The 15 Skills of Leadership and Management: Understanding the Characteristics and Needs of the Group

A characteristic is a trait, quality, or property distinguishing an individual, group, or type of person. To understand the characteristics of his group the leader must understand two fundamentals of groups. First, the leader must realize that there are three divisions within each person. They are: who he is, who he thinks he is, and who others perceive him to be. These are not lofty, philosophical concepts. A person’s characteristics can be explained in this form due to perception. Each person has a real image and a perception of that real image. They also have perceptions of the real images of others. This does not mean that people’s real images are always hidden from themselves and others. This just means that they are filtered through a person’s perception. The image has to be related to previous personal experience and preconceived beliefs so it can be understood. If the leader poses these divisions as questions to himself, he will see their simplicity in explaining a person’s characteristics. For example: Who am I? – I am the leader. I am in charge of the group and in control of the situation. I am responsible for all that goes on here. Who do I think I am? – I am a strong, confident young man with many good ideas and passion for my work. I am a very likeable person and have a good relationship with my group. I have some weaknesses, but I am aware of them and in time I will improve. Who do other perceive me to be? – He is good at the business end. Everything is organized and easy to understand, but his approach is often rigid and unfriendly. We don’t mind working with him, but he lacks kindness and finesse. Unfortunately the leader will never know the real answer to the third question, but he may be able to get hints or formulate a good idea.

Second, the leader needs to be aware of the typical stereotypes that appear in every group. The most notable include: the sycophant, the dissenter, the sloth, the overly zealous, and the manipulator. The sycophant is the yes-man or the leader’s toady. He agrees to everything the leader says, no matter what it is, and makes the leader feel more confident about his decision, yet this is a false sense of confidence. The sycophant’s agenda is to increase his prestige by always being near the leader.

The dissenter disagrees with most, if not all, of the directions the group pursues. He expresses his conflicting views frequently and may slow progress. The leader must not lose patience with this person, his different views on the situation will often prove useful.

The sloth is the group member that sits furthest from the leader, doesn’t pay attention to the group discussion, is regularly late to meetings, and produces inadequate work. If the leader finds a sloth in his group, his best plan of action is to find what the sloth can do well or better than any group member and let him do mostly that. He may also want to exert some extra effort on motivating the sloth.

Next is the overly-zealous. Although having an entire group of this type would produce outstanding productivity, this person tends to require more attention that the others and likes to monopolize on the leader’s time. He is often more concerned with the details of the project and spends too much time trying to do everything perfectly. He will also exhibit the most signs of hero worship. The leader can best utilize this person if he supplies him with plenty of work and has him do it in a place that is furthest from where the leader is working. Doing this will not cause him to feel angry or out of the loop because having plenty of work to do will make him feel like he is the most productive member of the group and he will draw pride from this.

Finally, the manipulator, or mutinous; the leader must be watchful of this person’s actions at all times and try to remove him from the group if possible. A manipulator’s agenda is to overthrow the leader and gain his power or befriend the leader and make him into a puppet. The manipulator will infect the minds of the group members with distorted truth and negative thoughts about the leader. He will try to convince them that they are slaves for the leader and he does not truly care about them or their well being, or he will try to become and advisor to the leader, always giving him the wrong advice and causing the group to fail until the opportunity for him to seize power arises. Another possibility is he will blackmail the leader and use that to force the leader to bend to his will. Regardless, the leader must be very cautious in dealing with this person.

A need is a want, a requirement, or the lack of something that would be useful in a person’s life. A group’s needs are indicative of the individual members’ needs and the work that they are doing; thus the leader must understand what his group needs to continue working efficiently. This point is easily illustrated by Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs model. Maslow used the following model to indicate that a person has five levels of needs which they need to satisfy in order to work well and feel confident.

Stage 1: Physiological needs – eat, sleep, water, supplies, work space

Stage 2: Safety needs – financial, economic, physical, future

Stage 3: Social needs – acceptance by the group and the leader

Stage 4: Esteem needs – status, self-respect, independence, purpose

Stage 5: Self-actualization needs – achievement, reach potential, confidence, goals

When the group members appear to be suffering, pre-occupied, or not performing at their peak; the leader should consider this model in deciding where some of their needs may not have been met lately.

I’m glad to say that during my internship I did not have any manipulators, but I did have one extreme case of an overly-zealous person. He was always early, wanted to leave exactly at the end of his shift, and became very upset if he could not go on break at exactly 4 and a half hours into his shift. While this irritated me, I knew that he was concerned about the minor labor laws and I had to comply. I quickly realized that if I did not have a position for him to go to immediately, he would stand wherever was most inconvenient for me and want to talk about the park’s policy and procedures or tell me about some rule breaker he recently caught. He often expressed to me his disapproval for the ineptness of the other crew members and their lack of commitment for their jobs. If he felt I wasn’t going to do anything about it, then he would take it upon himself to reprimand the crew member. All my crew members quickly came to resent him and complained about his attitude often. To help the situation, I gave him more tasks where he could work by himself. This eased the crew’s tension, but his attitude never improved, and neither did his relationship with the rest of the crew.

I made two attempts to discuss his actions with him, but during both, he began to quote his duties from the training manual in his defense and inquired as to why I wanted him to disregard his original training. I decided then that he was too headstrong and dedicated to the letter of the law that I could only utilize his abilities and trying to change his attitude would require too much effort.

Aside from this, my crew’s needs were simple. They needed water, protection from the sun and heat, breaks, security from the guests, comradery with their fellow crew members, and praise and respect from their supervisors. If I could provide these in decent amounts, then they felt confident and had the potential to succeed.