CHAPTER VI They must be able to discern the needs and desires of group members.
The
LEARNING TO LEAD
By Dr. Eduardo A. Morato, Jr. from his book, Self Mastery (2008)
There is considerable debate on whether leaders are born or made. For
those who argue that leaders are born, they cite the qualities and traits of
leaders that have to do with their personality and character. Some of these traits
seem to be innate, like a person’s charismatic appeal or ability to assert one’s
self and make other people follow in crisis. They say that these cannot be
learned in school. For those who argue that leaders are made, they believe that
a person’s personal circumstances, experiences and lessons in life are
responsible for eliciting leadership qualities and traits. If this is so, then these
circumstances, experiences and lessons in life can be re-created to evoke “acts
of leadership.” If done often enough, these acts can become habitual and lead to
character transformation.
What differentiates leaders from followers is easy enough to describe.
Leaders are outstanding individuals who have the ability to elicit the respect,
loyalty, support and commitment of people. Leadership is not merely about
gathering followers, because people in positions of authority can command
their subordinates to obey. Leaders are heralded because they have higher
levels of competency in a particular field of human endeavor (e.g. leaders in
sports, academic institutions, scientific societies). Leaders can also be hailed if
they possess higher levels of moral ascendancy and legitimacy. For certain
constituencies, these are quite important. Finally, followers praise leaders who
are altruistic and self-sacrificing rather than self-centered to ensure that the
greater good of the group is attained.
The competencies expected of leaders vary depending on the human
endeavor. For large organizations and corporations, scientific or research
institutions, academic bodies, skills-based groups and technology-oriented
teams, leaders are expected to possess technical expertise or a superior level of
proficiency about a particular knowledge domain. Large and complex
constituencies also demand higher competency in organizational development
and management from their leaders. Leaders must be able to strategize and
operationlize for the entire organization and not just for a section or a division.
For leaders of communities or constituencies composed of contending
stakeholders, political, social and behavioral competencies are required to
balance the power equation among the different interest groups. If the equation
cannot be balanced, the leader must be able to effectively communicate that his
chosen strategy or policy would be the better option for all parties concerned.
For leaders of informal groups, they must have a high level of people
skills. They should know the issues and temperament of their group members.
ability to assert one’s self with great confidence, the ability to activate and
motivate the members and the ability to manage ruffled feelings and
disenchanted followers are critical competencies for this type of leader.
Formal organizations that have institutionalized their organizational
processes in electing or appointing their leaders would insist that their leaders
have legitimacy. The organization would be scrutinizing the qualifications of
candidates when making their choice. They would be asking for proof of the
leader’s ability to discharge the expected functions of the position. The proof
must come from both past performance and manifested potentials.
Moral ascendancy is demanded of certain leaders. The followers would
be asking whether or not the leader has gone beyond the normal and expected
contribution to the organization compared to others. Do they deserve the
leadership more than others because they have shown greater commitment,
they have exerted greater effort and they have gone beyond the call of duty? Do
the leaders live the values and principles deemed important by the group?
Some organizations, especially those whose members are not duty-
bound to follow the leader, expect the leader to be other-people-centered.
Associations, cooperatives and communities function best when their leaders
clearly manifest altruistic traits. The members want to be assured that they are
not being manipulated by their leader for his own ends. The altruism is
necessary to command respect, allegiance and commitment.
A. LEADERS VERSUS MANAGERS
There are people who attain positions of authority and are expected to
perform certain functions. Doing the functions of the position well is what I call
managership. To address the managerial needs of organizations, there are,
currently, countless businesses, government agencies and non-profit entities
who aim to produce such managers. However, in many surveys and interviews
with institutional recruiters of managers, they are particularly interested in
hiring people who will not be mere managers but, potentially, leaders. In a US
survey (contracted by a university) of 8,000 corporations, who were asked what
they are looking for in MBA graduates, their top four answers were: (1)
Leadership; (2) Character and Personality, (3) People Skills; and (4) Strategic
Management. The managerial functions of Marketing, Finance, Operations and
others were deemed much lower in importance. A similar finding was obtained
when the Asian Institute of Management conducted a survey of large Philippine
corporations. The corporations acknowledge that the top MBA schools can
produce good managers but they are not quite sure whether they can produce
good leaders. Therefore, in their battery of tests and interviews, they are
searching for that leadership quality because they are investing in and paying
high salaries for people who will, eventually, be leading their organizations. It is
important, therefore, to distinguish between leaders and ordinary managers.
