This is a tricky question for someone like me who thinks that leadership is an act, an impact on people, not a role. Roles like doctor, pilot, librarian, mother, partner all have formal responsibilities by virtue of being roles. But what if leadership isn’t a role? Read the rest of this entry »
Everyone leads by example every day. How we work, our attitude, what we spend our time doing. However, it takes good emotional intelligence, or discipline, to be fully aware of the sort of example we’re setting. Read the rest of this entry »
How skilled are you at giving your team members feedback? Not an easy thing to do, so it’s common to do a poor job of it. Many managers either avoid it altogether or they resort to hints, jokes or other not-so-subtle ways of getting a message across. Read the rest of this entry »
My article The Ideal Leader should perhaps have been called The Ideal Leader Myth because my aim was to attack our fixation with the leader-as-hero. I argued that there is no ideal leader, that we need to empower ourselves and stop searching for heroes to give our lives meaning. Read the rest of this entry »
The claim that leadership is a form of influence confuses people. Some think it implies that ALL influence must therefore count as leadership, even selling or TV ads. But this is the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Saying that leadership is influence does NOT imply that ALL influence is leadership. Read the rest of this entry »
Attempts to define leadership confuse describing how it works with how it SHOULD work. Thus we focus on what WE WANT in a leader, our image of the ideal leader, rather than what it is. No wonder we are confused! Read the rest of this entry »
Do leaders have responsibilities? If so, leadership must be a role or type of person, but it is arguable that it is really an influence process, one that anyone can use. If so, then we need to say that only managers can have responsibilities. Read the rest of this entry »
Rapid change turns leadership into a series of small, discrete impacts, like leading in a crisis, where several people take turns providing leadership from moment to moment. This leadership is not visionary. Read the rest of this entry »
Must leaders articulate, or stand for, clear values? What is the connection between leadership and human values? Is it possible to show leadership in a value-neutral context? Read the rest of this entry »
The conviction that leadership is not possible without vision is seemingly unshakable. But this view restricts leadership to the glamorous end of the spectrum – CEO’s and heads of states. How, then can all employees show leadership, visionary or not? Read the rest of this entry »