Page 27 - The extraordinary leader

4 • The Extraordinary Leader

Our objective is to provide the reader with an empirical analysis of
leadership, a simple and practical conceptual model of what leadership is,
and a practical guide to helping leaders develop “greatness.” Our approach
and understanding comes from our analysis of hundreds of thousands of
leadership assessments from the direct reports of leaders, their peers, their
bosses, and themselves. We let our findings guide our development of a
practical theory.
Because together the authors have roughly three-quarters of a century of
experience in leadership development, we were surprised that the research
changed some long-held beliefs about the nature of leadership and how best
to develop it.

The Complexity of Defining and Describing
Leadership, or Why the Mystery Exists
Everyone recognizes the challenge of trying to solve any problem that con-
tains multiple unknowns. That is precisely the problem in trying to solve the
leadership dilemma. There are at once a significant number of unknowns,
and many of them are constantly changing.
Sixteen of those variables are described below.

1. There are differences in the leadership behaviors and practices
required at different levels of the organization. What we need
from a CEO or the secretary of the Defense Department is different
than the leadership requirements of a night-shift supervisor at
McDonald’s.
2. Leadership occurs in extremely diverse environments. Some
leadership produces prescribed results in a relatively defined and
established organization. Such leadership may speed a product to
market or escalate the revenue from a sales force, but it is not
conceiving new directions or strategies for the organization. Other
leadership is exhibited in a start-up organization in which there is no
structure or form, and the leader must create it from scratch.
3. Different skills are required at different stages in a person’s career. The
research on career stages shows that people’s careers go through very
predictable stages. Early on, people start as apprentices, learning some