Barry Conchie, Founder and President of Conchie Associates, and business partner Sarah Dalton, explain why the common discussion around what defines leadership has been "immature, inaccurate, and ineffective", and they lay out which 5 skills REALLY matter in leadership, based on wide-spanning research and data.Hear Barry and Sarah's full interview in Episode 469 of The Action Catalyst.
There are five talents that really matter. So when people ask the question, what is it about leadership and what do we need to know about leadership in a way that drives high levels of performance? The answer to that is the five talents. Now, the five talents, I'll just very quickly run through them. The first one is setting direction. So establishing a course, heading somewhere, right?
You need to be heading somewhere. The second thing is harnessing energy. And that means you're going to motivate people, you're going to motivate yourself. The third component is exerting pressure. Leaders need to change people's minds. And in our view, without the capacity to do that, your organization will really go nowhere.
Not everybody's going to agree with you, but you're still going to get there. The fourth element is improving connectivity. And that means organizations are associate as well as professional. It's about the connections between people. If your organization is supremely well connected, it predicts strategic agility. And if it isn't, you're going to get silos, trenches, and divisions.
You're going to get missteps, poor handoffs, and so on. The fifth element is controlling traffic. And controlling traffic is how you think about the way that you manage complex operation. And the controlling traffic that we describe in the book is like an air traffic controller. There were rigid rules that, my goodness, you've got to change on a dime in a heartbeat when things change.
Plane malfunction, angry passengers, a drunk pilot. I mean, whatever it is, you've got to be able to deal with it. So you've got very, very strict rules that guide certain parameters like how far planes have got to be apart, how fast they go, how quickly they descend, how you move them around the taxiway. Then everything after that is managing them to the rules. There's so much unpredictability.
You've got to be able to cope with that. So the five talents that really matter is our explanation of the critical elements that predict the top performing leaders. Now, not everybody is going to be good at all of them, but you need to be good at enough of them. And what the book does is describe that balance. Because I've got to tell you, there are some things I'm not good at.
Absolutely hopeless. Sarah, did you want to chime in on this? You've got a book of these things. And as I think about my career, Step B, I've learned to do more and more of less and less. So I'll let certain things go. And that's actually a really interesting model the book describes because we're not saying everybody has to do these five things.
We're saying these five things need to be taken care of. So you need to contribute some, but maybe the way you build your team fleshes out the rest. The way we've talked about leadership in the past is immature leadership. inaccurate and ineffective.
We've either said leadership is a million things and we've complicated it, or we've been even more silly and said it really only boils down to this one thing, like, I don't know, humility. Well, goodness me, that's just not true. So we deconstruct a lot of nonsense that's been written about leadership over the last 40 years or so.