Writing is an important leadership skill that is often overlooked. It is unlikely that you will ever see writing at the top of any list of important leadership skills. For a leader to be effective they must communicate their outlook, vision and worldview to the people they are leading. A leader who cannot communicate well using written words is going to be severely handicapped.

Another reason leaders need to write is to help them develop and clarify their ideas. Much of what makes someone a good leader is his or her viewpoint and perspective. Someone who makes good decisions usually does so because of how they look at problems. Someone who instinctively does the right thing will often have a difficult time explaining their decision-making process to others.

A leader who doesn’t take the time to develop and refine ideas and viewpoint can still be successful. But they will have a difficult time replicating their skills in others. You can’t teach someone to have the same “gut feeling” as you.

Leading Through Communication

It is possible for a leader to lead without using written communication. We have examples of many leaders who were unable to read or write. However, leadership greatly depends on communication and in modern times much of our communication is written. Written communication gives people a source to refer back to. If you only communicate verbally, there is no real standard to refer to if someone has a question.

It is also much easier to hold people accountable for something that you’ve communicated in writing. By putting your thoughts into words you give people a concrete standard that they can reference. Making your thoughts concrete can help align everyone’s efforts toward the same goal.

Clarifying Your Thoughts

Writing also gives you the opportunity to clarify your thoughts and better understand what you really think in your subconscious. Writing gives a leader the chance to privately develop their way of looking at problems in a way that can be communicated to others. In this sense, writing gives leaders a method for organizing and clarifying their thoughts. It allows them to take what they know instinctively and make it something concrete that can be conveyed to others.

This clarifying process can be immensely helpful in explaining strategy. Often a good leader will know what to do instinctively. However, the instincts of a single person are difficult scale for a large organization. Writing down the thoughts behind your instincts can allow you to replicate your skills in others.

The writing process can help you understand your decision-making methods in a deeper way. This makes it easier to teach your way of doing things to others. Often it will provide you with deeper insights into how you can make better decisions as well.

Writing isn’t the most important skill for a leader to possess. However, it is a very valuable skill to develop and practice because it lets you replicate and improve your other skills.

Leadership trait theory is the idea that people are born with certain character traits or qualities. Since certain traits are associated with proficient leadership, it assumes that if you could identify people with the correct traits, you will be able to identify leaders and people with leadership potential.

Most of the time the traits are considered to be naturally part of a person’s personality from birth. From this standpoint, leadership trait theory tends to assume that people are born as leaders or not as leaders.

There is a lot of value in identifying the character traits associated with leadership. It is even more valuable to identify the character traits that followers look for in a leader. These traits would be the characteristics of an individual who is most likely to attract followers.

However, the idea that leadership traits are inborn and unchangeable appears to be incorrect. It is true that many of our dispositions and tendencies are influenced by our personalities and the way we are born. However, most people recognize that it is possible for someone to change their character traits for the worse. Someone who is known for being honest can learn to be deceitful. The whole idea of saying that someone was “corrupted” is based on the fact that people can learn bad character traits.

If people can learn bad character traits and become different than the way they are naturally through conditioning, it logically follows that they can learn good character traits as well. A person who is prone to being dishonest can learn to be honest. A person who avoids risks can learn to take risks. It may not be easy, but it can be done.

The book The Leadership Challenge identifies 20 character traits that are generally associated with good leaders. The top five traits are:

• Honest
• Inspiring
• Forward-Looking
• Competent
• Intelligent

These are all traits that someone can learn to implement. It may not be easy, but with practice you can become more inspiring, with practice you can become more honest, with practice you can become more competent.

What makes this less difficult than it first seems, is that these are character traits that followers are looking for in a leader. By simply displaying these character traits more consistently an individual is able to change how they are perceived. Sometimes it isn’t a problem with changing your internal characteristics—it is just an issue of displaying those characteristics more openly.

By focusing on your own character and developing traits associated with leadership, you can increase your ability to lead.

Functional leadership is model that concentrates on how leadership occurs, rather than focusing on who does the leading. It defines the types of behaviors that guide an organization and then looks at how those behaviors occur. Under this model, leadership is a distributed function. People at all levels can participate in guiding the organization. One of the cornerstones of this leadership model is its focus on how instead of who.

This approach has some tremendous advantages. The models that focus on who leads tend to look at the person with formal authority in an organization. In many situations, the person with formal authority is not the real leader. Sometimes there is no single “real” leader. Even an organization that appears to be floundering is being led. People are still making decisions and forming opinions.

The functional leadership model looks at how these types of decisions are being made—even when there is no single person who is acting as a leader. By focusing on the function of leadership, it is easier to see the stimuli that are actually influencing the behavior of the organization—even if the input is coming from informal and unlikely sources.

Functional leadership is often used to describe job positions where an individual is expected to take leadership responsibility without any delegated authority. In this sense, they are asked to take on functions of leadership by helping to guide a team or process without being put into a formal position. The up-side of this type of arrangement is that it can keep the individual’s focus on how to influence their team’s behavior instead of how to exert their authority. The down-side is that it can result in inefficiency because they may not have the authority to make needed changes.

John Adair’s “three circles” have heavily influenced the functional model of leadership. These three circles represent the areas where leadership functions occur. Those areas are:

1. Task
2. Team
3. Individual

In general, this model looks at how needs are met in these three areas. In most organizations, the formal leader meets some of the needs in these three areas. Some needs are met by individuals who are taking on the leadership function even if they have no formal leadership role.

By identifying the need areas, a list can be formed showing the things that must happen for leadership to occur. By looking at where these things are occurring in a functioning system, you can gain insight into the actual process that is taking place without being misled by the titles and formally assigned roles.