are necessary for the skills approach, and there's problem solving skills. So what is your ability to solve new and unusual problems, ill defined organizational problems? And there's all these problem solving skills. We're not going to go over all nine of them, but there's nine key problem solving skills, which you can read about in the textbook. But think about this new and unusual or ill defined organizational problems. So say somebody came to you and say, you know, we have a problem with with people not listening to their leader. Well, that's kind of a that's kind of a nebulous topic, right? Listening to their leader. Well, what does that mean? Well, can you define that? Is it only in certain situations, is all the time, so, so, you know, there's some people that really have an appetite for solving those problems, and there's some that are not. Another competency that's important is social judgment and social skill. Oh, on problem solving. Let me also say that's developing Right, right? So you may not have very good problem solving skills when you first start an organization, but you develop those skills over time, and it takes some time to develop those skills, so that's something to consider as well social judgment and social skills. So another classes of leadership skills that social judgment is the capacity to understand people and social systems. So Mumford said that in order to do this, you have to be able to perceive what's going on socially. You need to have some flexibility in your behavior. You need to have some perspective taking, and then you need to be able to understand social performance. So I don't want to go I think most of those are kind of self explanatory, explanatory? Like you got to understand what a person values. You know, perspective taking is understand what others attitudes are, but social performance is a little bit different, and that one is you got to be able to communicate one's own vision to others, persuade people for change, meditation, mediation and conflict resolution are part of that, and then also coaching followers as they move toward organizational goals. So we'll talk a lot about coaching throughout this class. And I think there are some other classes that you can take that also talk about coaching. So, you know, I would encourage you to take those. Knowledge is highly important to this, and that's the accumulation of information schema. You'll hear that term sometimes, which is a representation or an outline of the structures, and then remember that that another important part of skills approach is career experience. So that's that's something that's really interesting. And I and I just noticed it. I'm just thinking about it now, but when I first started this lecture, or last lecture, first thing I did was I started a biography, and I told you I had some career experience that I would bring in, and I talked about my my knowledge database, and the kind of those things. And, you know, it's kind of taking a skills approach to to being a leader in wielding What's that one? Probably referential, right? Referential power. And, you know, I wasn't even intending to, but whereas some of our career experiences, and those career experiences matter in leadership, right? So if we've had challenging job assignments, we're going to understand the importance of problem solving if, if we were a leader of a large organization, we had 80 employees, or 100 employees or 5000 employees under us, we're going to understand the importance of training and mentoring and kind and coaching and those kind of things. Remember that, that as you climb the organizational ladder, your conceptual skills will improve. You know, it's funny. I heard a, it was a tongue in cheek, a satire kind of thing, but it actually has a lot of truth, and it's actually been proven in the research, where there's somebody who says you're only going to go to your highest failure point in an organization, meaning you're going to keep failing and failing and failing until your abilities mean you failed enough, and that's where you're stuck, which is really an interesting way to look at it. And I can't remember the researcher who said that, but I remember hearing a lecture on it not too long ago, and that's kind of a that's kind of a valid point, right? So I have failed to my highest level because, you know, I was in a level, and then I was good at it, and then I went to the next level, and, you know, I was good at it, good at it, but then I but then I reached a level that I'm at now where I've kind of failed to that level, and because I haven't promoted anymore, then that must mean that I'm a failure at my current level. I mean, it's kind of a weird way to look at it, but it kind of has some validity there, right when we talk about career experiences. So I'm developing these skill sets, but maybe I don't have the ability skill sets, and that's why I'm kind of at the level I'm at, anyway, just an interesting thought environmental influences we talked about this last lecture, where there's internal environmental influences, such as the technology that's used, the communication that's used. Then there's external environmental influences as well, such as economic, political and societal I remember that the covid 19 pandemic was an was an enormous external influence that affected all kinds of organizations and all kinds of leaders. Another skill that's really needed is effective problem solving. We talked a little about that as well, and then performance, and we talked about this as well, when I was talking about failing upwards, and that's the degree at which a leader has successfully performed the assigned duties. So what are the five components, leader performance, and then the three competencies, problem solving, social judgment and knowledge. These are all important attributes, including career experiences, environmental influences and individual attributes that all impact a leader's competence. So how does the skills approach work? So we talked about Katz's, where he said, you add, the higher you get in the organization, the more conceptual skills you need, and the lower you are, the more technical skills you need, right? So for low levels, technical and human skills are most important. For middle management, all three are important, and for upper level, conceptual and human skills are most important. And that's been supported by a variety of research. So what are some of the criticisms of this? You know, some of the skills approach seem to extend beyond what leadership is right. So some people say critical thinking and personality and conflict resolution aren't strictly leadership skills. That argument could be made either way. I think especially when we're talking about crises, which we will do a little bit later, also has weak predictive value. And what that means is that doesn't that means that not necessarily Can you predict that somebody will has the right skill mix to be successful in their organization. It's been tried. It has not succeeded yet. And remember that when we think about application, that this hasn't been wildly applied that there's not a formal program, you know, but there is ways to delineate the skill set of a leader. So the way I would use this approach as we wrap up is I would look at this and I would say, Okay, well, you know, conceptual skills are clearly really important as you move higher in your organization, and you want to be a CEO, so let's work really hard as your leader, as your supervisor, I'm going to work really hard with you to develop those conceptual skills. So let's let's start looking at spatial things. Let's start working on the mission and vision and values. Let's start doing these things. And let me do things to help you gain that skill set, or your human skills, or you've already arrived at the upper levels of the organization. So let's, let's look at ways to utilize your team effectively that have the technical skills that can get you the information you need. So those are some practical ways to apply this as a leader. And with that. We are done. We are wrapped up on our next module to see what we'll be talking about. We will be talking about behavior, the behavior approach. But before we do let's just talk about some things, skills approach. It helps us identify what strengths and weaknesses the skills approach works by providing a map that shows how a person can become an effective leader. We talked a little bit about that just now. Problem solving is a competency. Remember the word competency? Remember that in a skills model, crystallized cognitive ability? Remember that's the one that stays stagnant when we were talking about cognitive ability. It's, it's acquired over time. And then let's, let's talk about Katz. His he was the three skills model. And then just ask some some questions. Who developed servant leadership? It was not Katz. Remember that. Let's also remember that crystallized cognitive ability refers to one's innate intelligence. No, that's not correct either. Remember, this is intelligence that's acquired over time. So hopefully that helps you as you study and prepare for what's coming in the future. And I will see you back here to talk about the behavior approach. Have a great day.

Last modified: Tuesday, October 7, 2025, 12:03 PM