Just Finished Reading: Leadership – A Very Short Introduction by Keith Grint

Every year at work we have an appraisal by our bosses – or in this case this year by my boss’s boss. One of the things she said, almost in passing, was that I wasn’t really a leader. I raised an eyebrow at this then gave it some thought and agreed with her. Maybe it’s one of the reasons I haven’t really ‘progressed’ up our companies hierarchy is that I have no interest in ‘leading’ a team. Of course I’m not a very good follower either – which doesn’t help – nor do I take much effort covering up the fact that I could probably do my boss’s job and probably her boss’s job as equally well as they are – if I applied myself (which I don’t).

Anyway, as usual, I digress.

Despite not being a leader or ever having any intention of attempting leading anyone anywhere I do have a long standing interest in leaders and leadership ‘styles’. Most people surprisingly couldn’t lead if their lives depended on it. Probably because, as the author points out on page one, despite a great deal of time and effort applied to the subject no one has produced an agreed upon definition of leadership. The attempts so far seem to revolve around what I call management-speak AKA nonsensical bullshit like position based leadership, person based, results based or process based. All very well and grand sounding but such terms don’t really get us very far. After failing to define the central term the author digresses (in a good way I thought) into discussions of wicked problems, critical problems and tame problems – each needing a different leadership style to solve – which I found very interesting as I’d never really come across those terms before. The author then threw Hierarchists, Egalitarians and Individualists into the mix – if things hadn’t been complicated enough already!

After another interesting digression into thoughts on leaders throughout western history the author moved on to the knotty problem of whether leaders are born or bred. Using the present financial crisis as his backdrop he then goes onto demolish the idea that leaders generally come from the social group known as THW(alpha)MPs – tall handsome white alpha males of privilege…. Or exactly those people who got the world into the mess it’s in today. In other words hardly great examples of leadership! After a brief mention of the followers that leaders cannot exist without the author finishes up with the thorny question of whether or not we can do without leaders (apparently not).

Although I don’t think this book was in any danger of making me into a leader of men (or women) it did get me thinking about things that had barely crossed my mind before. In the last 30 or so years of working in various organisations I have seen many bad leaders and precious few good ones. Most are simply ineffective because they don’t really know what they’re doing. Some are bad because they know that they are poor leaders but are still expected to lead. These are often bullies of their subordinates because they afraid of losing control – which they never actually had. The best leaders know their people enough to use their individual strengths and to guard against their weaknesses. I have been lucky to have had a few bosses that I would have followed into Hell. Such leaders make all the difference to any team undertaking any task. If only we had more of them.