Last time we asked the question - "What makes a great leader?" and in order to answer that, we had to look at what it is that a leader actually does. What really is leadership? It turns out that the function of a leader is to allow large groups to work in a coordinated and purposeful way. Then we started to look at what sort of skills leaders are encouraged to develop and which of those skills really make the difference between a leader and a great leader.
The skills that really make a difference are not the ones that many people assume are the important ones. Technical skill in whatever it is you are doing is fairly unimportant. How driven you are personally is not that important. The reason for this is that those skills are ones that don't scale. Being technically good as the leader doesn't make the group any better once you hit the capacity of that one leader to dispense technical advice. Being driven to succeed as a leader doesn't make the group driven to succeed. Those things are individual things. They have a scale of one. What matters when leading groups are skills that scale across the whole group - things that lift the whole group up, not just the leader.
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