without your leadership being consistent.
People must have confidence that their
opinions and thoughts will be heard and
taken into consideration.
Delegator
An exceptional leader realizes that he/
she cannot accomplish everything on his
own. A leader will know the talents and
interests of people around him/her, thus
delegating tasks accordingly.
Initiative
A leader should work to be the motivator,
an initiator. He/she must be a key element
in the planning and implementing of new
ideas, programs, policies, events, etc.
The Notre Dame School of Business
adds these attributes as keys to excep-
tional leadership:
• Motivating teams – Inspiring oth-
ers is the mark of an effective
leader. Motivation is best done by
example and guidance, not by issu-
ing commands.
• Team building – Putting together
strong teams that work well is another trait of great leaders. The opposite is also true: if a team is weak
and dysfunctional, it is generally a
failure in leadership.
• Risk taking – You can learn how to
assess risk and run scenarios that
will help you make better decisions.
Great leaders take the right risks at
the right time.
•Vision and goal setting – A team
depends on its leader to tell them
where they are going, why they are
going, and how they’re going to get
there. People are more motivated
when a leader articulates his or her
vision for a project or for the organization, along with the steps – or
goals – needed to achieve it.
In most all researched definitions of
Leadership, we found that the need for
experience in general, was missing.
Interestingly, in the October, 2012
HBR, Professor Gautam Mukunda,
Harvard Professor challenged and ques-
tions experience versus leadership suc-
cess. He concludes that “unfiltered”
leaders (those without experience) were
both “most effective” and the “least ef-
fective leaders, while “highly filtered”
(those with a great deal of experience)
were leaders that landed in the middle
of the pack.
The professor further concludes that
“unfiltered” leaders (little experience) can
“crash and burn” just as easily as becom-
ing great and successful leaders. Steve
Jobs and Abraham Lincoln were “unfil-
tered” (relatively little experience) and
were great leaders because they could
think differently without the experience
filter getting in their way.
Mukunda says that “experience” many
times prevents leaders from approaching
business situations any differently than
other experienced people. “Filtered lead-
ers will usually make the basically same
decisions.” They will usually become
“good” but not “great” leaders.
In comparison, Mukunda compares
Presidents Jefferson and Lincoln, con-
cluding Lincoln was the “ultimate ex-
ample of the “unfiltered” leader while
Jefferson was a good decision-maker
but he was the prime example of a “fil-
tered” leader, accomplishing what others
(Madison and Adams) could and would
have done in his place.”
Lincoln was a two-time loser in
Senate races and so outside of the system
that he wasn’t even listed in the top 10
Republican presidential candidates in
some newspapers in 1860. Lincoln had
the ingenuity to announce, “we won’t
give up Fort Sumter without a fight,” thus
strategically, forcing the South to fire the
first shot and unite the North behind him.
The conclusions reached in his re-
search, Professor Mukunda says:
• Unfiltered Leaders are best when the
organizations tolerance for risk is
high.
•Unfiltered Leaders are best when
the organization vision is to grow to
dominance.
• Unfiltered Leaders are best when the
organization is a start-up or is on the
precipice of failure.
• Filtered Leaders are best when the
organization just wants to be in
business for 50+ years.
• Both type leaders are important in
medium to large organizations.
• “One can choose leaders who are
likely to lead an organization to
big wins or big losses, or a leader who will definitely be good at
their jobs but almost certainly
won’t be great.” CW
