Recommended Reading
At the School of Leadership and Professional Development, we believe that comprehensive knowledge is paramount to being effective in any leadership capacity. As such, we would like to recommend the following for your review.
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Apex Thinking: A Guide To Long-Term Leadership For The Rising CEO This book, a collaboration between Mountain State University president Charles Polk and William White, dean of the School of Leadership and Professional Development at MSU, is a virtual "how-to" guide for persons wanting to achieve top positioning in an organization, and also offers much advice and direction for current CEOs. An unflinching work that pulls no punches about what it takes to be at the top. View excerpts from the book here. |
How can we become more effective as leaders and as developers of leaders? Why Should Anyone Be Led by You? attempts to answer this question, which should be a key interest of anyone concerned with leadership. The authors’ develop their answer by building on a foundation comprised of four essential components: leadership is always situational, leadership is non-hierarchical, leadership is relational, and leaders must be authentic. In a book about polarities or paradoxes – the authors prefer the term tensions – the fundamental tension is the need for leaders to undertake differing roles on the one hand and the need to be authentic on the other. How does one both change and remain coherent? While the authors answer this question they also imply it is a question usually not well answered by most executives. What, then, makes leaders skillfully authentic? First, leaders must know themselves and be able to read the context they find themselves in and respond accordingly. Individuals with leadership potential fail, the authors suggest, usually because they lack an acute sense of social realism. Knowing yourself and reading well the context are not enough, however. The three key tensions effective leaders must manage involve striking a balance – a balance that necessarily shifts as the context changes – between 1) revealing your strengths but also showing your weaknesses, 2) establishing intimacy but also keeping your distance, and 3) being an individual but also conforming. Know and show yourself – enough. Showing people who you are requires a degree of self-knowledge as well as self-disclosure; one without the other is hopeless. Leaders need to become skillful at showing themselves because they need to show different aspects of who they are at different times and in different places. Showing yourself always involves personal risks because it reveals weaknesses, but revealing weaknesses shows others the contours of a real person and confirms humanity: weaknesses reveal that a person is present, not merely a role holder. But let’s be careful here: weaknesses are best revealed after showing strengths, are rarely helpful in times of crisis, and should be exposed sparingly. Remain authentic – but conform enough. Leaders must establish the connections necessary to deliver change. This requires leaders to have the skill to read the context and conform enough to achieve traction and deliver change. Leaders must retain their authenticity but make adjustments to their new surroundings to be able to operate effectively. Effective leaders both challenge and conform. Communicate – with care. Leaders must empathize with those they lead but must also be able to communicate a sense of edge. In other words, leaders are able to get close to their followers but also keep their distance. Closeness allows a leader to know and understand followers and allows followers to know more of the leader, and these are significant benefits. But a leader always has a larger, superordinate purpose, and this requires some distance with followers. Leadership is about an overarching purpose, but it is also constantly about people and relationships. Using social distance skillfully is a critical leadership skill. The authors explore these tensions in detail and in part by the use of examples indicate how leaders can go about managing these key tensions. Why Should Anyone Be Led by You? is a nuanced, not simplistic book, but so is the concept of authenticity. Review by John Sidor, Ph.D., School of Leadership and Professional Development Faculty |
Off Our Shelf
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Why Should Anyone Be Led By You?