Ibn Zohr University

ENSA-Agadir
Dr. Mohamed Nouhi
SOFT SKILLS SERIES

LEADERSHIP
PRINCIPLES AND
MODELS
 Inspiring Citations:
“The only safe ship in a storm is leadership”. – F. Wattleton

Good leaders must first become good servants.” – R. Greenleaf “

“Leaders are more powerful role models when they learn than when
they teach.” R. Kantor
, Soft Skills are new packet networks of interdependent professional attributes and
personality traits for the enhancement of career planning and the optimization of job advancement
and performance. They provide an effective framework for in-depth understanding of the technical
knowledge including Communication, Leadership, Problem-solving, Critical Thinking, Time
management, Motivation, Teamwork, Work Ethics and many others.
The Top-10 Principles/Strategies of Leadership:
1. Charisma: It comprises three major elements:
* Powerful Influence: the ability to impact individuals, companies, and communities in a professional
situation toward the attainment of a specified goals.

* Smart Presence: Being smartly present by serving others, harmonizing differences, and transforming
problems into solutions, challenges into opportunities.

* Passion: Being Passionate is energizing other people, building enthusiasm, and caring about what you do
.
2. Clear Strategic Vision:
 Leadership is about articulating visions, creating the environment within which things can be accomplished,
discovering the company's destiny, and having the courage to follow it.
 Campanies have infinite number of goals and objectives, but they should be (1) positive, (2) reliable, (3)
feasible in accordance with their mission, the purpose, and the intended results. Like the bus driver, the
leader chooses the course of the journey, makes expectations, and provides real time for arrival or the end
of the journey. “Plan everything. Leave nothing to chance”
 Clear vision is the ability to start evolutionary change processes that are more adaptive by incorporating 5
Ps: “Prior planning prevents poor performance”.

3. Innovative Mindset:
 It is the creative process of bringing new ideas, methods, and devices to meet unarticulated needs.

 Driving transformation in the company’s evolving culture by redefining the mission, embracing change, or

creating a new business model.

 Turn creative ideas into successful business practices.
4. Inspiring Loyalty and Alignment:
The art of mobilizing the employees and winning their hearts and minds for shared
aspirations, aligning the teams around corporate strategy, tactics, and values.
 Creating a healthy organizational culture that everyone in the organization understands,
supports, and works to achieve: “Value, empower, and appreciate your staff,”

5. Maturity: it includes three elements:

* Integrity: the quality of being honest and adherence to strong moral principles
against corruption. It means doing exactly what should be done.”
* Fairness and Trust: Select the best people for every key position, trust them, and give
them the authority necessary to do their jobs. Fairness also means motivating, rewarding,
protecting, respecting, forgiving, and caring for the staff by promoting their dignity:
“Find out how people want to be treated and treat them that way”
 * Balance: Realize your shortcomings, your weaknesses and strengths, moderate your
reactions to both good and bad news, and have exactly the same temperament in both
situations

6. Intuition and Intelligence: the first is a sense of knowing opportunity, whereas the
second is the unique wisdom that enables us to effectively act on opportunity.
 Crisis is a powerful motivator

7. Positive Interdependence:
 Cooperation and collaboration between project team members to ensure that we achieve
the best possible outcome for each project and each client.
 Collaboration and interdependence initiate the company for productive Strategic
Direction: “Surround yourself with the right people, a strong team”
8. Communication and strategic probing: Deepening the dialogue, creating a
conductive climate for interaction, overcoming mistakes, and bringing the meeting to
positive closure: “Listen to those around you and implement the best of what’s suggested”

9. Adaptability: Focus on professional growth and willingness to continuous improvement

 What works in one organization may be a cause of failure in another.

 Find your own way of doing things. Don’t imitate others, find what works for you.

