Page 46 - Develop your leadership skills- John Adair. -- 2nd ed

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How to turn the core leadership functions into skills ■ 37

Angela Roberts was appointed at a particularly difficult time as
a team leader in a factory assembling television sets. Sales
were falling, complaints about quality abounded, and morale
was especially low. She noticed one symptom of this poor
morale on her very first day in charge. The team members in the
electronics factory where she had worked before usually took a
15-minute coffee break in the mornings, but here she found that
45 minutes was nearer the norm. ‘You have a controlling
problem,’ she told herself, and, being a good leader, by
example and word she soon set a new standard.

It is the natural instinct of leaders (perhaps in contrast to
managers) to rely as much as possible on self-control or self-
discipline in others. The better the team and its constituent
individual members, the more you can do that. The point about
self-discipline is that it is our only way of being both disci-
plined or controlled and free. If control or discipline is imposed
upon us – as sometimes it must be – we always lose an element
of freedom. Now leadership only really exists among free and
equal people, and so ultimately a large element of self-control is
a necessary element of leadership. If a group or team, organisa-
tion or community lack that, then they are also inadvertently
robbing themselves of the opportunity to experience leadership
as opposed to management.

‘Control’ comes from medieval Latin contrarotulare and origi-
nally meant ‘to check accounts’. Its financial origin is a
reminder that finance in different ways – profit targets and
spending limits – is one important means of control. Self-
managing teams (which are not the same as leaderless groups!)
are those who take on board budget responsibility for planning
and controlling their own work. Within limits they have discre-
tion on how to use the resources – especially the money – that