Leadership Skills

 

SKILLS/COMPETENCE REQUIRED

• Influencing
• Persuasiveness
• Persistence
• Negotiating skills
• Political awareness
• Business acumen

 

EDUCATION & TRAINING

• Scenario/role/game playing (Context & problem-solving)
• “Outward-bound” (Context & problem-solving)
• Mentoring
• Experience

 

PERSONAL REFLECTION

• Strength/weakness assessment
• Strategy planning (competence available vs. competence required – development plan)
• Measurement and audit
• Development of judgement (Sphere of concern vs. sphere of influence)

 

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Commentary

This is a more ‘operational’ definition of leadership skills, with explicit acknowledgment of inter-personal abilities in influence, persuasion and so on. Another session at the conference (Semiotic Warfare, Aidan Ward & Colston Sanger) stressed the point that systems development is often the last link in a long chain of political battles around business process, system requirements, and plain corporate pecking-order issues: while developers have to be shielded from this noise, architects (don’t forget the business is our client!) have to be able to participate at this level. There’s another whole story about how this might be done!