1. Managers run things well. They make sure that the people assigned to
them are excellent workers and accomplish their tasks better than
most. They are superior Operators.
Leaders redefine their industry and change their business environment.
They introduce new products, processes and systems. They create new
markets. They are great Innovators.
2. Managers are good Motivators. They are able to bring the performance
levels of their people to new heights.
Leaders go beyond performance achievements. They inspire people to
become leaders themselves. They are Transformers of people since
their impact can be seen not only in the accomplishment of tasks but in
the inner growth of their people.
3. Managers confront and engage their present environment and plan for
the near future. They are Short-term Strategists and Tacticians.
Leaders see far beyond the present and near future. They can intuit
into the long term and divine how events will flow into the far future.
They are Visionaries and Long-term Strategists.
4. Managers are Stationary Pillars of Strength. People adapt to them.
They are the reference points of the organization.
Leaders are Dynamic Wheels of Fortune. They adapt to evolving
environments by changing their positioning and their way of doing
things. They set moving targets and constantly keep abreast of the
situation. They are flexible, fluid and free.
5. Managers are Output-oriented. They work hard in order to deliver the
desired results and performance outcomes.
Leaders are Value-driven. Beyond the desired results and performance
outcomes, they inculcate long lasting values that anchor the entire
organization. They do not just do well, they do good. Society admires
them not just for their victories but, more so, for their enduring
legacies.
6. Managers are astute Organizational Designers and Developers. They
know how to build, structure and move organizations. They know what
will make organizations function and what will not.
Leaders are compassionate Nurturers of Organizational Culture.
Beyond the design and development of organizations, they espouse
ideologies, offer philosophies and establish guiding principles. They
humanize the organization by giving each member due attention and
recognition. They create a team by emphasizing participation,
involvement, interaction and communion.
7. Managers go for Efficiency, Economy and Effectiveness. Being efficient
means maximizing outputs given certain inputs. Being economical
means maximizing economic benefits given certain economic costs.
Being effective means maximizing results given certain efforts and
resources.
Leaders strive for Empathy, Enthusiasm and Enlightenment. The
empathetic leader is sensitive to and totally aware of people. The
empathetic leader has a high degree of social skills. He can relate to
one and all. The leader electrifies the organization by generating a lot
of enthusiasm among his people. He arouses passion and zeal in
everyone. The leader seeks true enlightenment by being able to detach
himself from petty issues and by being responsive to the real issues
that matter. He has the ability to see the truth and do away with
pretentiousness and false prophets.
B. THE FORMATION OF LEADERS
If leaders can be made, then the formation of leaders must start at a
very early stage of person’s development. Educators in basic education and
parents have their work cut out of them. Later on in life, the task of leadership
formation is passed on colleges or universities and to entrepreneurs and
corporate executives who hire managers with the potential to become leaders.
There are three suggestions for leader formators of organizational managers.
First, leader formators must themselves have the ability to lead. At the
very least they should be role models and wellsprings of inspiration. They must
possess high leadership skills such as the ability to sense people and situations,
the ability to listen, the ability to communicate and the ability to rally their
mentees to excel themselves in knowledge, skills and wisdom.
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 Second, leader formators must be willing to take on the added
responsibility of transforming each student or mentee into a leader. Leadership
formation demands personal attention, true caring and quality time beyond the
classroom. It is much easier to teach management subjects and merely focus on
imparting techniques such as problem solving, financial forecasting,
organizational restructuring, market demand analysis, production scheduling
and information processing.
Third, leader formators must not only have high IQs but have high
emotional quotient, high adversity quotient and high intuition, creativity and
integrative thinking capabilities. High IQ may be sufficient for teaching
management but the other intelligences of the brain are necessary for the
formation of leaders. Sensitivity to people, high tolerance for crises and
conflicts, an active beginner’s mind, insightfulness and a wholistic perspective
are but some of the job requirements for leader formators.
