Best adfvice i got about bulies and bulying was when i was 17 doing my apprenticeship, an old bloke called alf in the foundry said,

“When you leave school you think you leave all the bullies and children in the school yard, sadly you dont they follow you as workmates and management, always remember that” and i have.

There’s no commonality between leadership and bullying at all…

Leadership IME is about setting a vision, showing what behaviour you desire from your team by behaving that way yourself, delegation and empowering people to do their jobs to the best of their ability, and supporting them in their own ideas and potential. It’s focussed on thinking about what others need from you, and putting your own needs second.

Bullying is about a weak person’s ego and a failure to deal with their own fears and issues. Typical behaviours are control, manipulation, dishonesty.

You know when you’ve been well-led – you feel great about yourself and you achieve more than you thought you could.
You know when you’ve been bullied – you feel depressed, disheartened and angry.

Much of what is put up as leadership by programmes like the Apprentice, Dragon’s Den etc is pretty much the exact opposite.

Interesting but you have forgotten that the illustration of personality traits merely explains the set of skills a person needs in order to manage the situation. i.e. only to “get by”. Get it right the person is labelled as leader and get it wrong the person is a maggot or zombie.

I’m not sure I’ve understood you. Can you explain in more detail what you mean.

geetee1972 – Member

Interesting but you have forgotten that the illustration of personality traits merely explains the set of skills a person needs in order to manage the situation. i.e. only to “get by”. Get it right the person is labelled as leader and get it wrong the person is a maggot or zombie.

I’m not sure I’ve understood you. Can you explain in more detail what you mean.

What I am trying to say is that the research only found out the short term solution. In a way whatever we found from the research is merely helping us to compensate for our limited capacity to be a leader at that moment in time. i.e. we improve or learn to be a leader based on research recommendation just to apply the newly learned/acquired technique to that specific situation but not beyond because that is not our natural tendency. For example, we might learn to be a good leader at work but when we are taken out from work, we would revert back to our natural self in a different situation.

The reason is simple. You are either born with it or you don’t. The latter can compensate by learning to be a good leader only at specific situation. Taking them out from their comfort zone means they will be like fish out of water.

However, if you are born leader it doesn’t matter where you are you will always be a leader. I say “jump” … other should response “how high?”. 😀

However, if you are born leader it doesn’t matter where you are you will always be a leader. I say “jump” … other should response “how high?”.

I see your point but the (expansive) research suggests that this isn’t the case. The corrollary of your point would be that anyone born with the personality traits of a serial killer will thus innevitably become a serial killer and we know that’s not true. Behaviour is, to a certain extent, a free choice.

You can learn to compensate for certain weakenesses as a leader, so for example, some of the derailing personality traits can be compensated for by being very self aware and ‘choosing’ not to behave in a given, negative way.

The key here is that behaviour and personalty are not the same thing. Yes they are linked and in being linked personality can be seen as causal of behaviour, but it is not completely pre-determined. A self aware and motivated individual can chose not to behave in the way you miht expect someone with that profile to behave (there are exceptions to this, most notably sociopaths!)

Anyway, personality is only one aspect of leadership. As I said there are many other facets which can be used to balance your leadership approach also.