This is an incredibly difficult question to answer, in fact – I couldn’t really give a proper answer at the point of questioning, because there were too many factors to think about. We will work through these below.

The first factor is about how we are actually going to measure the growth or improvement in leadership quality over the years. There are several issues with this measurement process:

The lack of a good quantitative means of measuring success. Share prices (Market Cap) of companies would be a terrible proxy for leadership because they are affected by so many other factors, such as economic cycles, politics, monetary and fiscal policy. Other factors such as the results of certain polls and surveys wouldn’t be comparable to surveys and polls taken many years ago, because polls are not consistent between decades as different researchers researching leadership styles and leadership courses have slightly different hypotheses.

When it comes to qualitative factors, we’re in no better position. The personal account of famous leaders throughout history will be littered with error and bias, and will make for an unfair comparison across the ages. Giving a thorough qualitative survey to leaders now asking about the leadership skills of leaders during their lifetime would also through bias onto the fire.

So rather than approaching this in a scientific way, we could look at the changes in the leadership landscape over the years, as highlighted by the leadership authors and commentators. History may not paint a perfectly accurate picture of the real changes on the ground of real British business, but it would provide the best picture we can attain.

In my opinion, due to the increases in leadership education as well as a larger aspirational middle class than 50 years ago, leadership has improved significantly, becoming more democratic and more transparent.

I’d like to start from the very start – and give an instructional guide on how to buy shares online for the first time. I chose this topic because it’s often the first response I hear from someone who I ask “Why do you have all your savings in cash if you plan to save it for a very long time?”. Indeed the ‘how’ often eludes the public, because little media attention is given to the personal ownership of shares, (apart from the odd story explaining how an old couple invested entirely in one share lost all their life savings when a corporation collapsed (e.g. Royal Bank of Scotland dying).

The truth is that buying shares is actually a very simple process. You could compare it quite easily to opening a savings account or a savings bond with NS&I. The ‘How’ will be explained below. As to the ‘Should I?’ ‘Which do I..’ and ‘When should I?’… you should read future financial articles posted here for extra tips!

Open an Account

To buy and hold shares, you need a brokerage account. There are two types of broker – discount brokers and full-service brokers. If you know what shares to buy and are looking for an executor, then a discount broker is for you. If you want financial adviser and perhaps someone to manage your account, you’ll be looking for a full-service broker. Discount brokers – as the name suggests – are much cheaper than full service. A full service broker will typically charge 3 x times more in fees, but obviously you get an extra service against that cost in return. I personally feel that the financial advise from full service brokers when it comes to ‘stock tips’ is pointless, and it is best to aim to minimize your overhe

Fund the Account

You’ll need to transfer funds into your brokerage account from an existing bank account. This should be a smooth process, as brokers will want you to be funded as soon as possible! In line with money laundering regulations, a brokerage firm will need to verify your identity before allowing you to invest. This can usually be done by entering information which it will check against your public record, but if you are not on the electoral roll or have not had a bank account in your name then it is likely that you will need to send in documents etc to prove your identity.

If you are a leader or looking for a leader to run your business, it is important to keep in mind the leadership traits that are necessary. As this will help you develop your own skills or the skills of the leader that you hire. There are 6 basic traits that should be present in any leader and they are discussed below.

• Need for achievement:  A leader needs to take responsibility and work hard to succeed. In order to achieve the goals and objectives of the company; the leaders need to be determined and know what is expected from them. Achievement can only be gained if the leader is clear of the vision, goals, objectives and tasks or duties that need to be fulfilled to gain competitive advantage in the market.
• Intelligence:  No leader can be successful or effective if he or she does not have the knowledge of the work that needs to be done.  The leader needs to have the right set of skills, such as good sense of judgment to make sure that the decisions that are made are logical and effective.
• Decisiveness: As a leader there will be many situations that will be hard to solve and get out of, which is why it is important that the leader can make the right decisions without any hesitations.
• Self- confidence: This trait is very important because if leaders do not have confidence in themselves; followers will not be confident in the leader enough to trust them. Leaders need to give a positive image to their followers to show that they are cable of succeeding.
• Initiative: Leaders need to be self-starters; this means that they can get the job started and finished without having supervision to get the job done effectively and correctly.
• Supervisory ability: Leaders need to be able to get the job done through other people who have the skills to do so. This means that the leader should motivate, supervise and encourage followers to get the work done without hesitation or dissatisfaction.

