Organizational Leadership: Understanding, Development, and Practice

A leader is not just someone with formal authority or informal influence. A leader is a person who sets the direction for a team or organization, possessing a higher level of vision than a manager and holding greater authority than an employee with leadership potential.

Manager and leader are distinct concepts:
• A manager coordinates the work of a team,
• A leader defines the strategic course and inspires forward movement.

Classic leadership theories identify three approaches to defining a leader:
• Charismatic — a leader is born with innate qualities;
• Behavioral — a leader is defined by their style of interaction;
• Situational — a leader emerges only in specific circumstances.

However, none of these approaches fully answer who a leader is and how to effectively work with them.

Key Aspects of Working with Leaders

Psychological work with leaders often focuses on individual coaching or counseling. This is because leaders seldom need basic skill development; rather, they seek solutions to specific management or personal challenges.

Nevertheless, challenges arise both in working with informal leaders and managers lacking clear leadership potential.

Two Dimensions of Leadership:
• Individual — personal qualities of the leader: energy, ambition, responsibility, willpower;
• Social — abilities related to interacting with others: motivation, empathy, managing group dynamics.

In reality, these dimensions overlap. For example, an informal leader may lack public speaking skills, while a manager may struggle with goal-setting and time management.

Thus, working with leaders and managers requires a comprehensive approach combining training, coaching, and psychological support.

Recommendations for Working with Leaders and Managers:

Working with a leader possessing both formal authority and informal influence:
• Sotering — a unique managerial therapy based on philosophical principles, focused on developing phenomena such as “faith,” “will,” “vision,” “attention,” and “power”;
• Coaching — a positive therapy aimed at achieving specific goals defined by the leader with the consultant’s support, which can be organizational, personal, or creative;
• Various psychotherapeutic techniques — including psychoanalytic, Gestalt, behavioral, and humanistic methods tailored individually based on the leader’s issues;
• Individual consulting — psychological, economic, or other professional advice to assist the leader in solving their challenges.

Working with managers developing leadership potential or informal leaders without formal positions:
This involves several key stages:
• Diagnosis — conducted in groups or individually to identify leadership qualities using surveys, assessment trainings, or competency evaluations;
• Leadership training — delivered through individual therapy or group programs aimed at developing leadership traits (willpower, ethics, confidence) and skills to unite, direct, and sustain a team;
• Sustaining development — establishing mechanisms for ongoing autonomous self-development.

Working with emerging teams and young professionals:
• Training managers to work with leadership, creative, or innovative teams;
• Implementing motivation programs, from individual plans to onboarding systems;
• Organizing competency-based contests within the organization;
• Conducting diagnostics and team-building for effective communication systems;
• Branding and cultivating organizational ideology.

Many organizational owners and top managers often ask: “Is it even worthwhile to encourage leadership development within the company?”

The answer is clear. In a competitive environment, organizations striving for growth and effectiveness rely on leaders as the primary driving force. Leaders are the most active, initiative-taking, motivated, and inspiring individuals who see projects through to completion and relentlessly pursue excellence.

With a properly structured leadership system, motivation framework, and a unified set of values and goals aligned with the leadership team, you gain an unbeatable resource.

The LabHR is ready to help you achieve this.