Developing Leaders

‘Leadership = using your personal power to win the hearts & minds of others in order to achieve a common purpose’

David Gilbert-Smith, former SAS officer and winner of an MC for gallantry in Korea.

We think of leaders in terms of what they are, what they know and what they do.

What leaders are is about personality and character; what leaders know is about professional knowledge and competence as well as the knowledge of themselves and their people. What leaders do is about how they use the team to achieve results. That basically involves three things:

1. Making decisions and setting the context in which others make decisions.

2. Communicating.

3. Building and sustaining the culture.

Developing leaders is about providing a framework around which to understand and make sense of leadership as we experience, observe it and practice it and then using that framework to treat leadership like any other skill. We practice it, and with feedback, reflection and persistence we get better.