 10. Empowerment:
 Giving the employees autonomy and opportunities that will lead them to reach their
highest potential
 Delegate authority and help your people develop themselves as decision makers.
Leadership VS Management
Leadership is a challenging and exciting soft skill. It is an art that sometimes relies on forces
that can’t be explained in rational or scientific terms.
Leadership Models
1.Coercive/ Commanding leadership:
It demands immediate obedience: In a single phrase,
this style is ‘Do what I tell you’. These leaders show
charisma, initiative, self-control, and drive to succeed.
The battlefield is the classic example, but any crisis
will need clear, calm, commanding. This style does not,
however, encourage anyone else to take the initiative,
2-Pace-setting leadership:
 This style can be summed up as ‘Do as I do, now’, expecting excellence and self-
direction.
 The Pace-setter very much leads by example or Model, but this type of leadership
only works with a highly-competent and well-motivated team.
 Like the Coercive leader, Pace-setters also show drive to succeed and initiative, but
instead of self-control, there are coupled Contingency, and Situationality meaning
that leaders should act as the situation demands and should develop a repertoire of
skills and styles that can be deployed to suit that particular situation.
3. Affiliative Leadership:
 It values and creates emotional bonds and harmony and not
specific tasks.
 It touches on deep-seated feelings, emotions and basic human
values
 Based on emotional connections, affiliative leaders believe that
‘People come first’. Such leaders demonstrate empathy, and
strong communication skills, and are very good at building
relationships. This style is most useful to solve conflicts when
a team has been through a difficult experience, and needs to
heal rifts, or develop motivation.
4.Democratic Leadership:
It builds consensus through participation.
Democratic leaders are constantly asking ‘What do you think?’.
Such leaders show high levels of collaboration, team leadership
and strong communication skills. In this style of leadership, each
employee has an equal say on a project's direction and works
well in developing ownership for a project
Involving team members in decision-makig process for better
productivity.
5.Coaching Leadership:
It aims to develop people. The phrase that sums up this
leadership style is ‘Try it’ Coaching leaders allow people to try
different approaches to problem solving and achieving a goal
in an open way. The coaching leader shows high levels of
empathy, self-awareness and skills in developing others. A
coaching style is especially useful when an organisation
values long-term staff development. Grounded in expectancy
theory, this suggests that people operate on the basis of a
rational calculation of effort to performance to outcome. In
this model leaders can vary their style in space and time to
maximise the chances of success in conjunction with the
6.Situational Leadership
The core foundation of this Model is the belief that there is no single "best"
approach to leadership.
Because people are different, managerial styles should differ to suit different
people within the same organization.
It provide extreme adaptability for leaders to select and adapt their styles
across a broad range of choices.
It consists of four major styles according to Paul Hersey and author Ken
Blanchard
* Telling: by instructing people what to do and how to do it
* Selling: leaders "sell" their message to persuade employees to work toward
the common goal.
* Participating: shares decision-making and responsibilities.
* Delegating: dedicating the individual the responsibility for the execution and
completion of the established goals.
7-Transformational Leadership: It was initially introduced by
leadership expert James MacGregor Burns and Bernard M. Bass. According to
Burns, transformational leaders inspire followers to change expectations,
perceptions, and motivations to work towards common goals. There are four
different components of transformational leadership:
* Intellectual Stimulation: encouraging creativity among followers and
motivating them to explore new ways of doing things and new opportunities to
learn.
* Individualized Consideration: It involves offering supportive relationships and
encouragement to followers. by keeping lines of communication open so that
followers feel free to share ideas and so that leaders can offer direct recognition
of the unique contributions of each follower.
* Inspirational Motivation: Transformational leaders have a clear vision that they
are able to articulate to followers. These leaders are also able to help followers
 Contemporary challenges
1.From self-isolating individual leaders to self-supporting
leadership teams
It combines a relatively novel theme - about forcing subordinates to reflect upon
their influence in the achievement of goals - and a relatively old theme - about the
difference between situations that require mechanistic responses - which he calls
"technical" issues (often called "management" elsewhere to distinguish it from
"leadership") In so far as Heifetz also distinguishes between the exercise of
"authority" and the exercise of "leadership" - sometimes labelled power derived
from formal role and power derived from informal role - Heifetz also hinges his
ideas on a distinction familiar to Weber and many others since. Hence, for Heifetz,
the critical issue is whether people have the ability and motivation to intervene in
situations that are not routine, in which the answer cannot be derived from
previous experience, and where part of the role of the leader is to reflect the
2.From cult control to cultural coherence
The search for charismatic or "superleaders" often generates a form
of leadership that is unable or unwilling to recognise when change is
required.
Much of the debate around the "cult of leadership" is captured in
the charismatic approaches but the difference between transactional
and transformational leadership also generates cult followers.
Transactional Leadership is premised upon motivating followers by
some form of instrumental exchange, either a monetary or symbolic
reward system. Transformational Leadership on the other hand,
3.From Rules to Principles: The conventional explanation for the
existence of rule-based organisations involves the need to inhibit
followers from exercising their initiative and undermining
conformance to requirements. The positive aspect of this is a
bureaucratic support for equality in service provision. The negative
aspect is a fundamental discouragement of subordinate initiative
and risk-taking. Controlling organisations through rules is doomed to
failure. Setting an ultimate goal (the summit) and measurable
progress is the key.
4.From Naivety to Complexity: Complexity Theory implies many

critical points like:

• Organisational life is systemic and predictable.

5. From private interest to public service
Much of the debate around the difference between private interest and public
service, and the relative differences in leadership required by the two forms, has
been reconstructed recently through the development of Stakeholder Theory.
Freeman's original construction expanded the focus of leaders in the private
sector from a narrow concern about profitability to a wider acceptance of the
legitimate interests notably of workers, consumers, suppliers, creditors, the
government and the local community.

6.From win/lose arguments to win/win negotiations

The assumption is that discussion can be mutually agreed through equal
participation, a consensus can emerge. Leadership, then, is not usually achieved
through superior rhetoric or appeal to logic or reason, but by establishing what
,As a conclusion
 Leadership is not a person or a position. It is a complex
moral relationship between people, based on trust,
obligation, commitment, emotion, and a shared vision of
the good.
 It is a key strategy for organizational effectiveness and a vital process of
influencing the activities of an organized group toward goal achievement.
 It is the lifting of a man’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a man’s

performance to a higher standard, the building of a man’s personality

beyond its normal limitations.