If educators, entrepreneurs and corporate executives want to be
formators of leaders and innovators, they must act as mentors and role models
with full willingness and full dedication. They must aspire to be the new
messiahs of this highly globalized, academically specialized and technologically
advanced millennium. While most schools and corporations rush to learn the
complexities of cyber management, educators, entrepreneurs and corporate
executives must remain steadfast in their resolve to form leaders who will
disentangle these complexities and strike at the essence of what is important,
what is relevant and what will be responsive to the future in order to shape that
future.
There are three sterling qualities of the leader. These are inspirational
leadership, transformational leadership and adaptive leadership. These
constitute the Leadership Trilogy. This conceptual framework and learning
schema can be used for the formation of leaders.
Inspirational
Leadership
The
Leadership
Trilogy
Transformational Adaptive
Leadership Leadership
1. Inspirational Leadership
The Inspirational Leader is a person of vision who establishes the raison d’
etre of the organization. The inspirational leader is able to visualize and
weave dreams; listen to the people and rally them towards a common
cause; act as role model or value exemplar; and, serve the best interest of
his/her constituency. The Inspirational Leader has four major traits.
a. The Inspirational Leader as Visionary and Weaver of Dreams
The inspirational leader has a grasp of the whole and can see the
relevance of today in terms of tomorrow’s grand dream. The
inspirational leader first creates in his/her mind a powerful vision to
drive all of his/her energies.
Learning to lead means that the leader must be focused on the future.
The leader must be able to conjure many possible directions and
choose the one most beneficial to the interests of the organization. The
leader’s role is to chart the unknown, yet, make the best decision about
that unknown. While there are countless opportunities for growth and
development, the leader must be able to determine the best
opportunity that would lead to the vision. In the process, the leader
must be able to weigh all the risks and calculate which ones are worth
taking in order to achieve a better future.
b. The Inspirational Leader as Missionary
The vision of the inspirational leader is well articulated into a mission
statement, which is the purpose for being of an organization. The
mission serves as the focal point of the organization. The inspirational
leader is even willing to suffer significant consequences to achieve this
mission. But the potential gains outweigh the calculated costs.
The leader should have a compelling purpose that would rally the
entire organization into concerted action. The purpose must be the
driving factor that unites everybody in the organization in the face of
opportunities and obstacles presented by the organizational vision.
From the mission statement, the leader must be able to extract
commitments from the individual members and work units of the
organization. These commitments define what the members will give
of themselves in order to achieve the purpose.
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 c. The Inspirational Leader as Role Model and Value Formator
In order to establish the leader’s credibility, he must learn how to
master himself by living the role of a model leader. The inspirational
leader is a formator of values and nourisher of the organizational
culture.
The leader should represent the ideals and principles of the
organization, not so much by monitoring them in others but by living
them himself on a day to day basis. Being a virtuous leader is as
important, or even more so, than being a competent leader. For many
followers, their foremost concern is whether the leader would be just,
fair and trustworthy to and for all of them. At the very least, they
expect their leader to be a good steward of the organizational resources
and a good cultivator of values which the organization ought to live by.
The leader sets the moral tone and should be the primary exemplar of
the organization’s culture or way of thinking, feeling and doing things.
d. The Inspirational Leader as Servant
The inspirational leader subsumes his personal agenda to the higher
good of the whole organization. He must learn to be humble in the
service of leadership.
The leader should put the welfare of the people and the objectives of
the organization first. In order to do this, the leader must not act like a
master that commands with absolute authority. As the doctrine goes,
absolute power absolutely corrupts. Servant leaders introduce
mechanisms within the organization to elicit greater people
participation, provide checks and balances that prevent the abuse of
power, install processes that promote transparency, and
institutionalize performance measures that guarantee service above all
else.
2. Transformational Leadership
Transformational Leadership focuses on the leader as change master at
two levels. The first and higher level is entrepreneurial change
mastery, which zeroes in on the leader as a keen preceptor of the
situation (past, present and future) and as the total strategic innovator.
