Hi. Welcome back to corporate and organizational leadership. What we're going to do now is we're going to look at an overview of Northouse, Northouse chapter three, which explains the skills approach to understanding leadership. Now what we're going to do is we're going to look at two versions of the skills approach. We're going to look at an older, simple, three skill approach developed by Katz in the 1950s and then we're going to look at a more modern skills model that corresponds really well to how we tend to think about leadership development that was developed by Mumford in about the year 2000 now let's look at an overview of this skills approach, both models included. First of all, this perspective on leadership is, once again, just like the trait theories, leader centered. That means we're looking at the leader. We're not saying that leadership belongs to the group. It's we're not looking at the followers too much, we're looking at the leader and focusing on what the leader's responsibility is, how the leader become develops a leadership. And so we're focusing on the leader now, unlike the trait approach is an there's an emphasis on skills that can be learned and developed, and so that's different. The trait approach kind of seemed like, yeah, we've got these traits now we, as Christians, said we can develop those and moved by the power of the Holy Spirit in certain directions. But this approach to leadership assumes that everybody has the potential to develop their skills to some degree. Now the what would we? What would we? How could we define leadership skills? We could use it as the ability to use one's knowledge and competencies to accomplish a set of goals and objectives. So it's like using what we have, whether that's our knowledge, our experience, our beliefs, our values, our abilities that have been developed, we use those to accomplish a set of goals and objectives, which include getting other people to work towards the objectives also. Now let's look at the first model, called the three basic administrative skills developed by Katz in the 1950 and in this approach, you can see there's three columns here, three different sets of skills. There's technical skills, and this is easiest to understand, maybe in a manufacturing context, when you're manufacturing something, I used to for a while, I worked in manufacturing in aerospace, you need some technical skills to actually put together these satellites or spaceships or airplanes, whatever we're putting together that might include soldering skills. It might mean welding skills. There's all kinds of skills that are needed to actually manufacture something. Another set of skills have to do with human skills, and that's how to deal with other humans, that you can coordinate your efforts, that you can get done what you want to get done so that you work together rather than against each other. And then there's conceptual skills that include problem solving, dealing with abstract ideas and figuring out what needs to be done next. Now in Katz's three basic administrative skills model. Each level of management needs to have a different set of skills. So down here at the bottom, the supervisory, these are the people that are actually leading, people who are manufacturing the supervisory management needs to have good technical skills. They need to know what the technicians, the workers, need to be doing, so they can show them, so they can teach them, so they can model them, so they can fix problems that go on. They need to have good human skills that they can get everybody to work together. But in terms of conceptual skills, the big picture of what's happening, that's not a high priority now middle management, they need, they still need all the technical skills, and they still need human skills, but they need more conceptual skills to be able to coordinate all the activities that are going on that are led by their the supervisory managers below them. Now the top management, this is where it's kind of interesting and also debatable. They need less technical skills. They don't need how to solder. They need good human skills, and they need good conceptual skills to coordinate all of the efforts. Now this model works really good in the manufacturing context and. A service oriented or a software oriented company. This idea that technical skills are not always necessary for top management might be a bit more debatable, but it's a it's a good approach, and that it shows that that different skills are needed in different contexts. Now let's move on to a more modern approach. And this is Mumford's skill model, and it was developed in the 1990s and one of his most cited papers was done in 2000 and the goal of this model is to identify the factors that maximize a leader's performance, especially problem solving. Kind of Mumford was really concerned about what, what can leaders do to solve problems? What? What causes good problem solving? So, so his research is focused a lot on problem solving. That seems to be, from his perspective, the main thing that that leaders need to do. Now, unlike the trait model, which emphasizes what traits are necessary in leaders,Mumford's model emphasizes the capability, capabilities that make effective leadership possible, rather than what leaders do. We're not looking at habitual behaviors traits, but we're looking at their capabilities or capacities. So we say this is a capability model. And in a capability model that assumes that you can develop your capabilities, and that means that a lot of people have potential for leadership. Some people already have the capabilities. Other people need to develop those capabilities, but they have what's necessary to advance their leadership abilities. Now let's look at the skills model in two steps. First we're going to do is just in this slide, we see the first three components of the skills model. We're going to make it a little bit more complicated, but let's get the first three components down right of way. We start off with individual attributes, and this is kind of similar to traits, but it's a little bit more broad. People have their general cognitive ability. That's basically how smart they are, how well they can deal with abstract ideas, there's crystallized