Why Should Anyone Be Led by You? With a New Preface by the Authors: What It Takes to Be an Authentic Leader

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Not true. Many executives don't have the self-knowledge or the authenticity necessary for leadership. And self-knowledge and authenticity are only part of the equation. Individuals must also want to be leaders, and many talented employees are not interested in shouldering that responsibility. Others prefer to devote more time to their private lives than to their work. After all, there is more to life than work, and more to work than being the boss. Not true. Many executives don’t have the self-knowledge or the authenticity necessary for leadership. And self-knowledge and authenticity are only part of the equation. Individuals must also want to be leaders, and many talented employees are not interested in shouldering that responsibility. Others prefer to devote more time to their private lives than to their work. After all, there is more to life than work, and more to work than being the boss. Leaders deliver business results.

Inspirational leaders rely heavily on their instincts to know when to reveal a weakness or a difference. We call them good situation sensors, and by that we mean that they can collect and interpret soft data. They can sniff out the signals in the environment and sense what’s going on without having anything spelled out for them.For Weber, technical rationality was embodied in one particular organizational form—the bureaucracy. Bureaucracies, he said, were frightening not for their inefficiencies but for their efficiencies and their capacity to dehumanize people. The tragic novels of Franz Kafka bear stark testimony to the debilitating effects of bureaucracy. Even more chilling was the testimony of Hitler's lieutenant Adolf Eichmann that "I was just a good bureaucrat." Weber believed that the only power that could resist bureaucratization was charismatic leadership. But even this has a very mixed record in the twentieth century. Although there have been inspirational and transformational wartime leaders, there have also been charismatic leaders like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung who committed horrendous atrocities.

Although Goffee and Jones assiduously avoid giving leadership recipes – they rightly maintain that leadership is contextual – there are some good learning points for aspiring leaders. Chapter four for example – Read and Rewrite the Context – has some gems. In this chapter, they describe three levels of analysis for leaders; key leaders who may make the biggest impact on one’s performance, important teams, and thirdly the context and constraints within which one must operate. One of the things they emphasize time and again is to know yourself and be authentic with others. It is a temptation to want to seek to imitate others in the hope to like them experience success. This is commendable in one sense, for we seek to learn from others and thus improve upon our strengths and shore up our weaknesses. But in another sense this is dangerous because people can easily see through a manufactured individual who is clearly not being himself. One answer is that there is a crisis of belief in the modern world that has its roots in the rationalist revolution of the eighteenth century. During the Enlightenment, philosophers such as Voltaire claimed that through the application of reason alone, people could control their destiny. This marked an incredibly optimistic turn in world history. In the nineteenth century, two beliefs stemmed from this rationalist notion: a belief in progress and a belief in the perfectibility of man. This produced an even rosier world view than before. It wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century, with the writings first of Sigmund Freud and later of Max Weber, that the chinks in the armor appeared. These two thinkers destroyed Western man’s belief in rationality and progress. The current quest for leadership is a direct consequence of their work. In earlier research, we discovered that many women—particularly women in their fifties—try to avoid this dynamic by disappearing. They try to make themselves invisible. They wear clothes that disguise their bodies; they try to blend in with men by talking tough. That’s certainly one way to avoid negative stereotyping, but the problem is that it reduces a woman’s chances of being seen as a potential leader. She’s not promoting her real self and differences.You may find yourself in a top position without these qualities, but few people will want to be led by you. The founder of psychoanalysis, Freud theorized that beneath the surface of the rational mind was the unconscious. He supposed that the unconscious was responsible for a fair proportion of human behavior. Weber, the leading critic of Marx and a brilliant sociologist, also explored the limits of reason. Indeed, for him, the most destructive force operating in institutions was something he called technical rationality—that is, rationality without morality. By the twentieth century, there was much skepticism about the power of reason and man’s ability to progress continuously. Thus, for both pragmatic and philosophic reasons, an intense interest in the concept of leadership began to develop. And indeed, in the 1920s, the first serious research started. The first leadership theory—trait theory—attempted to identify the common characteristics of effective leaders. To that end, leaders were weighed and measured and subjected to a battery of psychological tests. But no one could identify what effective leaders had in common. Trait theory fell into disfavor soon after expensive studies concluded that effective leaders were either above-average height or below. One answer is that there is a crisis of belief in the modern world that has its roots in the rationalist revolution of the eighteenth century. During the Enlightenment, philosophers such as Voltaire claimed that through the application of reason alone, people could control their destiny. This marked an incredibly optimistic turn in world history. In the nineteenth century, two beliefs stemmed from this rationalist notion: a belief in progress and a belief in the perfectibility of man. This produced an even rosier world view than before. It wasn't until the end of the nineteenth century, with the writings first of Sigmund Freud and later of Max Weber, that the chinks in the armor appeared. These two thinkers destroyed Western man's belief in rationality and progress. The current quest for leadership is a direct consequence of their work.

Goffee, R., & Jones, G. (2019). Why should anyone be led by you?: What it takes to be an authentic leader. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press. Inspirational leaders empathize passionately—and realistically—with people, and they care intensely about the work employees do.

People who get to the top are leaders.

Hewlett, S. A. (2019). The sponsor effect: How to be a better leader by investing in others. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press. Recent leadership thinking is dominated by contingency theory, which says that leadership is dependent on a particular situation. That's fundamentally true, but given that there are endless contingencies in life, there are endless varieties of leadership. Once again, the beleaguered executive looking for a model to help him is hopelessly lost. Recent leadership thinking is dominated by contingency theory, which says that leadership is dependent on a particular situation. That’s fundamentally true, but given that there are endless contingencies in life, there are endless varieties of leadership. Once again, the beleaguered executive looking for a model to help him is hopelessly lost.

Excerpted from the article "Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?" in the Harvard Business Review, September-October 2000. We’ve yet to hear advice that tells the whole truth about leadership. Yes, everyone agrees that leaders need vision, energy, authority, and strategic direction. That goes without saying. But we’ve discovered that inspirational leaders also share four unexpected qualities: The book is crammed full of actual case studies of people who have both succeeded and failed as leaders, with the author’s explanation as to why. I found the concepts easy to understand and follow. I recently bought "Why should anyone work here?" book from same authors but once I started with it I thought that I should actually start with this one first as it was first released already in 2005 (also have Estonian translation version from that time in my bookshelf). In high level I was expecting a bit more systematic approach but it felt repetitive and jumping around different, the examples were based on very few companies and managers (mainly focus was on BBC and their transformative CEO) which I have not read that much about before. This is clearly a "leadership" and not a "management" book.

Reveal Your Weaknesses

Effective leadership is a skillful authentic role performance with the capacity to transform organizations and enrich lives. It's always difficult. But it's well worth a try.