In “Three Rivers of the Amazon”, adventurer Tim Biggs describes a run in with the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas on the Apurimac River in Peru.

The kayakers had slipped past the guerrillas unnoticed. When they tried to warn the rafting team they were spotted by the soldiers who, in a moment of confusion, dived for cover. Instead of taking the chance to paddle for the rapid, the leader of the rafting team decided to surrender. The kayak team watched as the raft team were led into the forest. The kayakers were dumbfounded. Then the leader of the expedition, Dr François Odendaal, did something heroic. He paddled back up the river to negotiate with the guerrillas. In doing so he illustrated four qualities of leadership. These qualities are proposed by Prof. J Richard Hackman after researching leaders and teams, with his colleagues for decades. They are:

  • Know some things
  • Know how to do some things
  • Emotional maturity
  • Courage

Know some things

Some people just know how to get the most from a team. It just comes naturally. Fortunately for the rest of us, we can learn from books and courses. We can learn the importance of a clear, consequential, engaging direction. We can learn how to select teams with enough similarity for connections and enough diversity to stimulate fresh perspectives and solutions. A team leader can learn what it takes to promote team effectiveness.

The expedition in the illustration was fraught with animosity between the South African and Polish contingent. Something François was not able to contain. However, in the situation, he was reasonably fluent in Spanish and had experience of liberation organisations, both of which turned the tide.

Know how to do some things

Knowing the theory is a good start, but not enough. Leaders must know how to create and maintain the conditions described in the theory. Specifically leaders must have diagnostic skills and execution skills. They need to see through the noise to pinpoint where to focus their resources and then they need to be able generate action.
Key skills for a leader include:

  • Envisioning
  • Inventing
  • Negotiating
  • Decision-making
  • Teaching
  • Interpersonal skill
  • Implementation

Leaders can also develop these skills.  But it is a challenge. These skills are developed to a large part through experience. François was able to connect, intensely with the guerrillas, using the above skills to secure the release of the team.

Emotional maturity

Dealing with a team is emotionally demanding.  The leader must deal with the team and their own anxieties. The emotionally mature leader is able to inhibit the impulse to assist a team when the struggle will give them learning experience. Leaders may also take actions to temporarily raise anxieties to create opportunities for team learning.
The leader of the rafting team had been undermining his leadership throughout the expedition but François was able to put this aside to focus on the matter at hand which was literally about life and death. During the negotiation François kept his head even as the leader of the rafting team continued to blunder into sensitive subjects which riled the soldiers.

Courage

Leaders have to step up.  Leadership involves taking a team from where it is to some other, better situation. Leaders often operate at the margins of what people presently like or want rather than at the centre of the collective consensus. A leader may challenge accepted norms and disrupt established routines, rocking the organisational boat and risking losing the esteem of their peers. Indeed a leader may engender a level of resistance so intense that they place their job at risk.

This takes courage.

There are no courses to teach courage. Everyone on the expedition team knew of other incidents where tourists had been murdered by the guerrillas. François must have known the odds as he paddled back to the captured team.

So what are you doing to develop your leadership qualities?