cognitive ability, and that is how much stuff you know. Generally, if you're high in cognitive ability, you can learn stuff that's that's one. ability, cognitive ability is, is the ability to learn. Some people will learn a lot of stuff. Some people won't learn a lot of stuff. So and we call crystallized cognitive abilities, basically the stuff that that you learn and that stays in your tool chest, this, this general cognitive ability sometimes that's called fluid cognitive ability, the idea that you can take any set of any, any information, any set of data, and you can analyze it and figure out what to do from there. That's why we call it fluid versus crystallized. So crystallized cognitive abilities, basically the background information that you know we've got motivation which describes the desire to lead to get things done. Some people are high, some people are low. It depends. We have different motivations to do different things, and then we've got personality. And like in the trait model, everybody has different traits, so we start off with these and the individual attributes that we have will influence the competencies that we will develop. We can develop problem solving skills. We can develop a social judgment skills. We can gain knowledge in all of these areas, and the more competencies that we have, the more likely we will have positive leadership outcomes, and that is especially in this model, is effective problem solving, And that's the main way that Mumford measures of performance. So these are the first three components in the skills model. Nothing ground shaking here, but there's two other com two other components that we need to look at. So here's all five components we have still have the individual attributes help develop competencies which lead to positive leadership outcome. But down here below, we've got some things that influence all of these components. First of all, we've got career experiences, the idea that the more experience you have, hopefully the more competent that you will be in that field. So our career experiences, they interact with our attributes, and they lead to various competencies. So if you've got whatever general cognitive ability you have, plus your experience, that will give you some problem solving skills. Same thing with the crystallized cognitive ability, your motivation, your personality, the different experiences that you have enable you to develop social judgment skills, your knowledge, which again increase the likelihood of positive leadership outcomes. And so there's the experiences that you have in your job, and that's that's typically why organizations ask for a year's experience, two years experience, five years experiences, because the idea is that that you learn through these experiences. But there's also environmental influences that affect that interact with your attributes and contribute to your competencies, which lead to leadership outcomes. And these environmental influences can be quite broad. They can be things like getting an education, working on a Master of Arts in management program. It can have to do with the economy. The economy, the national culture, is going to push make certain competencies even more valuable. It'll the skills that you have will be more desired. They'll give the the environment will enable you to either develop the strengths that you have or push you into new directions where you have to develop new strengths. And so this, this environmental influence is also a big factor in influencing our competencies. Now these skills approaches, they have a number of strengths and also a few weaknesses. I really like the skills approach. I think it's an excellent way of looking at leadership. And so one of the strengths of this, it describes leadership in terms of skills that makes leadership basically available to everyone. To some degree, everybody's got some potential, and if they develop it, they can use it now. It might not necessarily be in the way that we want to, especially with the environmental factors influencing what we what we do, it's it's good because it emphasizes the role of experience and environment, whereas the trait approach didn't do that. It was kind of like you got what you got that's going to determine how good of a leadership that you'll you'll be able to exert. And now, as an educator, something that I really like about this is that it provides a structure that's consistent with the intuitive appeal of leadership education programs. We we have this idea that greater education increases your capabilities. I certainly believe that if you've if you looked at my background or whatever, you might notice that I have a bunch of master's degrees. I I never planned to go into academia. I basically, it's like, Well, whenever I needed to master some subject to increase my capabilities, I got a got a master's degree and and I really believe that getting master's degrees like you're doing, like I've done the past, gives you a set of tools that makes you a lot more capable and to have greater influence in the situations and among the people that you're around. So in educational programs like ours here, we're thinking that you're going to develop your capabilities and that will enable you to make better decisions and be better leaders. Now there's a few weaknesses and criticisms concerning the skills approach. Also one is, is that skills approach is really pretty broad, and you can kind of apply it to all areas of life. So it's pretty general and less precise, and doesn't really tell you what to do in any specific situation or how to how to actually solve problems, just that you can increase your ability to to solve problems. So it's pretty broad, not very specific. Now I think because it's it is broad, it enabled us to to get the big picture of what we're trying to do in developing our leadership skills. But people that. Want specific things to do in specific circumstances, aren't going to be too excited about this approach. Another criticism is that even though it tries to move away from the trait approach, still the attributes that you start off with are pretty similar to traits. And so once again, traits become pretty important.

Last modified: Tuesday, October 7, 2025, 12:07 PM