The leader is thoroughly familiar with, actually dictates and then
breaks the rules of the game. He transforms weaknesses into strengths.
The leader fires up the spirit of the organization to seek new heights of
performance. The leader discovers countless opportunities because he
masters the situation extremely well. The leader is the “defender of the
faith” as well as the iconoclast.
a. The Transformational Leader as Scholar, Senser and Seer
There are three stages in the first level of Transformational Leadership.
The first stage looks at the leader as Scholar, Senser and Seer. The
leader hones his skills in a scholarly manner with the use of critical and
systems thinking. Critical thinking sharpens the leader’s mind by
developing his ability to remove the chaff from the grain and pierce to
the essence of things by isolating the most crucial variables that
significantly determine desired outcomes. Systems thinking allows the
leader to connect, interconnect and disconnect all the ingredients in a
complex situation. The first stage also develops the leader’s ability to
“sense” the mood of the organization, the temper of the market and the
flow of events. Using both the scholar’s and senser’s ability, the leader
is then able to “see” what the future may hold, and what opportunities
are the most attractive to seize. The leader is able to accurately forecast
or predict what will happen to the industry, how consumers will act
and react, when is the best timing for investments and how to move
forward with the least effort.
b. The Transformational Leader as Warrior King and
Philosopher King
From the first stage, the leader is better able to assume the second
stage role of the leader as Warrior King and as Philosopher King.
This is essentially the leader as Strategist and Strategy Implementor
(Warrior King) and the leader as Articulator and Embodiment of
Corporate Culture, Values, Principles and Beliefs (Philosopher King).
The Warrior King knows how to do battle by deploying resources well,
gaining the competitive edge, quelling internal squabbles and finessing
enemies with great flourish. The Philosopher King exhudes diplomacy,
stands by virtuous principles and timeless tenets, teaches his subjects
well, wins with wit and wisdom and acts the statesman in every way.
c. The Transformational Leader as Magician and Entrepreneur
The third stage happens when the leader goes a step further and
becomes a creative innovator of new products, new services and new
ways of doing things. This is the leader as Magician and
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 Entrepreneur. The leader becomes the magician who creates a world
of constant change, constant conflict, constant improvement and
constant enlightenment. The leader may use illusion (promises of a
great tomorrow), sleight of hand (faster, better way of doing things) or
contraptions (technology) to perform his or her magic. Idea generation
and innovation is the strength of the magician. The leader is the
entrepreneur who is able to deliver his promises on the strength of
innovative interventions that enlarge the top line, reduce the middle
line and increase the bottom line (profits and surpluses) of the
organization. The entrepreneurial leader goes beyond “magical
creation” by ensuring that there is “grounded viable implementation.”
Successful innovation and acceptance by the market or beneficiaries is
the hallmark of the entrepreneur.
d. The Transformational Leader as Maestro and Mentor
The second or ground level of Transformational Leadership is
managerial change mastery, which brings the leader down to the brass
tacks of operational transformation. Essentially, this is the leader as
Maestro and as Mentor. The maestro is the master craftsman who has
a very high level of process skills. The maestro knows the tools of the
trade. He has a step-by-step, systematic and methodical approach to
problem solving, opportunity seeking and performance improvement.
He makes good judgments and almost always attains organizational
goals. He conducts the full philharmonic orchestra of the corporation.
As maestro, the leader synchronizes plans, organizes everybody toward
the goal, directs all the troops to move in one direction, controls all
movements to ensure unity of action and budgets resources to obtain
the best results. The mentor is quite keen in people skills. This has to
do with reading people accurately, eliciting the most from them and
guiding them to peak performance. It is a nurturing, caring role that
coaxes people out of their shells to reach their full potentials.
3. Adaptive Leadership
The adaptive leader is able to fit his leadership style with the situation
at hand. To achieve this, the adaptive leader must have high self-
awareness and self-mastery. This means being totally in control of the
self in order to strongly affect and influence others. This also means
that the adaptive leader must have high emotional quotient and a
compelling personality that gains respect and followership. The
adaptive leader can motivate individuals, teams and entire
organizations through adaptive behavior within the context of
organizational dynamics.
