Levels Of Leadership

There are plenty of literature available about leadership. It has been sliced, diced and analysed by hundreds of professionals. Of course several thousands of books have been written about it from the tamil thirukural and the Chinese art of war to latest books on amazon.com


Here is my personal take at it...


Technical Leadership
This is perhaps the first level of leadership. At this level, you are leader in the chosen task. It does not depend on others. It is usually you and the mastery of your tools. A painter and his painting, a programmer and his design/code, a architect and his floor plan, a soldier and his shooting skills, a sprinter and his speed. Such mastery can be gained by practice and does not influence anyone else. Such influence if any is either inspiration by competition or accidental.


People Leadership

At this level of leadership, you are able to influence a set of people by your communication skills and personality. People follow you because they see you do things. Your influence is limited to people you interact with. Ideas are propagated by touch. Most "grass roots" leaders operate in this mode. They inherently understand human feelings and are able to respond positively to emotions. They are able to "connect" with other human beings. This helps them achieve goals that require a team to put their energies together.


Operational Leadership

At this level of leadership, you take up a bigger task that requires you to manage the interplay of different stake holders for the task. This requires you to be able to setup systems that organize themselves, optimize the functions, identify friction points and smoothen them out. The team you build works like a well oiled machine. You strike the balance between finance team wanting efficiency, your engineering team wanting freedom, your QA team wanting Quality, your customer teams wanting timeliness and so on. Your goals are multi fold and working on one will affect the other. Striking the balance is essentially a function of the job. At this leadership level, the one needs to be multi-skilled and you are expected to be operational in different domains.

Strategic Leadership

At a strategic leadership level, you set directions for the team and not worry about how it is achieved. As army general would direct his armies, these leaders will direct the operation, set goals. The task is to find "what" to do rather than "how" to do. Strategic leadership is like setting the course of a ship. Without which the ship floats whichever way the current is. A strategic leader creates a vision for the organization. And his vision sets the goal for people whom he may never met or talked or influenced. He operates at a influenced by thought level.

Are these levels incremental?

The skills required for each level of leadership is different and hence a leader who is good at one need not necessarily succeed at the next level. The person who is good at operational leadership level need not necessarily be strategic thinker or great people leader. However organizations are committed to making leadership sequential are doing great injustice both to the individual as well as to the organization.

These are different skills like decathlon athlete would tell you, different stages of games require different training and skills.

Perhaps one aspect of these that increases sequentially in number of people these leaders influence. However, that does not necessarily mean that the leadership translates to hierarchy. A strategy consultant providing consultancy to an operational leader like a minister to a king perhaps is case in point. An operational leader providing support for a people manager in his decision making is also conceivable. A technical leader taking the help of his people leader to get things done is also not a unthinkable idea.

It would be amazing to see a leader who is good at all these skills. However, it is perhaps possible to see people with 2 of these leadership skills, the rarer breed is 3.

This isn't natural progression.
Leaders who find themselves unable to perform at the next level tend to hang on to their comfort zones. a strategy question will be answered operationally. A operational decision will be influenced by people issues. A people issue will be resolved technically.

Will write more on this topic later...