Modern Leadership Styles: Part 1

As the business world has grown and evolved the flow of information has increased to warp speed, and the base of knowledge by which people make decisions has grown immensely.  These events have had the biggest effect on leadership and its application since the inception of the term mainly due to the fact that it is very tough to lead a population that feels that it knows everything.  From this, though, has risen several different new styles of leadership and has spurned behavioral scientists to take a very detailed look at a practice that they previously had thought to be rudimentary.  One of the main leadership styles that has emerged from these studies is the Skills Approach, a way of leading that focuses on the skills of the workforce that need to be effectively developed in order for the everyday tasks of the firm to be executed sufficiently.  The skills approach focuses on what you need to be able to do, not what you can or cannot do already, or how your personality fits in with everyone else.  The skills approach requires a leader who can see a glimmer of hope in everybody because not everybody can be a CEO, some people will have to be in middle management, some people will have to do back office work, and others will have to do sales.  The leader who takes the Skills Approach will find the right role for everyone and constantly be searching for ways to teach people how to improve their personal skills so that they in turn can improve their role within the company.

In the movie, "The Boiler Room" Ben Affleck plays a upper-level manager who is in-charge of new employee hiring and training.  He finds a rag-tag group of young professionals and trains them to be some of New York's leading young stockbrokers.  In the clips below we see Affleck's character lead his troops to improve their skills within their job; at first they must find a way to be hired by the firm, then they must pass a licensing test, and finally they are required to begin opening new accounts in order to stay on board.  But each step of the way, even in his gruesome tongue, Affleck is leading his employees to do better and telling them exactly how to improve each step of the way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8JkSEvyFhM