2 What employers look for
Employers place an emphasis on different leadership skills depending on their context, as can be demonstrated by reviewing a variety of leadership frameworks. You will now look at five frameworks from a variety of sectors, from healthcare to corporate finance.
- In the healthcare sector, the NHS Healthcare Leadership Model is made up of nine leadership dimensions:
- Inspiring shared purpose
- Leading with care
- Evaluating information
- Connecting our service
- Sharing the vision
- Engaging the team
- Holding to account
- Developing capability
- Influencing for results.
- In the charity sector, the Oxfam Core Humanitarian Competencies Framework includes a competency domain, ‘Demonstrating Leadership in Humanitarian Response’, which lists the following competencies and core behaviours:
- Self-awareness
- Motivating and influencing others
- Critical judgement.
- In Higher Education, the Open University Leadership Competency Framework contains six themes:
- Leading others to achieve results
- Strategic and analytical thinking
- Planning and organising
- Influencing and relationship building
- Driving and embracing change
- Student and customer focus.
- From the private sector, PwC is a professional services company providing specialist advice to businesses. One of the five attributes in their PwC Professional framework is ‘Whole leadership’, which is explained as follows: ‘We need you to lead yourself and others, regardless of your grade, by making a real difference in the work you do. This means delivering results in a responsible, authentic, resilient, inclusive and passionate way.
- Do you learn from your opportunities and take the time to develop your personal approach to work?
- Do you lead others to be the best they can be, whether you’re part of a team or leading one?
- Do you act with integrity and uphold professional standards at all times?’
- The technology sector often takes a less formal approach to listing leadership qualities, for example, an in-house research project at Google came up with the following manager behaviours – listed in order of importance:
- Is a good coach
- Empowers team and does not micromanage
- Expresses interest/concern for team members’ success and personal well-being
- Is productive and results-oriented
- Is a good communicator
- Helps with career development
- Has a clear vision/strategy for the team
- Has important technical skills that help him/her advise the team.
Common themes across all these frameworks here are motivating/empowering/influencing; achieving results; and planning/evaluating/analysing. Other themes reflect the priorities of the different sectors, for example, integrity is crucial to a financial services organisation and care is high on the NHS’s list.