Using MD
Mastering Leadership
Mastering leadership is a program of learning to understand and recognise your behaviours, and being able to distinguish between, and choose, mature and effective behaviours rather than immature and ineffective behaviours. By following this program, you will be able to perform in a more effective way and get your team and your organisation to a higher level.
Leadership and Organisations
Perhaps one of the most demanding positions in any organisation is that of leading from the top. Leadership really has very little to do with leading in the traditional sense (fear, coercion and intimidation) and everything to do with influencing others to behave constructively, productively and creatively, and for the most part, willingly.
If leaders are to be effective, they must be skilled in the management of social processes – that is the achievement of productive outcomes through social capabilities. The days of carrot and stick thinking are over. The leader’s role is to encourage personal and professional growth within their followers as well as ensuring that their needs are fulfilled. The more the leader invests in their employees, the more the organisation will reflect the talents and gifts of the employees as well as the attitude of the leader.
This is not a superficial process that can be simply solved by assuming people will understand the need and benefit of change. People perceive and respond to situations in quite different ways. The key to understanding these differences and mastering leadership is to understand the drives of the individuals and groups, and hence the most effective ways of influencing and motivating those people towards the organisation’s outcomes.
Drives and Values
Literature tells us that effective leaders must exhibit the values of trust, love, honesty, courage, respect for dignity and fairness. Values are not of themselves observable. What we do observe are behaviours, to which we apply global descriptors (values) like those above. The Management Drives framework allows us to describe those behaviours through their underlying drives. The values given above can be seen to be the positive aspects of the drives.
Leadership Capability
Management Drives enhances the managers’ self-knowledge, skills and attitude to lead and manage their own performance and the performance of others.
