Epic Think Tank

Leadership for the Top Team

Tough love for top leaders

It's not only tough at the top, but lonely. Leaders often feel more in common with their opposite numbers at other companies than they do with those they lead and manage, who don't necessarily face the same intensity of challenges, and may have very different knowledge needs.

Some participate in learning sets, which allow them to contrast and compare their experience with others in leadership positions. There has also been a rapid growth, in recent years, in the practice of executive coaching; practiced face to face, over the telephone or by electronic means.

Opinion around the table was divided about the value of this, but one revealing anecdote was shared by a delegate from a major telco on the subject of coaching. It seems that there was one particular department head within the company for whom nobody liked working. He was intellectually brilliant, and a decisive and effective leader, but he lacked people skills - to the extent that it was causing serious problems in the business. The answer arrived at by top management was to allocate him a personal coach, with a hidden agenda - to expose this weakness to the person in question and help him tackle it.

This raises an interesting issue. Leaders tend to be outward-looking, outcome-orientated people; more interested in doing, than in reflecting on their own habits and behaviour. In a sense they don't need any encouragement to learn: they are restless, hungry people always looking for new ideas that are going to make a difference. So, in some circumstances it may be that what they need is less to be supported than to be challenged. There may well be a place for the sort of 'tough love' meeted out in the example above.

In order to manage others, so the popular wisdom goes, it is first necessary to manage oneself. And if the others you are managing can be counted in tens or even hundreds of thousands, then surely the job of self-management becomes that much larger - and its outcome that much more critical. It is often said nowadays that the heads of large corporates, in particular, have more power than heads of government. And with great power comes… just ask Spiderman's dad.

Here is the third important difference between leaders and 'normal' people: leaders can face personal development issues on a different order of magnitude entirely from the rest of us.

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Introduction
Cometh the hour, cometh the...MBA?
Learning from the post boy
Conclusion

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