THE SOLUTION
leadership science
makes leadership a hard skill
leadership science explains the why
Functional understanding gives us different tools that we can use to lead people. However, to be effective, we need to use the right tool at the right time.
This requires an understanding of the why behind leadership.
As leaders grow, they add more and more tools into their tool box. It becomes increasingly important to see how all these tools work together. This holistic understanding begins with leadership science.
science makes leadership a hard skill
The purpose of science is to understand why things happen. The key principle enabling this is universal causality – meaning that there are clear and definite rules that govern reality, and that these rules are the same everywhere.
These rules show us how seemingly unrelated phenomena originate from the same root causes. For example, biology reveals how all life arises from genes, physics tell us that all matter is made of atoms, and chemistry describes how complex molecules come from simple elements.
In the same way, leadership science shows how all leadership can be traced back to the same set of root causes – simple first principles that explain complex leadership concepts from self-leadership to organizational effectiveness.
This holistic concept of leadership enables leadership to be taught as a hard skill.
hard skills are the foundation for professional leadership
Leadership is usually regarded as an art relying on soft skills. However, professional artists – such as painters, musicians and architects – also possess a foundation of hard skills acquired through formal education.
Soft skills alone are not sufficient to formally educate leaders. Soft skills have unclear or variable outcomes - the same action can produce inconsistent results, and when we do get the result we want, it might be due to chance or unknown factors.
Therefore, soft skills are developed through subjective interpretation - through trial-and-error, each individual creates their own version of the skill. Therefore, soft skills cannot provide a common foundation of leadership.
On the other hand, hard skills link specific actions to specific outcomes. This is possible because of the universal causality behind leadership science – the common root causes that apply to all leadership scenarios.
Therefore, science provides objective knowledge that everyone can agree on. This enables the creation of reproducible standards – which is the basis of professional leadership.
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THE FUNCTIONAL TRAP
why we need a paradigm shift
