Labyrinth- the Art of Decision-Making by Pawel Motyl

Author:Pawel Motyl
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781989025314
Publisher: Page Two
Published: 2019-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

7

In Search of Authentic Leaders

Leadership. There’s probably no other topic in business that exerts such fundamental influence over the quality of the decisions taken within a company and creates such a strong feeling of unease in me. Everyone talks about it. Google will find you over half a billion pages if you search for the word leadership. The number of self-proclaimed experts running training sessions on it seems to grow with every passing hour, at every turn we can apparently learn “how to become an outstanding leader in a weekend,” and more and more people, whom you might not immediately associate with the topic, are crawling out of the woodwork to offer their two cents on the topic. The debate about whether leadership is innate or learned, or whether being a leader is a question of personality or of experience resounds at ever more conferences and seminars, leaps at us from the pages of magazines, rampages through the blogosphere and social media.

However, while we can gorge ourselves on theories, in one form or another, we are positively starving when it comes to people who can take those theories and turn them into practices. Thus, we find ourselves constantly repeating the mantra about a lack of leaders. We say there are no authorities, no clear vision, no strong characters to inspire us to challenge our own limitations and improve ourselves. According to many, this problem, this lack of real, authentic leaders, has even intensified in recent years. They’re right. Authentic leaders have always been a rare thing in the business ecosystem, and the pace of change in the environment means we need more of them than ever before, especially as a lack of leadership can have only two consequences: if we’re lucky, stagnation and a lack of development; if we’re unlucky, catastrophic errors like those that hit NASA in 1986 and 2003.

Today, sound management isn’t enough. It’s not enough now to just “do things in the right way”—in the new normal, even the error-free implementation of decisions and following procedures will get you nowhere when you’re faced with a black swan. The second part of Peter Drucker’s definition of leadership has become key: success or failure is decided by the ability to “do the right things,” making the right decisions and the right choices, which we expect our leaders to do. The psychology of change has also begun to play a role, as the vast majority of people are afraid of change and are not keen to leave their comfort zone, which in the face of today’s macroeconomic, political, technological, and social turbulence is a pipe dream. People need a clear vision for sure, especially in times of uncertainty; therefore, they are looking for visionary leaders they can trust.

Leadership ability has been admired and debated over millennia. In the beginning were the men, and the occasional woman, who changed the world, generally military, political, or religious leaders, or great scientific minds. Their common denominator was the ease with which they attracted

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