The ‘I’ of Leadership
Earlier this year I was at the London Business School attending a reunion. Among the various speakers was Nigel Nicholson, the not-so-young ‘enfant terrible’ of the Organisational Behaviour Department. Naturally, as all good business school lecturers do, Nigel spruiked his latest book, The ‘I’ of Leadership. Nigel has spent a lifetime studying leadership and the scope of this book is truly amazing. There are 552 footnotes to the 16 chapters! Yes a number are “op. cit.s” and “ibid.s” but the range of material that Nigel sources is a stunning example of scholarship and reason enough to buy the book.
The insight that really resonated with me was CLRs – Critical Leader Relationships. Nicholson argues that these are the people who help leaders with their most difficult decisions. In organisations they can be upward, downward, and lateral but Nicholson argues that perhaps the most useful are external be it a spouse, personal coach or advisor. According to Nicholson most leaders take CLRs for granted but successful leaders typically have CLRs that provide:
Help (Bill Gates & Steve Ballmer in the early years of Microsoft),
Insight (Warren Buffett & Charlie Munger),
Challenge (Micheal Eisner & Frank Wells, in Australia Leighton’s Wal King & Dieter Adamsas were a formidable pairing.)
Feedback
Ideas (Steve Jobs was always on the hunt for creative intellects) and/or
Support (Margaret and Dennis Thatcher)
Nicholson suggests that one task leaders should undertake at least annually is an analysis of their CLRs.
It was also pleasant to read a book published in the UK on Leadership making reference to one of Australia’s more successful CEOs, “Scroo” Turner, (wrongly called by “Screw” by Nicholson but a forgivable mistake). According to Nicholson, Turner read a paper by him on evolutionary psychology and business published in the Harvard Business Review. The paper caused Turner to reorganise Flight Centre into units of families (stores), villages (clusters of stores) and tribes (aggregates of villages totalling no more than no more than 150 people which is known as Dunbar’s number and is the size below which self management can be maintained).
The two key messages of The ‘I’ of Leadership stem from its title. The first is a ‘pun’ on I. Leaders should use their inner eye to become self-ware and be able to answer authentically the question “Who am I and why am I here? Good leaders are self-aware.
The second key message was a new word, “decenter”. Many leaders suffer from eyestrain: I did this, I do that, I make the decisions. I-I-I punctuates their conversation. According to Nicholson, (and his book he quotes some great examples) good leaders get inside the heads of the other people and used that knowledge to build successful relationships, particularly CLRS.
Of course these are the first principles of emotional intelligence and Nicholson like so many writers on this subject suffers from the same problem. The exhortations to be self-aware and empathetic are all to the good but my belief is that unless you have a theory of temperament such as the 7MTF/Humm-Wadsworth the exhortations will soon be forgotten. I call it putting on the ‘Humm’ glasses in my workshops and once you have put them on you never look at yourself or other people the same way again.
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