The Leadership Coaching Blog

I’ve been re-reading an article from People Management magazine which was basically posing the question - “Given the general hunger for good Leadership, why are leaders in such short supply?” The writers (Rob Goffe and Gareth Jones) put forward 2 main reasons:

1. Organisations desire leaders but structure themselves in ways that kill leadership - they encourage conformists or role players with little sense of who they are and what they stand for.
2. People’s understanding of leadership is blinkered - they focus on the characteristics of leaders and what they do to others, rather than seeing it as something they do ‘with others.’

What I believe they are saying here is that leadership should always be viewed as a relationship between the leader and the led. That there is no set recipe to follow, and that attempting to imitate other successful leaders is doomed to fail - this is because what will work for one leader will not necessarily work for another.

In many ways I agree with this - as aspiring leaders need to discover what it is about themselves that they can mobilise in a leadership context, and not purely rely on trying to ‘do’ what others do.

On the other hand, I do think that this can be a useful way of testing your effectiveness as a leader and coming to terms with your true self - in terms of what feels comfortable and natural, and what feels forced.

Anyway, there was more to this article than I have time to get down here, so will try to come back to it shortly