There are four basic traits of the adaptive leader.
a. Self-Adaptation
Self-adaptation means being fully self-aware of who you are, what your
talents are, what your values and aspirations are, what your goals in life
are, and what gives you meaning and a true sense of fulfillment. You
have self-mastery when you have total self-adaptation. The adaptive
leader can always place the self in the context of others. The adaptive
leader can fully harness his/her potentials to do good and do well at the
same time. There are three ways to gain deeper self-mastery or better
self-adaptation.
a. Developing your inner self – able to fathom the truth about
your whole being as the progressively enlightened self
b. Developing your higher self – possesses a deeper level of
spirituality and clearer view of one’s role in uplifting society
c. Developing your selfless self – willing to sacrifice the self and
embrace personal costs for the greater good of others
b. Situational Adaptation
The adaptive leader has a wide repertoire of management styles to
govern by. The adaptive leader knows what strategies will work or will
not work as situations change. The adaptive leader is sensitive and
flexible, and totally responsive to his or her constituencies. The six
generic styles of the adaptive leader, according to Daniel Goleman who
wrote Leadership that Gets Results, include the coercive, authoritative,
affiliative, democratic, pacesetting and coaching styles. These styles
seem to work best or worst given certain situations. On the whole,
according to Goleman’s research, the authoritative style along with
affiliative, democratic and coaching styles have positive impacts while
the coercive and presetting have negative impacts.
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Six Leadership
Works Best
Styles
Coercive During emergencies /
crises
When dealing with very
difficult employees for shock
treatment
Authoritative To cajole and persuade
towards higher version
When enthusiastic /
charismatic leader uses it
When leader is clearly
superior to others
For empowerment
When business is going
adrift
Affiliation For unity and harmony
When eliciting loyalty
For communication and
feedback
For relationship building
To repair broken trust
Democratic When consensus needed
When it is very difficult to
solve issues
When buy-in needed
To set group goals
Pacesetting For highly capable staff
When technology is
changing fast
Coaching When personal
development and growth
desired
When personal
commitment wanted
c. Personality Adaptation
Works Worst
About 1500 years ago, the Sufi scholars were said to have developed
During most other
the Enneagram or nine personality profiles. The Enneagram is being
situations
When dealing with used today in the Master in Entrepreneurship course of the Asian
Institute of Management (AIM) to profile successful entrepreneurs. AIM
highly intelligent,
found out that most of them (90%) tend to be dominant in one or a
egalitarian society
combination of three personality types. If entrepreneurs can be
considered leaders in their own right, then three character traits stand
If leader is too
out. They have very high need and proclivity for:
overbearing or too
pushy
a. Achievement – strong motivation to succeed and high aversion
When timing is not
to failure
yet right given the
b. Adventure – wants to experiment on new things and takes
prevailing mood
pleasure in being very much “of the world”
c. Assertion – uses authority and power easily, tends to dominate
and exercise leadership frequently
The adaptive leader must be able to develop a personality that strives
When mediocrity
to achieve, seek great adventures and assert the self to gain
results because too
ascendancy. The adaptive leader must likewise know how to interact
much praise is given
with the six other personality types and place them in positions where
When leader allows
their temperament is most suited. (The nine personality types are: (1)
poor performance
the perfectionists; (2) the helper; (3) the achiever; (4) the romantic; (5)
the observer; (6) the questioner; (7) the adventurer; (8) the asserter;
When hard decisions
and (9) the peacemaker.)
must be made
During crises
d. People Adaptation
The adaptive leader has very high social awareness and social skills
When overwhelming that allow him to interact with and secure great rapport with people.
to others People adaptation involves good listening, communicating and relating
When no feedback skills as well as sensitivity to the nuances of behavior, culture and
given societal mores. The adaptive leader has a high adversity threshold,
If organization is not meaning that he or she can convert conflicts into creative solutions and
so smart and talented manage adversarial positions with great equanimity. Having a high
When mass emotional intelligence is an important quality of the leader. All the
mobilization is needed lessons of learning to feel and learning to communicate enable the
When resistance to leader to adopt well to people.
change is high