These 6 traits are necessary in any leader, so if you are lacking in any of the traits be sure to take the right course or training to improve them.

Principle 1: Investing – Learn how the stock markets and other financial markets work. Be prepared to put your own money where your mouth is an confidently build a smart portfolio of stocks.

Principle 2: Risk Management – Learn the principles of risk and risk management. Understand how companies can use hedging and financial instruments to reduce or eliminate specific financial risks such as commodity pricing risk or exchange rate risk.

Principle 3: Budgeting – Budgeting is a mainstay of British management practice, but personal budget is also important. If you cannot keep your own finances in order, why would someone pay you to keep their businesses’ finances in order?

Use various textbooks, online resources and formal education to brush up your knowledge on these areas.

This topic needs to be dealt with in a polarised fashion – because these are very different areas.

How to Be A Leader

This is there element of the leadership world which is personal development related. Leadership Videos and courses focusing on this topic will be extremely focused on the individual with a laser pointer. Like any skill, leadership is something that can be taught and can be learnt through a mixture of classroom, experience and also mistake! Let’s not forget that some of the lessons we hold most tightly in our minds ultimately are derived from a mistake we made in the past! Well, the idea of leadership videos and courses is that you can actually learn from the mistakes of others before you make the same ones.

What is Good Leadership
What is good leadership is the study given to ‘what actually occurs’ rather than simply ‘what should be occurring’, which this phrase otherwise may suggest. Therefore researchers who are looking to analyse and draw tips and strategies from successful leaders do so by analysing many case case studies to isolate the leadership traits and qualities which appeared to hold the key to leadership success in each instance. This practise can have potential downsides, such as survivor’s bias – which means that researchers assume that successful leaders have been successful because of their talents and traits, whereas in reality they may have simply survived due to blind luck, indeed in spite of their particular leadership traits.

For example, in 2007 (before the financial and housing crisis) one could have looked at which companies had been the most successful in the decade. The answer was unanimously the real estate developers and banks. One could’ve at the time drawn that the qualities needed to run a successful business were to engage in as risky activity as possible. However recent years have allowed us to look back on these events with heinsight, and we would now conclude that real estate businesses simply did well because they were in a bubble, and not because their owners were particularly talented.

However contrast this with the actual workplace that exists in the UK, and you’ll make the same startling discovery that I did – UK companies are only growing managers, and not leaders (or ‘management heros’) as I call them. See, the rhetoric is all good and well, but regional managers want good results from their store managers so they’ll use proven and controlled management techniques, and the store managers will learn from a national training course on how to manage their employees.

Basically, whenever big companies want to achieve success, they tend to want to standardise the training process and in doing so – they ensure that only management is ever passed on. This chain continues, and eventually you end up with a career path that is ensued entirely by ‘management’ right up until the board level. This is not how you inspire leadership or business leaders!

You may wish to visit the following resources for further reading:

Resource 1
Resource 2
Resource 3
Resource 4
Resource 5
Resource 6

This time, with the commodities markets, the bulls have the upper hand because commodities have very few technical methods of valuation anyway. The value of a commodity is simply the price people are willing to pay for it. Commodities such as gold may look nice and shiny, but they don’t provide growing cash flows like stocks, and therefore their prices are just the ‘result’ of a supply and demand equation – an equation that is increasingly being dominated by capital flows by greedy investors.

When retail investor begin to jump in on a trend – that’s when you know it’s time to sell out. Quite a few notable individuals have already sold their gold, but the rest of the market isn’t taking a head.

I’ve looked at several websites to see what their view is on whether Gold is a bubble. The owner of thegoldbubble.blogspot.com certainly seems the think so! Interestingly that blog closed to new posts in 2010 – I wonder what its owner would make of the gold price now, which is now hovering around $1,500.

From Financial Expert, How to Invest in Commodities has a less extreme but similar view. It doesn’t warn completely against investing in commodities, but it does advise to only place a tiny (1/20th) portion of your portfolio into it. Such that it will do the job of diversifying and smoothing the portfolio, but not taking a large position in order to make a massive gain. This sounds reasonable. What do you think?

