Page 57 - Develop your leadership skills- John Adair. -- 2nd ed

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48 ■ Develop your leadership skills

Administration

Administration is usually linked to management skills rather
than leadership skills. You may be able to recall a leader you
have met who was full of entrepreneurial spirit, enthusiasm
and drive, a motivator of others but completely useless as an
organiser and administrator. Indeed, ‘industrial administration’
was once the name for what we now call ‘management’. The
only relic of those days is the MBA – Master of Business
Administration.

Administration, as we all know, involves paperwork and is
primarily concerned with the day-to-day running of things. It
usually includes financial administration of various kinds and
levels.

Now the key thing to remember is that administration is
always secondary to something else. It is a servant function.
Minister is the Latin word for ‘servant’; it comes from the
familiar minus, ‘less’ (as opposed to the magister, ‘master’,
derived from magis, ‘more’).

In the old days, when organisations were overstaffed, you as
the leader (alias magister) could delegate all the day-to-day
paperwork to your staff. But these days leaders – equipped
with personal computers – will often have to do a great deal
more administration than in the past, especially at team leader
level. So being a good administrator is now a part of being a
good leader.

Taking on this administrative responsibility of leadership is a
way of becoming a good facilitator, for you are thereby freeing
the team as a whole and its individual members to be effective,