Many people have good ideas or good intentions but neither is sufficient to make them a leader. The acid test is the buy-in of others. Having reflected on the vision you offer and other things you do, are they willing to commit their time and effort to help make the dream come true - to follow you?

A manager seeks to improve the status quo; often seeking to reduce organisational risk in doing so. In contrast, a leader changes the game; and, this may involve (at least temporarily) increasing risk. Let me illustrate the contrast. A tour manager makes sure proper travel arrangements are in place, that everyone is comfortable and well fed. The tour leader, however, chooses the purpose and destination for the journey, decides what is to be seen, draws out the messages, etc. The leader is concerned with effectiveness i.e. achieving goals; the manager with doing it smoothly and efficiently. Both roles are important - though different. And, in most organisational jobs, there is an element of both. However, V|E|C|T|O|R is concerned specifically with the leadership role.

The distinction between leaders and managers is explained more fully [elsewhere].

History is full of leaders, who literally or metaphorically offered people a journey: explorers taking expeditions deep into the jungle; politicians founding parties and taking them to victory at the polls; business leaders establishing enterprises or turning old ones around; social reformers setting up movements to change the social order. On some journeys, the followers had immense commitment and, at the extreme, were willing to die.

V|E|C|T|O|R is about what you can do to build and sustain commitment. The focus here is primarily on leadership in business or similar organisations. The stakes may not always be as high as in exploration or social change but the issues are not too different.

Leadership occurs across all the levels of an organisation. It starts, one hopes, with the chief executive and cascades down. You may be a follower in your relationship to your manager but should be a leader to those below. However, an enlightened team-leader, secure in his or her competence, will often ask a subordinate to lead the team, when the subordinate has expertise or vision for a task in hand. Equally, in an emergency, you can become the leader, almost by magic: instantaneous recognition by others that you are the one most appropriate to the situation and their needs. In this sense, leaders exert their leadership not only downwards, as we normally understand it, but also upwards and across the organisation.

Whoever leads has one prime responsibility: to make everyone on the team (themself and the followers - as individuals and as a team) as effective as possible. The leader thereby maximises organisational performance: achieving agreed outcomes whether these are long-term profitability or short-term customer service.

Something needs to be made clear, lest any of us are offended by the "follower" tag. To suggest someone is a follower is not to suggest they are a robot responding blindly to commands. There is an assumption throughout V|E|C|T|O|R that followership, like leadership, is an honourable and well-rounded role. A follower is a thinking, responsible person, who raises issues, provides input, and also challenges things they believe to be wrong - as well as taking instructions and carrying out assigned responsibilities. In sum, while leadership is the focus here, it is a partnership and the goal is to achieve more and better follower capability and contribution.

If ideas and good intentions are not the key to leadership, what is? The answer is contained in one word: action. In some cases, the required action may be to develop ideas, to think through a problem, to analyse and reach a conclusion; equally, it may be to meet with customers or stakeholders, to hire or fire staff or re-think how your team carries out its role. But the test is the relevance of these actions to making your followers want to join and remain on the journey.

It is often said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. For willing followers, hell is poor leadership: they are not concerned with your good intentions; they may not even care what your intentions are. But, they will evaluate your actions - and particularly how these impact their ability to do what is expected of them. If you preach productivity but waste their time, it is the waste, not the preaching, they will notice. In leadership, as in most things, actions speak louder than words.

Many people have a favourite or preferred model of leadership - and often one that makes them look good! They may be drawn to the heroic model: military leaders like Napoleon or business leaders like Rupert Murdoch. Others may favour quiet achievers like Mahatma Gandhi or Warren Buffett. Nice as it would be to find a "man (or woman) for all seasons", life is not so accommodating. Churchill was a splendid war leader but less good in peacetime. Many entrepreneurs build companies to a certain size but fail thereafter.

Appropriate actions today may not be right tomorrow. Your team may have changed, so may market circumstances. Your previous job, leading the contracts team, might have required hands-on technical capability. Now, as Customer Service Director, you may need skill in setting policy, building customer relations and holding people accountable.

