Chapter 17

The Many Faces of Leadership

“In my 20 years of working, I’ve never had a better boss than my first supervisor. He understood people and how to motivate them. He could be tough and caring at the same time. And he was never afraid to say he didn’t know something. We would have followed him anywhere. I wish there had been some way that we could have bottled him.”

Vice president
Fortune 100 company

In the early 1940s, Prime Minister Winston Churchill rallied a starving and battered England to hold out through months of Nazi bombing. A few years after that, Mahatma Gandhi led India against the might of the British Empire to win his peoples’ independence - without the use of violence. Almost 20 years later, Dr. Martin Luther King inspired a massive civil rights movement to confront head-on centuries of discrimination against African-Americans. Then, in 1980, Candy Lightner and a small group of California women established Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), which forced changes in federal and state laws that significantly helped reduce alcohol-related traffic accidents and deaths. In the close of this century, Nelson Mandela showed the world the power of leadership by becoming the first elected black president of the Republic of South Africa, following decades of apartheid and brutality.

What do these five people have in common? Their values, passions, and talents persuaded others to follow them and to courageously take action in the face of daunting odds.

But not all leaders draw history’s spotlight. Every day, millions of men and women motivate others to change a small corner of their world. Whether it’s in the fight against AIDs, the campaign to make schools safe for children, or the struggle to keep an organization healthy and growing, people work tirelessly without publicity or fanfare. You find leaders at all levels of society - and organizations. Leaders are diverse as society itself, you can’t pigeon-hole leaders; each leader’s style and skill remains uniquely his or her own.

Don’t worry, you won’t get an academic discourse on leadership. We’d get bored writing one. Instead, this chapter looks at the human qualities that cause people to trust and follow other human beings. Some managers make outstanding leaders, while others win the Boss from You-Know-Where contest (see Chapter 2). What do outstanding leaders, at all levels, do to motivate employees to abandon the safety of the known and risk the unknown? What do leaders do to keep employees dedicated and inspired even during disappointments, disruptions, and disasters? This chapter addresses those questions.

Leaders Are Many Different People

No carpenter would use only a hammer to build a house, nor would a surgeon rely solely on a scalpel to remove a tumor. Neither should you rely on a single style for leading people through a merger or a company-wide integration of your information systems.

Motivating people to give up the familiar and to leap into the unknown requires ambidextrous leadership. It’s about creating options, understanding situations and people, and being flexible. It isn’t about one style of thinking or acting. Successful change leaders understand this. They consciously develop and use multiple methods for encouraging employees to embrace the future.

We present six different styles that successful managers often adapt when leading the charge. But rarely does each one exist in its purest form because managers evolve their own personal ways of operating.

They are: Coaches, Role Models, Investigators, Actors, Builders, and Human Beings.

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