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Re-Frame Leadership: Jettison the Cult of Personality

SUCCESSFUL LEADERS ARE:
Courageous
Visionary
Charismatic
Passionate
Consensus Building
Confident
Bold
Etc

THEY CAN ALSO BE:
Controlling
Petty
Neurotic
Insensitive
Arrogant
Aloof
Manipulating
Etc

OZ'SWIZARD?
If all of these disparate descriptions of leaders are valid, maybe the labels are just smoke and magic with little substance and value: merely a reflection of the perceptions of the observers. What then is the real essence of leadership?

The cult of leadership personality is alive and thriving in American business but cracks may be appearing. Jim Collins (Fortune, Feb. 2001) is accelerating the awareness that the trait and personality theory of leadership is a dead-end street. This is not to say that there are not some correlations between individual traits and leadership success. However, a review of the research indicates that, at best, these correlations are .30 to .40, which translates into a 10 15% accuracy of predicting leadership differences. What accounts for the other 85% of the difference between success and failure no one really seems to know. This state of affairs is not very helpful to those wanting a more definitive guide to leadership improvement (maybe this is why we have so much trouble developing leaders).

Most of us rely on anecdotaldescriptions of great leaders and have fixed in our imagination a composite vision of the ideal leader: how he/she looks, acts, speaks, thinks and handles problems. When asked, most of us can describe this ideal person with clear detail. These aspirational models provide us with guidelines for our behavior and even fuel our guilt when we fail to live up to our expectations. However, there seems to be little evidence of their effectiveness.

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