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.

The meeting has become a little heated. Battle lines have been drawn. The argument has been going for a while now. Neither side is backing down. But then you see it! A chink in their logical armour. A flaw in their argument. This is your chance. You marshal your thoughts and go in for the kill! The argument is yours! It will be your proposal that gets accepted, not theirs. I mean, sure, their proposal had some good points, but yours was clearly superior. Clearly. Probably a good thing they didn't pick up in that bit where you had to fudge some numbers to make things look better… like you did with theirs.

OK. How often have we sat on the sidelines watching others slug it out and thought about how the argument has gone on way past the point where it is about getting a good outcome and become about winning the argument instead? Regardless of the quality of the outcome? How often have we been in this sort of situation ourselves and thought about how important it is to win the argument? So why does this happen? Why can we see how silly it is when we watch others but can't see that same behaviour in ourselves?