Why managers, like former BP boss Tony Hayward, really need excellent leadership skills.

July 29, 2010 - PRLog -- In today's global business environment - characterised by instant communication and intense competitive pressure, good, effective leaders are increasingly characterised as being enablers -  helping people and organisations to perform and develop. This implies that the leader has to achieve a sophisticated alignment between people's needs and the aims of the organisation.

The traditional concept of a manager being the directing chief at the top of the hierarchy, concerned with process and procedures, is nowadays a very incomplete picture of what makes for an effective leader.

Today, good leadership is more about the attitudes and behaviours especially regarding interpersonal relationships or emotional intelligence (EQ).

Leadership is centrally concerned with people. Leadership also involves decisions and actions relating to all sorts of other organisational processes, but it's special because of its unique responsibility for people. Leadership can only be said to be operating when other people or followers are involved. You cannot be a leader and work 'on your own'.

“This is the message that people like Tony Hayward, former boss of troubled BP, failed to learn,” says Geraldine Kilbride, Business Psychologist who lectures and coaches on effective leadership. “His training was in engineering. He is a typical process and procedures man, and was seen by everyone as a safe pair of hands, when his predecessor, Lord Brown made the fatal mistake of not coming-clean about his personal life in the witness box. But what ifhe failed to apply, when he finally got to the top of his organisation, is that leadership is less about process and all about vision, communication and inspiration.”

Many functions in life, like engineering, are a matter of acquiring skills and knowledge, and then applying them in a reliable way. In fact, we have many terms for different kinds of management such as, marketing management, human resource management, logistics management, quality management and project management - amongst others. This implies that management is about small pieces of the action, limited, discrete functions or processes, that we can learn and become good at.

Leadership is quite different. Good leadership demands emotional strength and behavioural characteristics which can draw deeply on a leader's mental and spiritual reserves.  Tony Hayward illustrates this perfectly. He will always be known as the person who “wanted to get his life back” when the stresses and strains of coping with a seemingly never-ending catastrophe proved too much for him.

Leadership is about the bigger picture, it is about direction setting and aligning the goals and values of the organisation with the goals and values of the employees working in that organisation and communicating and interpreting the vision for the outside world. Done properly, it is a ceaseless activity, with no time off for good behaviour.

“ Good leaders typically have a keen understanding of relationships within quite large and complex systems and networks”, states Geraldine, “ they are capable of driving forward towards their goal, working around obstacles placed in their way, but above all,  they have a unique ability to communicate and to bring people with them.”

Of course, managers and leaders need to be able to make tough decisions when required, but most importantly both should concentrate on enabling the team to thrive, which is actually a "serving role" and not the task-driven role commonly associated with management. In the coming months, it will be interesting to see if  Bob Dudley decides to lead people or to manage process as he settles at the helm of BP.


For an informative interview and more information effective leadership, call Geraldine Kilbride
on 077 26214338. www.crucialskills4leaders.com: geraldine@crucialskills4leaders.com

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