Page 80 - Develop your leadership skills- John Adair. -- 2nd ed

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How to grow leaders in your organisation ■ 71

from the important, for a strategy worth the name should be
three-dimensional:

■ importance – it really has to matter;

■ longer-term – it takes time to grow trees;

■ multi-factored – it takes more than one element or
approach to make a strategy.

The remaining principles will give you an idea of what those
various elements should be. It is when there is synergy – the key
elements working together in harmony – that your organisa-
tion will begin to grow leaders.

Principle two: selection

‘Smith is not a born leader yet.’ When those words appeared on
a manager’s report in the 1950s, nobody thought that the
person in question could do anything about it – still less the
organisation that employed him. As a saying of the day had it,
‘Leaders are born and not made.’

We don’t think like that now. The action-centred leadership
course based on the three-circle model that was developed in
the 1960s proved once and for all that the proverb was only
half-true – leaders can be trained or developed. The other half
of the truth, however, is that people do vary in their relative
amount of leadership potential. Since it is not easy to develop
leaders, why not hire people who are halfway – or more – there
already? Or at least make sure that when you recruit from
outside – or promote from inside – you know how to select