13 years ago, when I was interviewing for my first job fresh out of Biz-school, I was asked "What is your biggest strength that should lead us to hire you?". My answer was "I am a good human being". I thought I was being cool (maybe a little contrite as well). But I honestly believed that it was an awesome answer to a pre-packaged question and that I was a shoe-in for the job. I guess I was the only guy on campus to believe that because none of the interviewers who asked me this question and got this answer actually offered me a job. The one that did, received my desperate plea for acceptance "I got the skills that it takes to get any job done"

5 jobs and a lot of gray hair later, I'm trying to re-address the question and I still come up with the same answer "I am a good human being". And this time around, I'm convinced that I have the ammunition to defend my response. I believe that the Leadership Model follows a hierarchy similar to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You start with basic wants, move on to safety and security, then Love, Affection & Belonging, then Esteem and finally to Self Actualization. Organizations need Self-Actualized leaders but they need leaders to progress through the stages and fulfill the lower level needs.

1) Basic Wants/ Physiological Needs - Every organization has some core wants to be addressed. They include tools to survive and thrive. I equate this in the leadership model to core technical skills. You obviously need to know how to account if you want to be a Finance Manager. Or be erudite if you want to sell. For all my bluster, at the stage in my campus interview, all I needed to demonstrate was that I had the core skills to do my job. Most leaders get promoted to successive levels of leadership through technical mastery but the Peter principle prevents them from being truly exceptional leaders by being technically competent alone.

2) Safety & Security: Organizations need leaders to provide their units with structure and a framework to operate in - this translates to hierarchy, roles and responsibilities and the ability to provide the organizational employees with criteria and a path to be successful. To climb into the second level of leadership, a good leader must provide his team the operational model in which they can feel successful and secure. Lousy leaders believe in anarchy and chaos. A good leader creates the framework where an employee feels secure operating in and can focus on his job and doing it well.

3) Love, Affection and Belonging: This translates into the ability to foster teamwork. The leader has to not only ensure that his team is working well together but has to ensure that his team plays well with other teams too. This translates into an ability to bring disparate people from all walks of life together for a common purpose and make them interact in positive, productive relationships. Bad leaders create divisions - between sub-teams and between their team and the rest of the organization which translates to "We're fine, that other group sucks" A good leader is able to make the team work as a team, a unit, a family creating a sense of common purpose.

4) Esteem: You don't have to like me. You don't even have to respect me. You simply have to respect the role I'm playing. As we mature in our interactions with each other, professional respect is all that really matters. In order for a leader to be considered a good

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