The Most Overused Word on Business Books
Dr. Kelner and his latest book.
Stephen P. Kelner, Jr., President Ascent Leadership Networks
Many books talk about leadership. I have found it one of the most overused words in my career as a leadership (there it is) consultant. A Google search of the term “leadership book” provides 3.3 billion results, hopefully mentions and not actual books, for reasons I’ll make clear[1]
These books frequently describe leadership as if it is one, monolithic thing. However, the evidence suggests that people are far too complicated for that to work. In practice, we have found three aspects of people that define different kinds of leaders:
Where they lead – in what context
Who they lead – what kind of people
What they want as a leader – what motivates them
Where
If an earthquake hits your business, the kind of leadership required is very different from that required for an innovation team. Solving technical problems looks different from transforming an organization. Empowering a team can look very different from making sure everyone feels taken care of. And differences in size and scope changes the situation as well: managing six people you know personally is different from managing a 50,000 person multinational. All these represent different contexts for leadership: the objective of the organization or group you lead.
Who
Leading across geographies, languages, and cultures looks different from having a team sitting in the same building who grew up together. We know that great leaders must be inclusive leaders, because they can take best advantage of everyone working for them, but there are also differences in how you lead people who are, say, technical professionals, skilled laborers, or managers, especially relative to oneself. A technical expert leading a team of technical experts necessarily looks and differently from a leader of a diverse set of functions. Again, people are complicated!
What They Want
Leadership is demanding. Top leadership roles are especially absorbing, and any such role requires certain kinds of actions virtually every day of the week. How do you sustain yourself? This is where implicit motivation comes in, a topic we have raised before in these blogs. Research shows that aligning your emotional drives (implicit motives) with your role and your values makes you happier, but even beyond that it helps you maintain productivity, because the role itself is energizing. That means your implicit motives – which are relatively stable, deep characteristics of who you are – matter a lot for what kind of leader you want to be, because they will energize or potentially conflict with what you do.
Pulling This Together
When looking at all three of these, clearly one kind of leadership just won’t do. In my forthcoming book, Where You Can Lead: The Pentad of Great Leadership, you will find five. In my decades working with top leaders globally, these five are not only among the commonest, but they are also firmly anchored in implicit motives.
This book helps people identify what they want, and use this in turn to identify what kind of leadership will most energize them. These five kinds of leadership inevitably relate to different contexts, as you can see from the list:
· Entrepreneurial Leader
· Thought Leader
· Caring Leader
· People Leader
· Change Leader
Furthermore, I don’t just describe leadership at the top. Since these are anchored in fundamental motives, it’s possible to trace the path from day one on the job through the highest levels of leadership. I identify six main levels of leadership for organizations of different size and scope, and describe the key steps required to move from one to the next, including what will be easy (based on your motives, of course), and what will be hard.
And finally, given our focus at Ascent on helping people become the best leaders they can be, I also try to help identify where people might want to stop or shift. I’ve worked with leaders who were very successful in their careers, but personally unhappy and burnt out, because they went beyond where their motives and values suited them best. Just because you can carry out a role doesn’t mean you want to do it. This book – like Ascent – is intended to help people find their best and proper destiny.
We think this is a worthy goal.