Leadership competency is vital to the success of a corrosion management program (CMP) and is required by corrosion professionals to improve the widespread acceptance of best practice corrosion risk management across all industrial sectors.
Leadership is not the same as management. Leaders sense the need for change, creating a vision of the future state and determining how it will be achieved. The purpose of a leader is then to inspire and motivate a team towards achieving it. Managers enable the implementation of the work by creating and tracking structured actions to achieve required outcomes within defined constraints and resources. Both skills are interconnected and required for successful implementation of a CMP. However, leadership is often not explored in isolation from management, and its importance can get lost.
This paper introduces some basic engineering leadership frameworks, which can be useful for individuals and teams to consider with respect to their personal leadership development. It also explores experiences of how poor leadership skills impact the success of a CMP. The authors hope to convince the reader that leadership skill development is an important requirement for corrosion professionals at all levels, and that more focus is required in developing training in this area at a grassroots level.
Leadership is the ability to motivate and inspire people towards achieving a positive change. Leadership starts with an awareness of self and is driven by a deep understanding of both personal values and the values of wider teams and organizations.1
Often leadership is confused with the skill of management, which is defined here as the ability to develop and action structured plans, processes, procedures to achieve required outcomes within defined constraints and with specific resources. The work done by leaders and managers is different (Table 1).
From past experience with various organizations, it is observed that there is often a stronger importance placed on management competency versus leadership. However, like management, leadership is a skill set that can be taught and learned: the idea that people are ‘born’ leaders is no longer relevant.
