7 Leadership Roles

Strategies for Becoming a More Effective Leader

By Farid A. Muna

Board Member
Meirc Training & Consulting

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women are merely players:
They have their exits and entrances;
And one man in his life plays many parts.
William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 2

How many roles does a leader play? Undoubtedly, there are many more than seven; but the following are seven roles that I believe are critical to leadership success:

The leader as

• Gardener: Cultivating HR
• Canada Goose: Three Leadership Lessons
• Negotiator: Beyond Win-Win
• Student of Cultures: A Worldly Mindset
• Captain: Strategic Thinking
• Abacus: Beyond the Financial Bottom Line
• Acrobat: Balancing Work and Personal Life

I have always felt that whenever these seven roles were discussed, the strategic element was significantly under-emphasized or completely overlooked. This is precisely what I attempt to do here: incorporate a strategic approach to each role.

Three of the above roles were covered at length in articles published in academic journals (see References, below). The other roles were briefly described in various short articles (some of them appear on this Meirc website). The current article is a brief summary of all seven leadership roles. Of course, the vast literature on leadership can easily yield many more roles that leaders play—perhaps more than twenty depending on the school of thought and specialization of the writer. Yet I have chosen just seven roles which are particularly critical for increasing the effectiveness of leaders working across various types of organizations.

Why seven? Well, there are two good reasons. First, the seven roles are those that are most familiar to me. Clearly, to discuss all of the other equally critical leadership roles would result in a book more voluminous than my objective of producing a short summary for busy leaders.

Second, I selected seven roles because I was influenced long ago by the psychologist George Miller (1956) who published an interesting article titled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information”. Miller suggested that the number seven reflects our cognitive capability for comfortably retaining information in our immediate memory. He wrote: “The span of absolute judgment and the span of immediate memory impose severe limitations on the amount of information that we are able to receive, process, and remember.” Miller reminded us of the Seven Wonders of the World, the seven primary colors, the seven notes of the musical scale, the seven days of the week, and the seven seas. I would add here that one finds this magical number stated often in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; not to mention its frequent references in Far Eastern religions and cultures. In modern times, think of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), or the seven dwarfs, or the seven-year itch, or the seven digits commonly used for phone numbers!

In this summary, the term leadership is not restricted to those at the top of large entities. It refers to people who are appointed or selected to be in charge of organizations, institutions, or countries (the capital L’s), as well as to those who find themselves directing smaller groups, teams, units, or departments within organizations (the small l’s). I would like to stress that organizations (and nations for that matter) require both capital L’s and small l’s. It is equally important to have group leaders scattered at every level in the organization. This is not to imply that we should have our organizations (or nations) populated by only capital L’s and small l’s: this would be catastrophic (too many chiefs and not enough workers!). To fully appreciate this last statement, allow me to quote the late Peter Drucker (a well-known management guru), “Managers do things right, while leaders do the right thing.” This is worth thinking about: managers are efficient, while leaders are effective. Preferably, a balance of leaders and managers should be sought. Ideally, some of those leaders will also be good managers, and some of the managers will be good leaders.

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