Developing A Leadership Competency Model: Fill & Download for Free

As an introverted employee, I’m by nature skeptical when leaders in our company ask me about my work. The instinct is: “why does he not trust me.” It doesn’t matter that as a internal communication specialist, I know the importance of two-way communication models and why it’s vital for managers to know what is going on.As a team leader, you are responsible for your employees performance. You feel the need to help your team, make sure the are on the right track.Most people are like me. We don’t like to be interrupted by our manager. And making a false move here can do a lot more harm than good. Handling employees like me is the cornerstone of having a positive impact on your team’s efforts and a key to having a high performing team.

Leadership competency models are a hoax.Designed to create clarity, competency models reek with complexity.These models outline dozens of skills you need to be a successful leader. For each skill, they define 5 levels that you need to overcome. Each level presents a statement that explains what you look like when you achieve that level. To master each sentence, you need 6 months to a year.Let's do the math. To be a successful leader, you only need about 20-30 years. This is nonsense. Leadership success is not about building arbitrary skills.Leadership success is about outcomes.It is about conquering the continent.It is about delivering on the revenue targets committed to the shareholders.It is about winning a basketball championship.It is about landing a rocket on Mars.It is about making the impossible possible.So, let's stop wasting time thinking about the things we need to be successful leaders. Let's start thinking about the outcomes that leadership demands from us. Let's make outcomes guide our leadership development.After all, why waste 20 years to become a leader when you can do it today.

