A survival guide for leaders

Let's face it, to lead is to live dangerously. While leadership is often viewed as an exciting and glamorous endeavor, one in which you inspire others to follow you through good times and bad, such a portrayal ignores leadership's dark side: the inevitable attempts to take you out of the game. This is particularly true when a leader must steer an organization through difficult change. When the status quo is upset, people feel a sense of profound loss and dashed expectations. They may need to undergo a period of feeling incompetent or disloyal. It's no wonder they resist the change and often try to eliminate its visible agent. This "survival guide" offers a number of techniques--relatively straightforward in concept but difficult to execute--for protecting yourself as you lead such a change initiative. Adapted from the book Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading (Harvard Business School Press, 2002), the article has two main parts. The first looks outward, offering tactical advice about relating to your organization and the people in it. It is designed to protect you from those who would push you aside before you complete your initiatives. The second looks inward, focusing on your own needs and vulnerabilities. It is designed to keep you from bringing yourself down. The hard truth is that it is not possible to experience the rewards and joys of leadership without experiencing the pain as well. But staying in the game and bearing that pain is worth it, not only for the positive changes you can make in the lives of others but also for the meaning it gives your own.     

Discovering your authentic leadership

The ongoing problems in business leadership over the past five years have underscored the need for a new kind of leader in the twenty-first century: the authentic leader. Author Bill George, a Harvard Business School professor and the former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, and his colleagues, conducted the largest leadership development study ever undertaken. They interviewed 125 business leaders from different racial, religious, national, and socioeconomic backgrounds to understand how leaders become and remain authentic. Their interviews showed that you do not have to be born with any particular characteristics or traits to lead. You also do not have to be at the top of your organization. Anyone can learn to be an authentic leader. The journey begins with leaders understanding their life stories. Authentic leaders frame their stories in ways that allow them to see themselves not as passive observers but as individuals who learn from their experiences. These leaders make time to examine their experiences and to reflect on them, and in doing so they grow as individuals and as leaders. Authentic leaders also work hard at developing self-awareness through persistent and often courageous self-exploration. Denial can be the greatest hurdle that leaders face in becoming self-aware, but authentic leaders ask for, and listen to, honest feedback. They also use formal and informal support networks to help them stay grounded and lead integrated lives. The authors argue that achieving business results over a sustained period of time is the ultimate mark of authentic leadership. It may be possible to drive short-term outcomes without being authentic, but authentic leadership is the only way to create long-term results.     

What leaders really do

Leadership is different from management, but not for the reasons most people think. Leadership isn't mystical and mysterious. It has nothing to do with having "charisma" or other exotic personality traits. It is not the province of a chosen few. Nor is leadership necessarily better than management or a replacement for it. Rather, leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems of action. Each has its own function and characteristic activities. Both are necessary for success in today's business environment. Management is about coping with complexity. Its practices and procedures are largely a response to the emergence of large, complex organizations in the twentieth century. Leadership, by contrast, is about coping with change. Part of the reason it has become so important in recent years is that the business world has become more competitive and more volatile. More change always demands more leadership. Most U. S. corporations today are overmanaged and underled. They need to develop their capacity to exercise leadership. Successful corporations don't wait for leaders to come along. They actively seek out people with leadership potential and expose them to career experiences designed to develop that potential. Indeed, with careful selection, nurturing, and encouragement, dozens of people can play important leadership roles in a business organization. But while improving their ability to lead, companies should remember that strong leadership with weak management is no better, and is sometimes actually worse, than the reverse. The real challenge is to combine strong leadership and strong management and use each to balance the other.     

How leaders create and use networks

Most people acknowledge that networking-creating a fabric of personal contacts to provide support, feedback, insight, and resources--is an essential activity for an ambitious manager. Indeed, it's a requirement even for those focused simply on doing their current jobs well. For some, this is a distasteful reality. Working through networks, they believe,means relying on "who you know" rather than "what you know"--a hypocritical, possibly unethical, way to get things done. But even people who understand that networking is a legitimate and necessary part of their jobs can be discouraged by the payoff--because they are doing it in too limited a fashion. On the basis of a close study of 30 emerging leaders, the authors outline three distinct forms of networking. Operational networking is geared toward doing one's assigned tasks more effectively. It involves cultivating stronger relationships with colleagues whose membership in the network is clear; their roles define them as stakeholders. Personal networking engages kindred spirits from outside an organization in an individual's efforts to learn and find opportunities for personal advancement. Strategic networking puts the tools of networking in the service of business goals. At this level, a manager creates the kind of network that will help uncover and capitalize on new opportunities for the company. The ability to move to this level of networking turns out to be a key test of leadership. Companies often recognize that networks are valuable, andthey create explicit programs to support them. But typically these programs facilitate only operational networking. Likewise, industry associations provide formal contexts for personal networking. The unfortunate effect is to give managers the impression that they know how to network and are doing so sufficiently. A sidebar notes the implication for companies' leadership development initiatives: that teaching strategic networking skills will serve their aspiring leaders and their business goals well.     