Even if you still have the same job and the same team of people, the market environment may have changed. Whereas last year, it was a seller's market with high margins and an emphasis on rushing products out the door. This year, you may need to reorient your team to reduce costs and fight to keep customers so you ensure the viability of your operation. Easy street quickly becomes mean street. And, these two situations require entirely different leadership actions.

Choosing the right actions requires intelligence - of both the emotional (EQ) and conventional (IQ) varieties. Obviously, you need to be able to diagnose market conditions and technical issues. But, as importantly, you need to understand what your team, customers and other stakeholders require. Many of us are trained by courses and on-the-job experience to master quantitative and technical issues: growth rates, profit margins, product specifications, and so on. This is classic IQ stuff. However, the EQ skills of empathy, self-awareness and self-control are often left to chance.

We have less preparation for the listening and sensitivity required in diagnosing how our team members (or customers) are feeling, individually or as a group. Too often, we assume everyone is the same - and probably similar to us. Not necessarily an encouraging assumption!

All leaders need a mixture of EQ and IQ to diagnose simultaneously the market and human issues, develop alternatives, make wise selections and find appropriate ways to act. And sometimes, the "how" is more important than the "what".

Another ingredient driving our choice of leadership actions is finding an appropriate balance between the needs of individuals and the team. As with international trade, there is a need for both multilateral and bilateral considerations. This is not easy if the needs of one individual - for more of your time or special considerations - disadvantages others. As with most things, there is no simple answer. It depends on the situation - and this can vary as conditions change.

As most writers argue, successful leaders have a number of common traits. They have the capacity to inspire. They can get themselves going at the beginning of the day; and, they can drag themselves out of a rut - focusing on future possibilities rather than past problems.

They also attract, motivate and hold good staff. However, this can be a two-edged sword. It is good for building a team capable of tackling significant tasks. However, it can be a problem for the organisation, and yourself - if having built an operation, when the time comes for you to move on, everyone wants to follow. Flattering, but it may destroy what you have struggled to establish.

Outstanding leaders tend to be compulsive - working long hours and compromising other facets of their life. This can lead to burn out in them and the people around them. This is no different from the behaviour of outstanding people in other fields. However, in the case of business people, it tends to be regarded as lack of adjustment. A fixated entrepreneur, like Henry Ford, is seen as narrow, whereas a fixated film director or sports captain is seen as showing professional commitment! Contrary to the common view, in my value system, there is just as much potential for moral splendour in business as in any other enterprise.

Effective leaders spend a lot of time listening and talking - particularly the former. They seek and share information. They walk around and are visible; they spend time encouraging, guiding and coaching. They get out and represent their teams and their organisations and promote the importance of what is being done.

They also show adaptability and a capacity for learning. They recognise changes in the world around them and learn new skills to master new situations.

The V|E|C|T|O|R framework agrees with the foregoing characteristics of successful leaders. However, as foreshadowed in the [Introduction], there are areas where V|E|C|T|O|R departs from the views of some practitioners and writers.

First, the V|E|C|T|O|R framework, asserts that there is no single or right set of actions or leadership attributes. There is no "perfect" leader and certainly no "permanent perfect" leadership formula. It all depends on the situation: the organisational context and the needs of the individuals and team. This view is not unique. However, many leaders operate as though there were a single best way; and, too often writers, who assert the importance of situation, still become prescriptive about needed attributes and what is and is not the right way to lead.

Second, the leader needs to be free of fatal flaws - or self-destructive tendencies. These can be things that are broadly undesirable, like dishonesty; or, an otherwise good action, such as accountability, taken to excess, so that team members feel that any minor failure unleashes a witch-hunt. Such Seeds of Failure and the more extreme Fatal Flaws are explored in [another of our resource modules].

