Northouse, Leadership 9e
SAGE Publishing, 2022
Lecture Notes
Chapter 3: Skills Approach
Learning Objectives
3-2 Explain how the skills approach works.
3-4 Recognize the criticisms of the skills approach.
3-5 Explain how you can use the skills approach to strengthen your leadership position.
Annotated Chapter Outline
I. Description
A. Skills approach takes a leader-centered perspective on leadership.
i. In contrast with the trait approach, the focus is on skills and abilities that can be
learned and developed.
B. Three-Skill Approach
i. Katz (1955) believed effective administration depends on three basic personal
skills.
a. These skills (what one can accomplish) are independent from traits
ii. Technical skills are knowledge about and proficiency in a specific type of work or
activity.
a. Competencies in a specialized area.
b. Analytical ability.
iii. Human skills are knowledge about and ability to work with people.
a. Differ from technical skills, which have to do with working with things.
b. Help a leader to work effectively with followers, peers, and superiors.
c. Also allow leaders to assist group members in working cooperatively
Northouse, Leadership 9e
SAGE Publishing, 2022
iv. Conceptual skills are the ability to work with ideas and concepts.
a. Technical skills deal with things and human skills deal with people, but
conceptual skills are much more abstract.
v. Three classes of skills: technical, human, and conceptual.
a. Leaders must have all three, but different skills have different levels of
C. Skills Model
i. Product of the early 1990s based on research on more than 1,800 U.S. Army
officers of a wide range of grades (second lieutenant to colonel).
a. Main goal: To explain the underlying elements of effective performance.
ii. Some questions asked by skills model researchers included:
iii. A capability model of leadership.
a. Capability models examine the relationship between a leader’s
knowledge and skills (capabilities) and the leader’s performance.
iv. Skills approaches frame leadership as the capabilities that make effective
leadership possible.
a. Contrasts with other models that focus on what leaders do.
v. Mumford’s skill-based model has five components: competencies, individual
attributes, career experiences, environmental influences, and leadership
outcomes.
vi. Individual attributes include two types of cognitive ability, motivation, and
personality.
a. General cognitive ability: Generally speaking, a person’s intelligence.
Northouse, Leadership 9e
SAGE Publishing, 2022
b. Crystallized cognitive ability: Intellectual ability acquired over time or
learned through experience. It typically grows over a lifetime and does
c. Motivation: An essential quality of developing leadership skills, which
has three aspects: willingness, dominance, and social good.
d. Willingness: The ability and desire to take on complex organizational
problems.
g. Personality: Characteristics which impact the development of
leadership skills.
vii. Competencies include problem-solving skills, social skills, and types of
knowledge.
a. Problem-solving skills: Problem-solving is a leader’s creative ability to
solve new and unusual, ill-defined organizational problems. Nine key
b. These skills are part of a developing process, where employment of one
skill can lead to the next.
c. Social judgment & social skills: Another class of leadership skills. Social
d. Perspective taking: Understanding the attitudes that others have
toward a particular problem or solution. Perspective taking is empathy
e. Social perceptiveness: Insight and awareness into how others in the
Northouse, Leadership 9e
SAGE Publishing, 2022
f. Behavioral flexibility: The capacity to change and adapt one’s behavior
in light of understanding of others’ perspectives in the organization.
g. Social performance: A wide range of leadership competencies including
the ability to communicate one’s own vision to others, persuasion,
h. Knowledge: The accumulation of information and the mental structures
(schemata) used to organize that information.
i. Schema: A summary, a diagrammatic representation, or an outline. The
viii. Two main influences related to leader attributes/competencies and leadership
outcomes: career experiences and environmental influences.
ix. Career experiences: Events encountered throughout a leader’s career that
influence their development of knowledge and skills for solving complex
problems.
a. Challenging job assignments, mentoring, appropriate training, and
hands-on experience in solving new and unusual problems can all assist
x. Environmental influences can be classed as either internal or external in nature,
with each type of influence presenting a different type of challenge to leaders.
a. Internal environmental influences: Factors such as technology,
facilities, expertise of subordinates, and communication.
b. External environmental influences: Factors such as economic, political,
Northouse, Leadership 9e
SAGE Publishing, 2022
d. Environmental influences are a broad, nonspecific category in the skills
xi. Effective problem solving: Creating solutions that are logical, effective, and
unique. These solutions are still more effective if they go beyond given
information.
xii. Performance: The degree to which a leader has successfully performed the
assigned duties. Measuring the success of a leader is done with standard external
criteria, such as evaluations.
xiii. In short, there are five components of leader performance, with three
competencies at the heart of the model: problem-solving skills, social judgment
skills, and knowledge.
II. How Does the Skills Approach Work?
A. Primarily descriptive: Describes leadership from a skills perspective.
i. Not prescriptive (explaining what to do to be successful.)
ii. Merely provides a structure for understanding the nature of effective leadership.
B. Katz’s three-skill approach:
i. Suggests importance of leadership skills; varies depending on what level of
management leaders are at.
ii. Low levels:
a. Technical and human skills are most important.
iii. Middle management:
C. Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding, et al.’s skills model:
i. Leadership outcomes are the direct result of a leader’s competencies in problem–
solving skills, social judgment skills, and knowledge.
ii. Model also illustrates individual attributes, such as general cognitive ability,
D. Skills approach provides a “map” for reaching effective leadership.
III. Strengths
A. Contributes positively to our understanding of leadership:
Northouse, Leadership 9e
SAGE Publishing, 2022
i. A leader-centered model stressing the importance of developing particular
leadership skills.
a. The first approach to structure leadership around skills and establish
ii. Intuitively appealing.
a. Makes leadership available to everyone.
iii. Provides an expansive view of leadership that incorporates a wide variety of
components (problem-solving skills, social judgment skills, knowledge, individual
attributes, career experiences, and environmental influences).
a. Each component can then be subdivided into even more specific
iv. Structure is highly consistent with the curricula of most leadership education
programs.
IV. Criticisms
A. Breadth of skills approach seems to extend beyond the boundaries of leadership.
i. Motivation, critical thinking, personality, and conflict resolution are not strictly
leadership skills.
B. Weak predictive value.
i. Components are related, but it’s not clear how.
ii. Success of programs following this model is unsubstantiated.
iii. Ability to transfer skills training to the job may be limited by followers, situation,
or organizational culture.
C. May not be suitably or appropriately applied to other leadership contexts.
ii. Insufficient research to generalize this data to other populations.
V. Application
A. Not widely used in applied leadership.
B. Despite the lack of formal programs, there is something to be gained:
i. A way to delineate the skills of the leader.
