SO YOU WANT TO BE A LEADER.....CMON GET A LIFE

So you want to be a leader? There's certainly no shortage of advice to guide you. At the last count Amazon stocked no fewer than 7,000 books on leadership and a welter of consulting firms have sprung up to elucidate the mysteries of the perfect leader's mindset. It seems the main problem faced by wannabe chiefs lies in choosing which set of principles to follow.What is indisputable is that great leaders forge great organisations. 'Having a manager who can lead makes an extraordinary difference to the success of a company,' says Sir Gerry Robinson, the former Granada chief who now combines a career as a management fixer with the chairmanship of Allied Domecq. But how do you think yourself into becoming one? You can't, says Robinson. 'The leadership spark - and it is a spark - is very specific to particular individuals. If you haven't got it, you are likely to struggle if put into a leadership role.'True leaders, he says, emerge spontaneously. 'Most people who have the capacity to lead, want to lead.' They can certainly be helped to develop these innate skills, he argues, but only if 'the promise is there'.'Leadership is a strange skill and needs to be separated from whether or not a person makes good judgements,' he adds. At its most basic, leadership is about persuading other people 'to want to do what you want them to do'. But that, on its own, can be dangerous. 'There are leaders who have been brilliant at getting people to follow them, but who have made terrible judgements, from Hitler downwards.' The ideal corporate leader combines the charisma needed to inspire others with sound judgement. 'The worst thing you can have is somebody with tremendous leadership skills but very little business acumen, because they can take everyone into some terrible situations.'The gentle touchThat may go some way towards explaining the recent seismic shift in thinking about good leadership: the demise of the all-conquering Alphatype leader. Thinking like a leader, according to the prevailing view, is no longer about bludgeoning followers into submission through sheer force of will, so much as the ability to govern by consensus and lead by example. Buccaneering bravado is out, thoughtful collaboration is in. As Fortune magazine pointed out last year, the mantra for today's chief executive is not so much 'admire my might' as 'admire my soul'.If that kind of touchy-feely style makes you cringe, consider the back story. Until the end of the 20th Century, the unchallenged rule was that big equals best. But a combination of factors - such as the increased volatility of markets, technological advances and growing competition from the new economies of the East - has seen a pronounced change in the type of organisations enjoying the greatest commercial success. A greater premium is now placed on qualities such as speed, agility and inventiveness.The implications for leadership are profound, says Professor Lynda Gratton of the London Business School. The world has grown 'too complicated and joined-up' to accommodate the old command and control mindset. 'Companies need cooperative environments to work effectively.' And, since corporate cultures start and end with the behaviour of the CEO, 'the most crucial competency of senior leaders is being collaborative.'If you are aggressive and highly competitive, people think that's how they should behave and you destroy the opportunity to create a collaborative culture. You need to be good at working with people, good at sharing your knowledge.'Learn to lead The new view of companies as primarily a series of teams places a much greater emphasis on the role of the leader as mentor. As a result leaders need to think in an emotionally intelligent way if they are to bring out the best in their people. The good news, say psychologists, is that this skill owes as much to experience as it does to innate ability. In other words, great leaders aren't just born, they can be made.'My view of leadership is that it's 50% nature and 50% nurture,' says Graham Lee, director of the business psychology consultancy OCG. Dr Daniel Goleman, the man who put the concept on the map when he published Emotional Intelligence in 1995, agrees. 'It's not like IQ... it's not that you have it, or you don't. These are plastic skills and the brain is designed to improve upon them. Anyone, theoretically, can get better.' In his follow-up book, Social Intelligence, Goleman homes in on the kind of mindset needed for effective leadership. It boils down to a mix of empathetic skills. 'Some people might be fantastic at recognising what clients need, others might be very good at feeling the mood of a room.' Some excel at networking, others have an edge at understanding the political dynamics of a company. 'If you're at a high level in business, odds are you're pretty good at many of those.'The key to developing these skills is simple, he argues. Ultimately it's about listening. 'Listening poorly is the common cold of social intelligence. And it's being made worse by technology. To have ‘a human moment’ you need to be fully present. You have to be away from your laptop and put down your BlackBerry.'The heartening thing about this theory is that it corresponds so well to hardwon experience on the ground. BA's sometimes controversial former chairman, Lord King, was labelled a Luddite for his refusal to embrace computers in his own office, but few ever doubted his ability either to lead the company or to foster a unique esprit de corps among staff.Boss of the people Lord Kalms, the no-nonsense trader who created the Dixons retail juggernaut, agrees. Effective delegation is often seen as a sine qua non of great leadership but, as Kalms argues, 'the boss still has to know everything that goes on in the business. He or she has to have eyes at the back of his head, and be very sensitive.' A good grapevine system is essential, 'and to achieve that, a boss needs a lot of mates'.When you consider that only a few years ago the debate on leadership centred around the 'sociopathic' traits of CEOs, it is clear there has been quite a revolution. Yet few would deny that truly outstanding leaders have an intangible 'it' factor (psychologists call it 'resonance') that others fail to replicate no matter how much they might strive to think like a leader. Nevertheless, studies show that the old adage of horses for courses may still have its place. Ebullient leaders of the classic Alpha variety tend to make more wide-reaching changes and carry out more and bigger deals than their emotionally intelligent counterparts. And their results are more extreme: they either win or lose big time. The best course, therefore, might be to match the next leader's personality to a company's growthcycle - acknowledging that while consolidation requires more 'human' skills, expansion might well be an Alpha forte.What is certainly true is that most of the world's most influential leaders continue to defy the theorists. When INSEAD business school professor Manfred Kets de Vries analysed the personality traits most frequently found in blue-chip chiefs for his book The Leader on the Couch, by far the most common was narcissism. That trait, of course, is a natural constituent of the human psyche on a spectrum ranging from 'healthy self-esteem' to the controlling, anti-social and paranoid behaviours characteristic of 'pathological egotism'.Many of the world's most obviously successful leaders veer towards the more extreme end of the scale, says de Vries. Bear that in mind next time you catch yourself preening in front of the mirror.