Chapter 1: What Is Effective Leadership?

Overview

Sweet are the uses of adversity.
—William Shakespeare, As You Like It

If you want to become an effective leader, what, specifically, should you do to make that happen?

Hundreds of leadership books purport to answer this question today. Just walk into any bookstore. Broadly, the research, thinking, and writing about leadership can be divided into two camps. One camp holds that leadership is all about behavior and that if you want to excel, you should learn and replicate the key behaviors of good leaders. Many companies pursue this view by developing competency models and then rigorously assessing and training their leaders accordingly. The other camp holds that leadership is all about character, values, and authenticity, and companies that adhere to this view focus on transmitting company values and orienting leaders to the right way to do things.

Both approaches are valid—and incomplete. Most leadership development efforts that revolve around either character or behavior are only sporadically effective because of an inherent problem. Leaders emerge from training emboldened with new ideas and ways of doing things but then re-enter a company culture that has not been modified. They find it difficult to sustain their leadership effectiveness, failing to carry over their success from the learning context to the leadership context.

Consider that in recent years the leadership development industry has exploded, yet just about every organization complains about a leadership shortage. With the increase in training programs and knowledge about this subject, logic dictates that we should be doing a better job of meeting the organizational demand for talent. In fact, most organizations bemoan the dearth of “ready now” leaders with maturity, judgment, and skill.

What’s missing?

Over the years, we’ve taught, coached, and counseled hundreds of senior executives in Fortune 200 companies throughout the world. Leaders who do not succeed tend to be people who lack self-awareness. Daniel Goleman has made this basic truth clear by describing the importance of emotional intelligence as an important component of effective leadership. Ineffective leaders don’t understand their own motivations or acknowledge their weaknesses; they don’t engage in reflection, especially when they fail and are unwilling to assume accountability. As smart and skilled as these people may be, they don’t really know themselves, and this lack of self-knowledge derails them, especially when they face new leadership challenges.

High-performing leaders, however, are aware of their strengths and their weaknesses; they talk and think about their limitations and failures and try to learn from them. They see themselves as continuously learning, adapting, and responding to both positive and negative circumstances. Most important, they are highly conscious of their feelings and behaviors as they move through life, including personal and professional passages: losing a job, being promoted, changing companies, mourning the death of a loved one, dealing with a divorce, and so on.

These passages have an impact on leaders, just as they do on all of us. If you go through them with your eyes—and your mind—closed, you diminish your own development. If you go through them consciously and are open to the lessons they hold, you dramatically increase the odds of being a consistently effective leader.