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Principles of Leadership Are Outdated
Posted Thursday, November 1, 2012Allen Slade
When I teach leadership to business students, I often open the first class by asking students about leaders they respect. Mahatma Gandhi, George Patton, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Steve Jobs are often mentioned. Some students talk about their athletic coach or a former boss.
Then, we get to the heart of leadership. To save you the cost of tuition, here are the highpoints:
The “Great Man” theories of leadership don’t work.
There is no one best way to lead. The best way to lead depends on the situation.
The best leaders are not students of leadership.
There are no simple rules. I discourage imitating role models. I attack leadership trait theories. I undermine leadership style theories. Being the best leader you can be is difficult and complicated.
Those who look for simple answers are understandably disappointed.
Yet, there is a straightforward approach to leadership in my class. Be a student of followership and collect lots of data.
Be a student of followership. Don’t waste time studying leaders or leadership. Study the people you lead. The best leaders have incredible curiosity about the people around them. They ask people what’s important to them, then they think hard about the implications. They check for understanding by asking more questions. The best leaders shape their leadership behavior for their followers.
Collect lots of data. To understand people, the best leaders are hungry for information. They collect data with direct observation of the words, tone and emotions of others. They ask lots of questions. And they suck every bit of value out of any quantitative data they can get, through surveys, 360 reports, attrition data, customer data, etc.
For the visually oriented like me, here is how I capture this vision of leadership:
With a commitment to know the people you lead and a hunger for more data, you can bootstrap your leadership. You can create mini-experiments based on your tentative knowledge of people, and then correct your actions based on their feedback. You will develop a personal, flexible leadership style. And, I suspect, your impact as a leader will expand well beyond what you would achieve if you had simply tried to imitate the great leaders of the past.
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