(Pakistani opinion, based on my visits and readings on China)Yep. China will still be able to compete with the US.Make no mistake, the US military if fully unleashed against the PRC could lay waste to their cities, infrastructure and economic zones and cause immense damage to their economy and global standing.But the source of Chinese power isn’t their bridges or apartment complexes or their coal plants and ports.It’s the political system they have in place which has delivered a meritocratic bureaucracy par excellence that has overseen the largest sustained economic growth in a modern nation state in recent history.It’s the party structure that has developed support from grassroots levels to top political office and unified all organs of the state from the military to the judiciary to the political class.It’s the political system that has subdued troublesome areas like Xinjiang and Tibet through federalizing in those regions and providing regional autonomy and economic growth to offset any separatist tendencies as well as carefully managing any regionalism tendencies.It’s the party that has successfully weeded out both far Left, Crypto-Maoist reactionaries like Bo Xilai and ultra-progressive, ‘Rightest’ liberalizers drawing inspiration from Gorbavich style reforms and potentially causing instability.And at the same time, the political system that has carefully managed the balance and turf war between hard progressives wanting to push for more Westernization and Far left Crypto Maoists who wanted to bring back more Mao-style policies like Party officials working in farms etc.It’s the party that has managed perhaps the largest single shift in a political party’s base in modern history when the CCP in the post-Deng era recognized that the party was losing it’s old base and had to contend with 5 different problem groups that were emerging: Rural farmers and peasants, Demobilized soldiers, Intellectuals and students, minority religious groups and urban workers. The political system in China was able to manage the disaffection of these social groups while moving the party’s base to the rising middle class, urban, educated workers in a growing knowledge and industrial economy.It’s also a political system with vigorous academic debates going on in internal circles that are surprisingly technical and philosophical at the same time and a far cry from what i see in several democracies at the moment. How many of us can even imagine Trump or Nigel Farage or Nawaz Sharif writing and publishing their own white papers which discuss topics as complex as maintaining market competitions at a time of strict government control of the economy through powerful SOEs? The Chinese leaders do that. The intellectual discourse is quite nuanced and in depth but i suppose this can be expected when the political machinery is managed mostly be technocrats.It’s a political system that is able to quickly identify core issues of disaffection (housing shortages and environmental pollution) and quickly gear the massive machinery of the state to satisfy the populace and retain legitimacy in their eyes. Read up on old articles about when China launched their first stock exchanges under the PRC. People rioted and attacked stock brokers when they felt they were being cheated and not sold stock certificates and PRC officials were quick to descend the next day to apologize in person and assure people that stock certificates would be issued in an orderly manner. It’s a government that constantly strives to placate and satisfy it’s populace (which is perhaps why outsiders are incredulous over why the government hasn’t been overthrown yet).It’s a political system capable of developing consensus, implementing long term projects successfully rather than face constant leadership and policy changes, mitigate infighting and pursuing a well thought out vision for the nation.I could go on.But the key element to understand here is that the political system in China has been the primary driving force which has lifted the nation and made it a challenge to the US in the first place.A long drawn out independence struggle forged a national identity. A socialist take over broke down the old colonial structures which kept the country subjugated by foreign powers and parasitic exploiters. A long period of political and cultural strife effectively established a powerful state structure autonomous from control of interest groups and ethnic politics. And a reform movement was carefully rolled out in a system capable of embracing change and implemented with minimal turmoil. And then those reforms were sustained, tweaked and adapted to changing circumstances as global politics and economics shifted.If the US goes to war with China, they can destroy their infrastructure and their economy, but short of a nuclear war, they can’t destroy this political system through regime change. There wont be ‘Dancing in the streets’ as US warplanes bomb Beijing or ‘friendly freedom fighters’ ready to drag the current Chinese president to his death, Libya style. In fact, a war of aggression might further strengthen the political legitimacy of the current political system which has already delivered so much.The US can at the moment, grind down Chinese defenses and lay waste to their economy and infrastructure. The military gap is still too significant. No one has any doubts about that.But the political system in China will remain in place and rebuild and rise again to continue challenging the US.The US political system ,however, will still remain the way it is. Crony capitalism will continue to reduce taxes on the rich and the corporations leading to a declining middle class. Industries will continue to offshore and automate leading to a loss of an industrial base and high unemployment. Reactionaries and demagogues with only ethnic and religious politics to offer will continue to rise to the top with no proper economic agenda. The US will continue to be run by the Reality TV style politics of the current Republican party while the Democrats will rest on their smug liberal laurels and their late night show zingers and lose election after election. Far right political movements will continue to drive racial and ethnic conflicts. Establishment war mongers will continue to pursue foreign wars as part of their imperialistic agenda while the economy drains back home. The US infrastructure will continue to rot while debt continues to pile.In short, a war between the US and China will be the equivalent of a cancer ridden sick man shooting a healthy young athlete. The athlete may recover and bounce back from the wound. The Cancer ridden man still has his cancer though.A war at home to radically reform and restructure the decaying political system may be too hard for the current US political leadership. Which is why another foreign war abroad to distract and unify the US populace may be the easier option yet again for American leaders. It’s not a sustainable strategy though. Bomb China and set them back a while, they will still bounce back because their political system, which is the source of their strength, is still in place.Upon independence, Pakistan would soon stumble upon some of the most massive economic growth in our history and a long period of modernization which was the envy of the Asia world. Other countries would send their economists to study our model of economic planning. Our airlines would fly to Thailand and the crew greeted by the Thai King. Our leaders would fly to Tokyo and be feted by the Japanese emperor. The English Queen drove through our streets of Karachi. Our president playfully slapped the American president.Now, the deputy assistant of a two bit regional governor comes to receive our prime minister at the airport.Why? Because we failed to develop a political system that endured and produced results. We were plagued by infighting, unable to restrain reactionaries and ideologues on either left or right wing and pursued stupid pointless wars abroad.Our leaders failed to develop a consistent economic policy, sometimes privatizing, sometimes nationalizing. We over threw one leader after another till our elections lost all legitimacy. Our rule of law went out the window and ethnic violence arose in the void of working political machinery.We lack unity and common shared purpose, lack visionary leadership, lack a political system that carries our rule based behavior in accordance to a well thought out system. We lack the ability to bring all stake holders together to forge sustainable policy and lack any academic or intellectual discourse among our leaders. We lack long term plans and legitimacy in our political system. One could say we are the opposite of China.A weak Pakistan is the result of a lack of a powerful, well thought out, legitimate political system that brings stake holders together, has a system in place that all follow and produces results.Countries like Iran, Pakistan etc emerged unscathed from the scars of the second World War while Japan and Germany lay in ruins. The difference between us and them was that they developed a political system that sustained itself, delivered results, had the legitimacy of the populace and produced leaders with a vision for the nation.In the mean time we stumbled from one coup to another, hanged elected prime ministers, rigged elections and laid waste to our political system thanks to internal strife, lack of unifying elements and so on. And all that political instability produced our current weak state.If you want to another example of how two different political systems can produce drastically different results, look no further than the two Koreas. Two people so similar, yet in such different states because of the different politics of the two. Different politics producing vastly different economic and social states.I do not have any ill will towards America or Americans in general. But given my experience in my country and everything i have learned so far in this life, i fail to see how beating China will stem the rot that eats away at America’s foundations and precipitates it’s collapse. The CPC will drag China back up to it’s feet after any military defeat the US inflicts on it. But the US will still have…well…Image source: Donald Trump is Seriously Funny, and, Well, Plain Serious • Nyack News and ViewsAnd all the dysfunction he represents at the moment. And a grim omen of what awaits in the future of US politics as well.