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Reading Harvard Business Review on The mind of a leader is like
attending one whole seminar on leadership with leading gurus as
trainers. It tells about Leadership—Warts and All, When Followers
Become Toxic, Putting Leaders on the Couch: A Conversation with Man-fred
F.R. Kets de Vries, Managers and Leaders: Are They Different, What
Makes a Leader?, Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the
Inevitable Cons and Understanding Leadership. And they were written
by respected experts such as Barbara Kellerman, Lynn Offerman, Diane
Coutu, Abraham Zalesznik, Daniel Goldman, Michael MacCoby and W.C.H.
Prentice. Get a copy and learn a lot about leadership. What I am
missing is some kind of self-assessment instrument. Well, maybe in a
real seminar.
Intriguing is The Seven Ages of the Leader
by Warren Bennis. In this intuitive article, Prof. Bennis, founding
chairman of the University of Southern California’s Leadership
Institute, reflects on his own leadership journey from a young
lieutenant in the infantry in World War II, as president of a
university and as the mentor to a unique nursing student and also
shares the experiences of his fellow leaders.
A leader’s life has seven ages and they
parallel those Shakespeare describes in “As You Like It” To
paraphrase, these stages can be described as infant, schoolboy,
lover, soldier, general, statesman, and sage. One way to learn about
leadership is to look at each of these developmental stages and
consider the issues and crises that are typical of each.
Infant. For the young man or woman on the
brink of becoming a leader, the world that lies ahead is a
mysterious, even frightening place. The fortunate neophyte leader
has a mentor. The popular view of mentors is that they seek out
younger people to encourage and champion, in fact the reverse is
more often true. The best mentors are usually recruited and one mark
of a future leader is the ability to identify, woo, and win the
mentors who will change his or her life. It may feel strange to seek
a mentor even before you have the job, but it’s a good habit to
develop early on. Recruit a team to back you up; you may feel lonely
in your first top job, but you won’t be totally unsupported.
The schoolboy, with a shining face. The
first leadership experience is an agonizing education. It’s like
parenting, in that nothing else in life fully prepares you to be
responsible, to a greater or lesser degree, for other people’s
well-being. Worse, you have to learn how to do the job in public,
subject to unsettling scrutiny of your every word and act, a
situation that’s profoundly unnerving and for all but minority of
people who truly crave the spotlight. Like it or not, as a new
leader you are always onstage, and everything about you is fair game
for comment, criticism, and interpretation (or misinterpretation).
Your dress, your spouse, your table manners, your diction, your wit,
your friends, your children’s table manners—all will be
inspected, dissected and judged. Your first acts will win people
over or they will turn people against you, sometimes permanently.
And those initial acts may have a long-lasting effect on how the
group performs. It is, therefore, almost always best for the novice
to make a low-key entry.
The Lover, with a woeful ballad. Many
leaders find themselves “sighing like furnace” as they struggle
with the tsunami of problems every organization presents. For the
leader who has come up through the ranks, one of the toughest is how
to relate to former peers who now report to you. It is difficult to
set boundaries and fine-tune your working relationships with former
cronies. As a modern leader, you don’t have the option of telling
the person with whom you once shared a pod and lunchtime confidences
that you know her not. But relationships inevitably change when a
person is promoted from within the ranks. You may no longer be able
to speak openly as you once did, and your friends may feel awkward
around you or resent you. They may perceive you as lording your
position over them when you’re just behaving as a leader should.
Knowing what to pay attention to is just as important—and just as
difficult. The challenge for the newcomer is knowing who to listen
to and who to trust.
(To be continued)
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