The Search for Leadership: Key Points

Here are just some of the points that Bill Tate makes in The Search for Leadership. If you agree with most or all of them, you'll love the book. If this seems like completely new thinking, you should definitely read it (and use the Toolkit to implement the approach in your organisation). If it all seems like common sense and you've been doing it for years, please talk to us about your experiences - or write us a case study!
.
  • Leadership is not the sole preserve of those who are designated ‘leaders’. It is one part of every manager’s job at appropriate times.
  • Leadership never happens in a vacuum. It becomes possible in a specific organisational context and is largely shaped by that larger context.
  • The prime purpose of leadership and its main value to a business is to ensure that the organisation continually improves and changes to ensure that the business has a secure future.
  • Lists of competencies that distinguish between managing and leading will not, on their own, ensure that managers will choose the leadership option or know when or to what to apply it.
  • Leadership is an organisational resource. It needs to be managed.
  • The need to manage the process of leadership is separate from the need to manage the people who lead.
  • Individual managers’ learning and development is important, but organisations can take too much responsibility for planning and managing it, while correspondingly showing too little interest in the organisation’s development.
  • While managers should be personally competent as leaders, the use of leadership competency frameworks for individual managers achieves next to nothing in terms of organisational/systemic leadership.
  • Competency frameworks assume that once managers know how (‘doing things right’), they’ll make sound choices about what (‘doing right things’). But organisations are full of people doing the wrong things competently.
  • The notion of a more distributed leadership culture throughout the organisation is fundamental if organisations are to tap into front-line experience and generate energy for change.
  • All organisations are continually engaged in a cycle of decay and increasing disorder, usually followed by rejuvenation and order which may be brought about through the exercise of leadership.
  • Reduced openness and discussibility, and a growing number of taboo subjects, are signs of an organisation’s increasing toxicity.
  • Don’t confuse effectiveness with success. Identify and choose effective leaders as role models.
  • In order to better understand and improve organisations, work and leadership, it helps to adopt a systems way of thinking about how the various aspects of the organisation come together, interact and work as one.
  • When a leadership problem arises, ask ‘Might we be overlooking a systems dimension?’
  • Organisations are not rational places. Besides their formal/official side, organisations have a more potent non-rational side – messy, crazy and sometimes dark, casting a shadow – which can be, and needs to be, recognised, understood and managed.
  • Awareness of, and respect for, the shadow system’s contribution and power is essential for effective leadership, especially in the context of change. A healthy scepticism for the rational system’s relative impotence (e.g. the futility of relying on edicts) is also a prerequisite of effective leadership, and avoidance of hubris and naivety.
  • For an organisation to be vital, innovative, flexible and changing, it needs to be held at a point that is just stable – not ossified but not anarchic – at a point known as ‘the edge of chaos’.
To put flesh on this skeleton, read The Search for Leadership. To start applying these principles in your organisation, have a look at the Toolkit.

Read more:

The Book's Home Page 
The Author
Contents
Topics Covered
Reviews
Key Points of the Book
Systems Thinking & Leadership
Why Leadership Needs Managing
Read Chapter 2

Related Titles:
Systemic Leadership: The Toolkit
The Decision Loom
Growing Wings on the Way