Picture yourself as the captain on a wide-bodied trans-continental Airbus, ferrying 350 people on their dream holiday.
For the duration of that flight, you are responsible for the lives and wellbeing of all those people. The skills that you need to fly that aircraft safely, and discharge your responsibility to those people, are many. The passengers boarded the aircraft in the full confidence that you have those skills and that you have built up so many hours practicing them that you are now an expert.
Is leadership in business really any different?
A leader needs a wide range of specific skills and our staff expect us to have them. The consequences of failure are perhaps less dramatic, but as a leader in business, we have the lives and wellbeing of our staff in our hands, as well as the success of the business.
Back to our airline analogy; how did our captain acquire the skills needed to fly that Airbus? Had he/she attended a standard flying course, full of lots of theory but quite light on practical, and then been told to “have a go”?
Imagine being a passenger on that plane. No, the airline industry does not run generic flying training and then expect its pilots to see, through a process of trial-and-error, which bits they can use. They recognise that skills need to be developed in a progressive way, starting with the foundation skills needed to fly a small single engine aircraft, and once these have been mastered, they move on to twin engines and so on.
Unfortunately, many businesses pride themselves on providing leadership training, but all too often it is a “one size fits all” approach. They offer generic leadership training, which fails to recognise that different skills are needed at different stages of a leader’s development.
In the 1970’s Walt Mahler and his colleagues identified the different skills, focus etc that different levels of leadership require, and suggested that there are specific leadership “crossroads” between each level, much the same as the transition that a pilot would undergo moving from a single engine to twin engine aircraft, and so on up the scale.
Leadership development can therefore be looked upon as a sequence of steps that a leader would need to “climb” in order to progress to the next level. There are 5 standard leader levels and therefore 4 transitions to make. The standard transitions are:
We have suggested that the skills and focus needed at the different levels of leadership are different, so what are those differences?
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