The Harvard Business Review started the New Year with a special issue on ‘The Tests of a Leader’ – thus continuing a trend for management to be subsumed in the wider subject of leadership. The latter used to be considered part of a management skill-set, not the whole caboodle. But the two are obviously indispensably linked. While you can be a good manager without being a great leader, you can’t be a great leader without being a good manager – because the leader ultimately depends on the quality of the support and contribution made by those who are led, the followers. The better your followers manage, the greater your chances of success as a leader.
The HBR special issue emphasises that leadership is a matter of responding to events, far more often than creating events yourself. The key words are ‘humility’, ‘courage as a skill’, ‘rebounding from career disasters’, ‘finding the second act’, ‘asking pointed questions of the person in the mirror’, ‘why transformation efforts fail’ and so on. The leader, in other words, walks a tightrope. As Saddam should have reflected, it’s all too easy to fall off into the abyss.
read all 70 gurus with one feed read all Read all media
