Friday, April 1, 2011
SHL Competency Leadership
The SHL People Performance Global put out a corporate leadership model by Dave Bartram which identifies transformational and transactional themes into four categories of leader competency. These four competencies, or functions, of leadership are: 1 Developing the Vision, 2 Sharing the Goals, 3 Gaining Support, and 4 Delivering Success. Bartram proposes that developing a vision is a strategic domain where leaders analyze, interpret, create, and conceptualize. Once the leaders set the visionary trajectory, then, sharing goals opens communication which creates interaction, presentation, and joint decisions in team atmospheres. The next phase of Gaining support, involves people at various levels for adaption and cooperation for betterment. Then, to deliver success, touches the foundation of operation by executing, enterprising, and performing the pre-planned decisions.
David Bartram defines leadership as, “influencing people such that they come to share common goals, values and attitudes, and work more effectively towards the achievement of the organization's vision.” This view begs the question, what does it mean to influence? According to Bartram, SHL leaders influence in areas of goal and outcome setting, initiating competency through task and person centered structures and behaviors, being innovative and charismatic, and considering the contextual surroundings of change and culture.
Overall, I like the idea of casting vision, involving teamwork, and achieving the goal. This would work in the church, if pastors trained others to lead through their God-given vision. Small groups could impact this concept. The hard part would be gaining support! Otherwise, I agree with this model’s definition of leadership and influence, considering a more Christ-like focus.
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ReplyDeleteRoger, I appreciate the breadth of the leadership spectrum incorporated into this model. I find it difficult to concur with those who seem to narrow leadership to only one or at most two of these foundational principles. While this model is indeed thorough, I sensed as well that some of the pieces need more definition and clarity, as you mentioned concerning “influence”. It seemed as if each level of the four-part model had a list of nouns and verbs describing the process by which a leader would engage in that practice, but throwing out words like “interaction”, “analyze”, and “adaptation” do not have clear meaning and would take on drastically different forms depending on who may be interpreting their meaning. Perhaps Bartram would be able to clarify exactly what he means by this long list of actions and processes, but we need to do the hard work of describing and fleshing out leadership even at these functional levels as well as the more broad and generic terms. As a general rule, I think it is always to our benefit to clearly understand cooperatively the terminology we employ concerning leadership, for when we neglect this task healthy and useful models can quickly go awry due to incompetence and misunderstanding.
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