Chapter 3 Outline – Skills Approach
A. Description
1. Takes a leader-centered perspective on leadership.
2. Emphasis on skills and abilities that can be acquired and developed.
3. Three-Skill Approach
a. Leadership skills are the ability to use one’s knowledge and competencies to
accomplish a set of goals and objectives
b. Effective administration depends on three basic personal skills: technical, human,
and conceptual.
1. Technical Skill: Knowledge about and proficiency in a specific type of
work or activity.
2. Human Skill: Knowledge about and ability to work with people.
3. Conceptual Skill: Ability to work with ideas and concepts. Central to
creating a vision and strategic plan for an organization.
4. Summary: It’s important for leaders to have all three skills; depending
on where they are in the management structure, however, some skills are
more important than others.
4. Skills Model
a. Capability model because it examines the relationship between a leader’s
knowledge and skills and the leader’s performance.
b. Frames leadership as the capabilities (knowledge and skills) that make effective
leadership possible.
1. Competencies
a. Problem-solving skills: leader's creative ability to solve new and
unusual, ill-defined organizational problems.
b. Social judgment skills: understand people and social systems.
1. Perspective taking
2. Social perceptiveness
3. Behavioral flexibility
4. Social performance
c. Knowledge: inextricably related to the application and
implementation of problem-solving skills
2. Individual Attributes
a. General cognitive ability: a person’s intelligence
b. Crystallized cognitive ability: intellectual ability that’s learned or
acquired over time.
c. Motivation
1. Willing to tackle complex organizational problems.
2. Willing to express domination.
3. Committed to the social good of the organization.
d. Personality: any personality characteristic that helps people to cope
with complex organizational situations probably is related to leader
performance.
3. Leadership Outcomes
a. Effective problem solving: the keystone in the skills approach.
Creating solutions that are logical, effective, and unique, and that
go beyond given information.
b. Performance: Reflect how well the leader has done her or his job.
4. Career Experiences
a. Experiences acquired in the course of leaders’ careers influence
their knowledge and skills to solve complex problems.
b. Positively affect the individual characteristics of a leader.
c. Skills and knowledge of leaders are shaped by their career
experiences.
5. Environmental Influences
a. Factors that lie outside of a leader’s control
b. Internal: technology, facilities, communication, etc.
c. External: economic and political issues, natural disasters, etc.
B. How Does the Skills Approach Work?
1. It’s descriptive – describes leadership from a skills perspective.
2. Provides a structure for understanding the nature of effective leadership.
3. Three-skill approach suggests that the importance of certain leadership skills varies
depending on where leaders are in a management hierarchy:
a. Lower-level management: technical and human skills are most important.
b. Middle-level management: all three skills are important.
c. Top-level management: conceptual and human skills are crucial.
4. Leadership outcomes are the direct result of a leader’s competencies in problem-solving
skills, social judgment skills, and knowledge.
5. The leader’s skills themselves that are most important in addressing organizational
problems.
C. Strengths
1. A leader-centered model that stresses the importance of developing particular leadership
skills.
2. It is intuitively appealing.
3. Provides an expansive view of leadership that incorporates a wider variety of
components.
4. Provides a structure that is very consistent with the curricula of most leadership
programs.
D. Criticisms
1. The breadth of the skills approach seems to extend beyond the boundaries of leadership.
2. It is weak in predictive value.
3. It claims not to be a trait model when, in fact, a major component in the model includes
individual attributes, which are trait-like.
4. It may not be suitably or appropriately applied to other contexts of leadership.
E. Application
1. Provides a way to delineate the skills of a leader
2. It is applicable to leaders at all levels within the organization
3. The skills inventory can provide insights into the individual’s leadership competencies
4. Test scores allow leaders to learn about areas in which they may wish to seek further
training
F. Leadership Instrument
1. Many questionnaires assess an individual’s skills for leadership.
2. Surveys help people understand and improve their leadership style.
3. Provide specific information to people about their leadership skills.