3. Show your own enthusiasm. The last and most important point is that you cannot expect to enthuse your team mates or subordinates if you are not enthusiastic yourself. People tend not to follow hypocrites. Besides, for the task in hand, you want everyone to be enthused towards the common goal, and that includes you. Of course nobody is there to highlight why you should feel inspired to work on this task, so you’ll have to motivate yourself, using the other tips here on this blog.

If you really find yourself so apathetic about the current task that that you cannot enthuse yourself, then how can you expect your colleagues to be driven towards the goals you have set them? Increasing your skill as a manager is a genuine, not superficial, process. Enthusiasm is contagious but so is shallow behaviour covering up apathy or the simple desire to manipulate. If you’re in the situation where you have to pretend to be enthused; you really need to think about changing your career because you will never feel happy on your current path.

Provided you are genuinely enthusiastic within yourself, you will find this will infect the culture of your team; spreading through your colleagues at a dizzying rate. And provided you talk in terms of their ambitions and set a personal challenge, you shall begin to see enthusiasm bubble out of your collegues like champagne from the bottle!

In Summary:

1. Talk to their dreams

2. Appeal to their competitive nature

3. Show your own enthusiasm

2. Appeal to their competitive nature. Humans are competitive beings. Naturally we have to compete for partners and resources, but we also have to compete for the best education, the best job or even the last brownies in the shop! Everybody has a competitive spirit to some extent, and this can be used to motivate an employee into performing well. As a manager, you simply have to set the challenge. Give the individual a high standard to try and meet, or compare them with another whom they wish to beat.

Back in my sixth-form college I remember a conversation with my business studies teacher very well. The exam results from the first round of examinations had just been released and it turned out I had achieved full marks on my business paper. My teacher called me to his desk and said to me quietly;

“I’ve seen your results. Fantastic! Just fantastic!. About 3 years ago there was a girl in my class who also did brilliantly in her exams. She wasn’t that nice though – a bit arrogant and up herself y’know, but she ended up getting full marks in her whole qualification. Shes the only person to have ever to have done that here, but I really think that you could do it too, and not be arrogant. It’d be good to have, y’know, a decent person who’s managed to do it.”

What a perfect thing to say. My teacher had set me a challenge to try and complete. Was I now going to slack off in class and get complacent on the back of one good grade? Definately not. I was going to try and beat that girl.  I badly wanted to get full marks without being ‘arrogant’ about it. And so for my 2 year course I tried very hard in that class and came out with an impressive grade. Who was I to prove him wrong in thinking I could do this? He gave me a good reputation that I didn’t want to let down, and he also gave me a chance to prove I was better than this unpleasant person. It was a perfect combination of challenges that had one great result = dedication on my part.

• Give your employees a good reputation to uphold
• Compare your employees to their rivals
• Set your worker a tough goal to meet, but enough praise to show that you believe they can reach it

If you set your own employees challenges such as these, you will fill them with a sense of purpose and clear focus that would only come them accepting a competitive challenge and striving to succeed at it.

1. Talk to their Dreams. It’s an unfortunate but likely fact that many members of your workforce do not genuinely want to do the task you’ve set them. Perhaps they want to run their own business, or get married. Whatever their wishes, they all have their own dreams and if they’re organised, maybe a grand plan as to how they’re going to achieve them. What you have to do is show your team mates individually that their current task will take them one step closer towards their dreams.

Easier said than done? Well let me give you a few examples.

If a worker’s dream is to run their own business; don’t let them become demotivated by the fact this isn’t what they want to be doing. Instead, emphasise how working on this project will actually help them in the long term. Emphasise how they’ll learn so much from this, that when they do start their own business; they’ll already be learned in many areas on how to run one. If someone’s dream is to become a high flying career person, then you can mention the transferable skills they’ll gain from this task and be able to put on their CV for their next promotion. If the person wants to work for charity then you can point out that by learning from this experience they’ll have more to offer a charitable organisation in the future. It’s a simple technique that requires little thought and carries huge benefits.

All work gives experience, and all experience can help your workforces future career; you simply have to word it so that you show how important a step this job/task is on the path to fulfilling their dream. Once they see their current task slotting in to their grand plan, your workers will take care of the rest.