Finally, an effective leader may be neither good, nice nor easy. He or she may, in fact, at times be unnecessarily unpleasant - but still effective. This is reported of three of the leaders mentioned earlier (Napoleon, Murdoch and Gandhi) - the possible exception being Warren Buffett. But, leadership is not necessarily about popularity or social niceties, though both of these can help. It is about getting people to come on a journey, and in some situations they may prefer a tough bastard, or even a successful rogue, rather than a well-intentioned do-gooder.

Beyond these three differences of view, there are two more interesting differences of emphasis and scope, which make V|E|C|T|O|R complementary to other leadership offerings.

First, much of the leadership literature and many of the courses give priority to general principles - either extrapolating from theories of individual or organisational behaviour or observing successful leaders and generalising their behaviour into lists of dos and don'ts. The theories of Charles Darwin and Carl Jung, amongst others, have been put to work. Equally, myriad observations and anecdotes have buttressed professional papers and enhanced academic careers.

This is all high-level leadership stuff. In contrast, V|E|C|T|O|R is more down-to-earth and gritty. It's about applied leadership: actions not theory; specifics not guidelines; what can work not what might be desirable.

The table below sums up some of the above differentiations:

	Key focus	Dominating output
Most competitive offering	Leader's approach Behavioural theory Normative Assumptions	Profile, label or rating
V|E|C|T|O|R	Follower's needs Their Questions Desired Outcomes	Leadership Action Plan

V|E|C|T|O|R complements a lot of the leadership literature in yet another way. Many books and papers devote themselves to specific aspects of the leadership task. In some cases, this may be a period of leadership, such as the first three months - focusing on what needs to be achieved in order to lay the right foundation for long-term success. Other writers take a particular functional aspect of leadership such as communication and emphasise what needs to be done to ensure open and honest flows of information across the organisation. Still others offer a particular context: leadership of start-ups, of dotcoms, of turnarounds, and so on.

These segmentations are well illustrated by a short course on Best Practice Leadership offered by the Harvard Business School in January 2004. The topic headlines, each reflective of a book or other publication by the respective professor, read as follows: Sustaining Business Success; Leadership Under Fire; The Irrational Search for Charismatic CEOs; Acceleration Plans for Transitioning Leaders; Is Silence Killing Your Company; Time to Value B Players; Extraordinary Leadership in an Era of Turbulence and Change.

In each case, important principles were derived from literature and case studies. However, there was nothing in the course, which gave a general framework allowing participant leaders to diagnose their own situation and select from a smorgasbord of actions as a basis for developing their own Leadership Action Plan.

The following table sums up the above points, illustrating how V|E|C|T|O|R is on the one hand more down to earth and action-focused, but on the other hand broader in scope.

DIFFERENT LEVEL AND SCOPE ...

		SCOPE or COVERAGE
L E V E L	THEORY AND PRINCIPLE	Sustaining Business Success	Leadership Under Fire	The Irrational Search for Charismatic CEOs	Acceleration Plans for Transitioning Leaders	Is Silence Killing Your Company	Time to Value B Players	Extra-ordinary Leadership in an Era of Turbulence and Change
	ACTION PLANNING	V|E|C|T|O|R

These differences become clearer in the module titled ["The V|E|C|T|O|R Framework"] and in other modules, which identify the range and nature of possible actions. The clearest demonstration, however, is when you develop your own action plan.

Finally, as a leader, how do you know if you are succeeding? The acid test is organisational performance. However, whether you are a front-line supervisor or a chief executive, the first and most important signal is that your people, those who have decided to join and stay with you, are becoming more effective as a result of your leadership. It is crass but true that, year in year out, good leaders increase the market value of their team members.

This sets up an interesting dilemma: it makes other leaders and employers want to poach your people; but, equally, encourages them to stay with you and further increase their value. And, they may even stick with you because they are enjoying themselves.

You know when you have a virtuous (leadership) cycle when your followers are becoming better leaders of their followers. You initiate things, which are picked up, passed around, and your actions, examples and messages reverberate back to you from deep in the organisation - often in better form!

Dr. Timothy Pascoe AM
PhD (Cambridge), MBA (Harvard), BE & BEc (Adelaide)
Creator, V|E|C|T|O|R Leadership^®

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