David L. Dotlich - The Unfinished Leader: Balancing Contradictory Answers to Unsolvable Problems

Table of Contents

Praise for The Unfinished Leader

Leaders in all organizationswhether companies or governmentsare faced with messy challenges every day. The Unfinished Leader accepts these paradoxes as a fact of life and offers useful advice and real-world examples so every leader can respond more effectively to these challenges.

Alan Webber, founding editor, Fast Company

The Unfinished Leader is a fascinating and provoctive book which makes a strong case that leaders are always becoming rather than reaching a destination. In particular, the authors focus on the paradoxes that characterize organizational life and how leaders can learn to confront, live with, and ultimately leverage those paradoxes. The book is a compelling combination of counterintuitive theory combined with a tremendous amount of very practical and pragmatic advice. Leaders at all levels, facing the increasingly paradoxical nature of leadership and organizations, will benefit greatly from this work.

David A. Nadler, principal, Nadler Advisory Solutions, and retired vice chairman, Marsh & McLennan Companies

Leadership dilemmas are an opportunity to inspire innovation and creativity if you approach them with the right tools and mindset. Full of invaluable insights from international CEOs and senior executives, The Unfinished Leader provides practical advice on how the best leaders turn obstacles into opportunities to inspire innovation and creativity.

Marvin Chow, marketing director, Google Inc.

Copyright 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dotlich, David L. (David Landreth), 1950

The unfinished leader : balancing contradictory answers to unsolvable problems / David L. Dotlich, Peter C. Cairo, Cade Cowan.First edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-45509-8 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-118-86711-2 (pdf); ISBN 978-1-118-86714-3 (epub)

1. Leadership. 2. Decision making. 3. Work and family. I. Cairo, Peter C., 1948 II. Cowan, Cade, 1972 III. Title.

HD57.7.D678 2014

658.4092dc23

2013046389

One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical for the paradox is the source of the thinker's passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.

Sren Kierkegaard

Note

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Foreword

Stephen H. Rhinesmith

Most people are so used to hearing about the complete leader, the whole leader, and the balanced leader that it probably brings you up short to think of the unfinished leader as a role model. But that is what this book is all about.

When could an unfinished leader be good? Well, it might be in a complex world in which there are no easy answers. In a world where leaders need to see themselves as constantly open to new possibilities. In a world where leaders are willing to jump on new ideas and accept that they probably don't have all the answersand never will.

A leadership model that posits that the ideal leader is finishedcomplete and self-sufficienthas several inadequacies in today's world. First, leadership is becoming a collective experience as the world becomes more complex. Few leaders today can manage the challenges of a complex, technology-driven, connected marketplace by themselves. The increasing numbers of books on collaboration underscore the need for leaders to achieve their organizations' objectives in a way that moves them beyond whether they personally are finished leaders.

This coincides with a trend in leadership research to identify effective leaders as authentic in their relations both with others and with themselves. That means acknowledging strengths and weaknesses and ensuring that the best skills are applied to manage the most important challenges. This again requires moving beyond thinking about one individual as an independent, finished actor.

The leadership literature today also stresses the concept of effective leaders as self-aware. And being self-aware in today's world also means being aware that you can't consider yourself finished as a leader. We are all destined to be unfinished as we continue to learn and develop for ever-changing challenges.

But we need unfinished leaders for yet other reasons. As the authors point out, we will never finish the most important personal and professional challenges. This is because more and more of our problems are not puzzles to be solved but paradoxes to be managed on a continuing basis that has no end. This turns the image of an effective leader as decisive problem solver on end. Effectiveness in a global, interconnected world depends on leaders who accept not only that they will never be finished but that the world around them will never be finished. Many of the most important challenges we face will never be solved once and for all.

This does not mean there cannot be temporary solutions, only that fewer solutions will last. The Chinese for centuries have believed the world is on a continuum between yin and yang. The pendulum stops for a split second only before it starts swinging in the opposite direction. I was interviewing a leader in Shanghai a few years ago, and he said with pride that his business had been very successful in recent years. As a result, he was working hard to anticipate a future downturn, because he knew life was never one-sided. The swing of the pendulum would require him to manage the other side.