Effective leaders take personal interest in the long-term development of their employees and use tact and other social skills to encourage employees to achieve their best. It is not about being 'nice' or 'understanding' - it is about tapping into individual motivations in the interest of furthering organisational goals. In a groundbreaking article in the early 1960s, W.C. Prentice rejected the notion of leadership as the exercise of power and force or the possession of extraordinary analytical skills. Prentice defined leadership as 'the accomplishment of a goal through the direction of human assistants' and a successful leader as one who can understand people's motivations and enlist employee participation in ,a way that marries individual needs and interests to the group's purpose. He called for democratic leadership that gives employees opportunities to learn and grow - without creating anarchy. Problems and Illusions Rudimentary forms of leadership rely solely on a single source of satisfaction such as monetary rewards or the alleviation of fears about various kinds of insecurity. The task is adhered to because following orders will lead to a pay slip, and deviation will lead to unemployment. Arguably, such forms of motivation are effective within limits. In a mechanical way they do attach the worker's self-interest to the interest of the employer or group. But no one can doubt the weakness of such simple techniques. Human beings are not machines with a single set of push buttons. When their complex responses to love, prestige, independence, achievement and group membership are not recognised on the job, they perform at best as robots who bring far less than their maximum efficiency to the task, and at worst as rebellious slaves who consciously or unconsciously sabotage the activities they are supposed to be furthering. Prentice observes that it is ironic that our basic image of 'the leader' is often that of the military commander, because most of the time, at least - military organisations are the purest example of unimaginative applications of simple reward and punishment as motivating devices. However, in defence of the military, two observations are relevant: The military undeniably has special problems because men get killed and have to be replaced; there are important reasons for treating them uniformly and mechanically. Clarity about duties and responsibilities, as maximised by the autocratic chain of command is essential to warfare and any departure from an essentially military type of leadership can be considered to be a form of anarchy. Relations with People When leaders succeed it will be because they have learned two basic lessons: Men are complex, and men are different. Human beings respond not only to the traditional carrot and stick but also to ambition, patriotism, love of the good and the beautiful, boredom, self-doubt, and many more dimensions and patterns of thought and feeling that make them 'Homo Sapiens.' But the strength and importance of these interests are not the same for every worker, nor is the degree to which they can be satisfied in their job. To the extent that the leader's circumstances and skill permit them to respond to such individual patterns, they will be better able to create genuinely intrinsic interest in the work that they are charged with getting done. And in the final analysis the ideal organisation should have workers at every level reporting to someone whose span of authority is small enough to enable them know as human beings those who report to them. Pitfalls of Perception For followers to recognise their leader as she really is may be as difficult as it is for her to understand them completely. Some of the worst difficulties in relationships between superiors and subordinates come from misperceiving reality. So much of what we understand in the world around us is coloured by the conceptions and prejudices we start with. Our view of our employer or superior may be so coloured by expectations based on the behaviour of other bosses that facts may not appear in the same way to her and to us. Many failures in leadership can be traced to oversimplified misperceptions on the part of the worker or to failures of the superior to recognise the context or frame of reference within which the subordinate will understand managerial actions. In business, a worker may perceive an offer of increased authority as a dangerous removal from the safety of assured, though gradual, promotion. A change in channels of authority or reporting, no matter how valuable in increasing efficiency, may be thought of a personal challenge or affront. The introduction of labour-saving process may be perceived as a threat to one's job. A new fringe benefit may be regarded as an excuse not to pay higher salaries, and so on. Too often, the superior is entirely unprepared for these interpretations, and they seem to her stupid, dishonest, or perverse - or all three. But the successful leader will have prepared for such responses. She will have known that many of her workers have been brought up to consider their employers as their natural enemies, and that habit has made it a second nature for them to 'act like an employee' in this respect and always to be suspicious of otherwise friendly overtures from above. Credit: Capt. (retd.) Sam Addah The writer is a Lecturet; GIMPA aquasi2000@yahoo.com Saddaih@gimpa.edu.gh