This is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University with Talking Management for The Globe and Mail. Today I am delighted to sit down with Jennifer Chatman from UC Berkeley.
Jennifer, what is your latest thinking about leadership and where it is going?
CHATMAN - Well there are a couple of key things that we know about excellent leaders. One is that great leaders are focused on situations and they are adaptable across situations.
In other words, they look at a situation and ask, "How can I add value in this situation?" Once you start doing that, a second criterion is that leaders have a very large behavioural repertoire. In other words, they are able to adapt to situations and really add value.
Third, what this means is that leaders are great diagnosticians, meaning that they look at situations and are actually able to a assess what is going on and what is missing.
So with these attributes, I would say that the best leaders are very deliberate about leadership. They don't just let things happen and let things roll, they actually plan for interactions and plan for their messages to employees in a very deliberate way.
MOORE – So it takes a fair bit of self-awareness of your strengths and weaknesses, of when you are effective, and what that particular context requires and bringing those together.
CHATMAN - It's interesting that you hit on self-awareness because that really is a core elements of leadership effectiveness.
In fact, a student of mine is undertaking her dissertation on self-awareness right now and what she is finding is that leaders who are less self-aware are much more likely to derail, in other words to not achieve their potential because of a lack of self-awareness.