8.2 Business and moral leaders  (Page 3/13)

Skills sought for good business leadership

• Technical Skills . These include skills in quantitative and qualitative methods. Rakesh Khurana in his book, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands, points out that much of business research is divided between methods and principles taken from sociology and those taken from economics. One important import from economics is what has been termed by many as "homo economicus," the view described above that human beings are rational self-interest maximizers and, therefore, incapable of altruistic actions or motives.
• Interpersonal skills . Quinn and Petrick are quite interesting here. Their list includes “emotional expressivity, sensitivity and control, social expressivity, political sensitivity, control and manipulation, affective communication, and persuasiveness.” These strong social skills would not be as important for engineers and other professionals but are essential for business leaders, especially managers. Consider some of the interpersonal skills deployed using the ethics tests we have studied this semester. This would include role-talking and empathy deployed in the reversibility test, imaginative projection of experience as deployed by the harm test, and the ability to imagine and project a moral exemplar into a concrete situation, a skill deployed in the publicity test.
• Conceptual skills . These include “anticipation of changing trends and opportunities, diagnostic analysis of problems, integrative prognosis of ongoing improvement and/or problem resolution, proficiency in conceptualization of complex and ambiguous relationships, creativity in idea generation and articulation, and sound logical reasoning.” This seems to overlap considerably with the problem-solving framework that we have studied this semester: problem specification, solution generation, soluting testing, and solution implementation.
• Administrative skills include “effective work organization, prioritized operational obligations, efficient and timely in-basket processing of information, rapid routine decision making, constant monitoring of performance, solid control of financial resources, and sharp attention to detail.” Assigning work tasks, for example, would draw heavily from non-linear, systems thinking. One would have to integrate such variables as areas of expertise, ability to get along with other members of the team, current and previous work assignments, expertise and how this expertise complements the backgrounds of the other members of the team.

Argument that business leadership is built on moral leadership

Argument that a bad human cannot be a good leader

• Premise 1 . To argue that a bad person can be a good leader is to relegate leadership to effectiveness, i.e., a good leader is someone who gets things done, no matter what.
• Premise 2 : But this separates means from ends and reduces leadership to devising means to predetermined or pre-established ends.
• Conclusion 1 : But this contradicts the lists presented above that leaders have vision, inspire others, and take responsibility for their actions. It also contradicts the idea that leaders envision ends as well as devise means.
• Conclusion 2 : If an argument leads to a contradictory conclusion, then it must be rejected and its contradictory affirmed in its place. Hence, business leaders not only are efficient but they are also morally good.