Today I had the privilege of addressing the graduating cohort of about forty-five students and their police trainers from the Natural Born Leader’s programme being run by Greater Manchester Police. This great programme takes young people on a week-long course to develop their natural leadership skills.
The speaker before me was Duane Bryan, who was a candidate on this years ‘The Apprentice’ and he talked about his experiences on Alan Sugar’s show.
I was asked to explain how I had ended up as a business leader and to wrap up the week for the students by summing up my thoughts on leadership.
Leadership ultimately relies on an ability to understand what drives people, and I made reference to one of my favourite animations from the RSA “Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us”.
In brief, I asserted that people are motivated by 3 things (the alternative PMA definition):
Purpose – the belief that what they are doing is for a reason and will ultimately have impact.
Mastery – the ability to continue to improve to a point of mastering a skill.
Autonomy – the authority to make the decisions required to achieve your goals.
And leaders display 5 key qualities:
Cohesion – the ability to inspire a group of people towards a common purpose.
Decisiveness – the acceptance of the value of failure, empowering a leader to make decisions.
Persistence – the determination to give strategies enough time to succeed.
Opportunism – the ability to recognise and grasp opportunities as they present themselves.
Service – the genuine desire to produce positive outcomes for those you lead.
The whole talk is embedded below –
[youtube http://youtu.be/e_5uhpN8aP8]
Hi, i had the privilege of being in the audience on friday, and would just like to say how inspirational the talk was by the speakers. It was a honpur to here the stories of these people, and how they succeeded into very succsssful businessmen!
Thanks for the feedback Josh!