Managing Leadership^®

Vendors of lists of leadership characteristics can certainly develop plausible arguments for those that they insist upon as being vital for a successful leader. Better still, they can provide real-life exemplars for each of these essential traits, demonstrating how inextricably bound up with each person’s success were the highlighted characteristics.

But one of the many problems with this approach resides in the often less pleasant aspects of some of these characteristics as exhibited by particular sampled leaders, or of some other distinctly undesirable traits that often appear to inevitably accompany the celebrated ones. For example, as often as we hear about the importance of courage in a leader, we find it expressed as bullying. Or, enjoined to attract leaders with high levels of self-assurance, we find them bringing along similarly high levels of arrogance in the same baggage.

When confronted with problems like these, the trait touters sometimes fall back on the “price you pay” argument: if you want this, you get that – learn to deal with it. This is taken frequent recourse to in literally every realm peopled with supposedly exceptional individual leaders – from politics to the military to business – where the virtues initially sold to us are writ large, but no larger than the vices we eventually discover there as well.

But is it true? Must we accept certain disagreeable personal shortcomings in order to enjoy supposedly must-have leadership capabilities? Indeed, are the former inescapably paired with – even indicators of – the latter?

We’ll take a brief look at those questions and more tomorrow. Please do stop by, and bring your observations with you!

—

Today’s tips: Speaking of vices and virtues, they, unsurprisingly, are often in the eye of the beholder. Please see these contrasting views of one such issue: Vice: A WSJ article about Carl Icahn and the Yahoo board; Virtue: Icahn’s response posted at his blog. Which do you find more convincing?

—

Please do take a moment to subscribe, either by email or RSS reader, to be sure you receive future articles as they’re published.

Similar Posts:

• Growing into the job
• Sins and sanctimony
• Humility? Check. Sincerity? Check . . .
• Leading from the rear
• Big shoes to fill

Technorati Tags: leadership, characteristic, leader, trait, courage, bullying, arrogance, politics, military, business, WSJ, Carl Icahn, Yahoo