When parents are confronted with a crisis regarding their children, they often bring their adolescents to psychotherapists to be “fixed”. If the facilitator is experienced, the adults are confronted with the need to do some family of origin work in order to look at the unconscious reality driving the dysfunction. Organizations work the same way, [...]
Bernard Bass (2008) writes, “Successful leaders share values with those they lead” (p. 197). Unintentionally, the author has identified an aspect of the problem: leaders who model immaturity and limited self-awareness breed immature and unconscious values in their followers. Conversely, many leaders attempt to manipulate their followers by researching their values, and pretending to share [...]
An authentic leader’s style refers to a personal way of being. Landy and Conte describe the authentic leader as “genuine” and as a good “listener” (p. 567). This is congruent with most references (styles, models, and theories) to authentic leaders as being self-aware and other-aware. Bernard Bass (2008) reports, “Herb Kelleher, the highly rated CEO [...]
A pioneer in American leadership studies, leadership ethics, and business ethics, Joanne Ciulla began her distinguished career as a research fellow at Harvard in 1984. Since then she’s authored several books including The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work and three volumes of Leadership at the Crossroads, and over one hundred scholarly articles such [...]
Bernard Bass in his Handbook of Leadership defines social power as “the force less power underlying social exchanges in which the dependent person in the exchange relationship has and the person with more power is able to obtain compliance with his or her wishes” (p. 263). This is more of a definition of control than [...]
Traits are based on individual differences between people. Considerable research exists related to leadership traits. This blog post will focus on traits that correlate to successful authentic leadership in the areas of emotional intelligence (EI), creativity, and confidence. In a study of executive leaders of major organizational change initiatives, Petran (2008) discovered that emotional intelligence [...]
It is almost impossible to be vulnerable and transparent as a public leader in our culture. That is why Clinton remained wooden and completely absent from her body during the election. If she showed emotion, she may well have been torn to shreds. See Smith, Brescoll, & Thomas (2016) on the extra challenge women have to face [...]
This post compares the leadership approaches of Stan Goss, an executive coach, international speaker, and long-time mentor of this writer, and Mohandas Gandhi, the political and spiritual leader. Both men have modeled attributes that are characteristic of transformational leadership and authentic leadership styles. The 8-step approach of Advanced Change Theory (ACT), presented by Robert Quinn [...]