John Adair - Lessons in Leadership: 12 Key Concepts

Lessons in Leadership

Lessons in Leadership

The 12 Key Concepts

John Adair

John Adair takes us on an evocative journey from the origins of leadership thought to reflections on practical wisdom and judgment. In doing so, he achieves his humble aim of sowing within us the seeds of inspiration.

PHIL JAMES, Chief Executive, The Institute of
Leadership & Management

Leadership expert John Adair packs a lifetime of leadership lessons learned into this fascinating book, chock full of insights and brilliant in its illustrations from both Western and Eastern thought.

CYNTHIA CHERREY, President and CEO,
International Leadership Association

John Adairs smart, slender volume, Lessons in Leadership, summarizes what he has learned over a lifetime of studying and teaching leadership as well as practising it. Adairs personal and professional trajectory explains why this coda is wise as well as informed.

BARBARA KELLERMAN, James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in
Leadership, Kennedy School, Harvard University

The author explores the journey to becoming an effective strategic leader of an organization. Lessons in Leadership is a very inspiring read for anyone who is in a leadership position and wants to better understand their role and thus become more effective.

JOHN FAIRHURST, Managing Director and Academic Principal,
London School of Business and Management

Contents

In our complex and interdependent world, vulnerable to disruption, few things are more important than the quality and credibility of leaders.

IT IS DIFFICULT to deny the truth of these words. Look at the news on a television or mobile device, or read todays newspaper, and what do you find? That our world has indeed a deep and pressing need for good leaders and leaders for good in all fields of human enterprise and at all levels.

On a personal note, may I add that all of my professional life has been governed by a sense of that need and a determination to respond to it. In 1979, for example, I became the first person in the world to hold a university appointment as Professor of Leadership Studies. More recently, I have served as Chair of Leadership in the United Nations, based on the UN System Staff College in Turin.

Since that time, of course, there has been a proliferation of both courses and professors of leadership in business schools and universities throughout the world, but especially in America. For those of us who have been given the rank and title of professor, it is salutary to bear in mind this comment of Einstein: Academic chairs are many, but wise and noble teachers are few.

For the benefit of practical leaders in senior positions, as well as academics, this book is a summary of the main lessons that I have learnt so far about effective leadership. You may be familiar with some of the contents already, notably the chapters relating to Action Centred Leadership, which has been written about extensively and tends to be widely known. Other chapters, however, are much more tentative and exploratory. If you feel that I have left out something of importance, or for that matter included something which belongs elsewhere than under the canopy of leadership, please dont hesitate to let me know: For what matters to all of us in this field is truth.

In fact I do have a very firm belief in the importance of truth. To my mind the quality and credibility of leaders depends ultimately upon whether or not they know and understand the truth about leadership and are willing to live it out whatever the cost truth through personality.

My own personal quest for the truth about leadership began at a relatively young age. Therefore that story and in effect the story of this book starts long ago at St Pauls School in London, way back in 1952, the year when Queen Elizabeth II ascended the throne. I was eighteen years old and came to the subject with a fresh mind and an eagerness to become a good leader myself.

Leaders are born not made.

ENGLISH PROVERB

WHILE AT ST PAULS SCHOOL I founded the History Society, which, I am pleased to say, survives to this day. In my last term, as its retiring president, I was required to deliver a lecture. I chose as my subject leadership in history. No notes of my lecture survive, but this brief report appeared in the school magazine:

Leadership, he said, could be defined as the activity of influencing people to pursue a certain course; there must also be some power of mind behind the leader. Leadership is not merely the authority of the commander, but contains by necessity some strange strength of personality which attracts the ordinary man. It is only when the times are favourable that a man of destiny can come into his own. Although leadership may change in its aspect from age to age, the qualities of a leader are the same .

Short though it is, this paragraph also has the merit of just about summing up all that was known or perhaps I should say believed about leadership in those days, namely the mid-twentieth century.

For example, it reflects the assumption in those days that leadership was male . Present also at that time are two other assumptions: namely that leadership was both Western and essentially military .

The alumni of St Pauls School includes not only John Milton and Samuel Pepys but also the great eighteenth-century military commander the Duke of Marlborough, and in modern times Field Marshal Lord Montgomery. In fact, during the Second World War, Montgomery commandeered the large Victorian red-brick building of his old school in Hammersmith to serve as his headquarters for the planning of Operation Overlord in 1944. When he spoke to us schoolboys about his campaigns in the same lecture theatre which he used to brief General Eisenhower and King George VI on the D-Day landings Monty on the stage, speaking without notes, personified for me the definitive military leader.

The assumption then, I think it is true to say, was that leadership was something that occurred in primarily the military domain, and it was for others to learn from the practice of it on the battlefield. Therefore, the individuals who could speak with authority on the subject, or so the belief went, were active or retired military officers of distinction. Colonel Lyndon Urwick, a veteran of the trenches, had pioneered that role after the First World War, but as a lone voice. (On a later occasion, he kindly met me for lunch and gave me signed copies of all his relevant books and booklets.)

After the Second World War, Britains two most successful military leaders Montgomery and Field Marshal Lord Slim followed suit. Slim lectured and broadcast widely on leadership; Montgomery less so, although he did write a whole book on the subject entitled The Path to Leadership (1961). This was followed by The Art of Leadership (1964), a thoughtful book on the traditions of the Royal Navy, written by Captain Stephen Roskill, RN, a distinguished Second World War commander and naval historian, having been given fellowships at a Cambridge college in order to do so.

However, the seepage of leadership from the military domain into the world of work at large does raise two major questions. The first one concerns what is technically called transfer. What grounds have we for believing that the kind of leadership displayed on the battlefield be it on land, at sea or in the air is transferable to any kind of peacetime situation?

A rider to this question stems from the fact that in military contexts as I hinted in my lecture leadership is inextricably mixed up with command. And so, we must further ask how far is command and control on the military model relevant to peace situations? Are not war and peace two completely different worlds?