What to ask the person in the mirror

Every leader gets off track from time to time. But as leaders rise through the ranks, they have fewer and fewer opportunities for honest and direct feedback. Their bosses are no longer monitoring their actions, and by the time management missteps have a negative impact on business results, it's usually too late to make course corrections that will set things right. Therefore, it is wise to go through a self-assessment, to periodically step back from the bustle of running a business and ask some key questions of yourself. Author Robert S. Kaplan, who during his 22-year career at Goldman Sachs chaired the firm's senior leadership training efforts and cochaired its partnership committee, identifies seven areas for self-reflection: vision and priorities, managing time, feedback, succession planning, evaluation and alignment, leading under pressure, and staying true to yourself. The author sets out a series of questions in each of the areas, illustrating the impact of self-assessment through vivid accounts of real executives. Although the questions sound simple, people are often shocked-even horrified- by their own answers. Executives are aware that they should be focusing on their most important priorities, for instance, but without stepping back to reflect, few actually know where they are allocating their time. Kaplan advocates writing down what you do every working hour for a week and checking how well your actions match up with your intentions. As for feedback, managers should ask themselves whether they're getting truthful evaluations from their subordinates. (In all likelihood, they aren't). It takes time and discipline to persuade your employees to tell you about your failings.     

Realizing what you're made of

A ruptured disk pressed against Glenn Mangurian's spinal cord several years ago, leaving the lower half of his body permanently paralyzed. One minute, Mangurian was healthy and secure in his career as a management consultant; the next, his life was transformed and filled with uncertainty. The injury has taught him volumes about resilience and leadership. In this first-person account, he explains how people can create a new future after a crisis hits--and how, even if they're simply tackling everyday challenges, they can prepare themselves for the worst. Mangurian identifies resilience as one of the key qualities desired in business leaders today, but he says that many people confuse it with toughness. Toughness certainly can be an advantage in business, because it enables you to separate emotion from the negative consequences of difficult choices. But it can also be a disadvantage, because it can cut you off from many of the resources you'll need to bounce back after a crisis. Resilience, by contrast, is mostly about absorbing challenges--not deflecting them--and rebounding stronger than before. The author has learned a number of lessons about leadership in the face of adversity. For instance, although crisis distorts reality by reinforcing your fears, it also puts an emphasis on what matters right now; it highlights what's important to you and what you're capable of. Another major lesson is that loss amplifies the value of what remains, pushing you to take stock of what you have and to celebrate your assets. Perhaps most important, you can't know what will happen tomorrow--and it's better that way, because it's far more rewarding to engage with the present than just to prevent bad things from happening.     

Lessons in power: Lyndon Johnson revealed. A conversation with historian Robert A. Caro

No one can lead who does not first acquire power, and no leader can be great who does not know how to use that power. The trouble is that the combination of the two skills is rare. Amassing power requires ambition, a focused pragmatism, and a certain ruthlessness that is often at odds with the daring, idealistic vision needed to achieve great things with that power. The tension is as real in business as it is in politics. This magazine is replete with examples of successful senior managers who could not make the switch from ambitious executive to corporate leader because they did not know what to do with the power they had so expertly accumulated. Robert Caro is a student of power. For the past 27 years, the two-time Pulitzer prize-winning biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson has focused on the question of how Johnson amassed and wielded power. Caro's deep understanding of the inner workings of power offers senior executives a nuanced picture of leadership at the highest level. In this wide-ranging conversation, Caro shares his insights about the nature of power, the complexity of ambition, and the role that the greater good can play in the making of a leader. Power doesn't always corrupt, he insists. But what it invariably does is reveal a leader's true nature. "Today, when CEOs have acquired more and more power to change our lives," Caro says,"they have become like presidents in their own right, and they, too, need to align themselves with something greater than themselves if they hope to become truly great leaders."     

In praise of the incomplete leader

Today's top executives are expected to do everything right, from coming up with solutions to unfathomably complex problems to having the charisma and prescience to rally stakeholders around a perfect vision of the future. But no one leader can be all things to all people. It's time to end the myth of the complete leader, say the authors. Those at the top must come to understand their weaknesses as well as their strengths. Only by embracing the ways in which they are incomplete can leaders fill in the gaps in their knowledge with others' skills.The incomplete leader has the confidence and humility to recognize unique talents and perspectives throughout the organization--and to let those qualities shine. The authors' work studying leadership over the past six years has led them to develop a framework of distributed leadership. Within that model, leadership consists of four capabilities: sensemaking, relating, "visioning," and inventing. Sensemaking involves understanding and mapping the context in which a company and its people operate. A leader skilled in this area can quickly identify the complexities of a given situation and explain them to others. The second capability, relating, means being able to build trusting relationships with others through inquiring (listening with intention), advocating (explaining one's own point of view), and connecting (establishing a network of allies who can help a leader accomplish his or her goals). Visioning, the third capability, means coming up with a compelling image of the future. It is a collaborative process that articulates what the members of an organization want to create. Finally, inventing involves developing new ways to bring that vision to life. Rarely will a single person be skilled in all four areas. That's why it's critical that leaders find others who can offset their limitations and complement their strengths. Those who don't will not only bear the burden of leadership alone but will find themselves at the helm of an unbalanced ship.     

The leadership journey

It isn't always easy to change leadership hats or to alter the way you assess a business problem. Under pressure, most executives fall back on the management style or approach that worked in the last crisis they faced. But old approaches rarely work in new and demanding situations. Just ask Leonard Schaeffer, chairman and CEO of WellPoint Health Networks, one of the country's largest and most successful managed-care companies. In this account, he describes how he consciously adopted three very different styles of leadership at critical points during his 30-year career, depending on the business challenges at hand. Schaeffer headed up the U.S. Health Care Finance Administration during the Carter years--and led the charge toward more efficient work practices at that agency. Then he transformed Blue Cross of California from a floundering bureaucracy losing close to $1 million each day into a strong public company, WellPoint. The dire circumstances at Blue Cross had dictated that Schaeffer initially be an autocratic leader, which he considers the managerial equivalent of being an emergency room surgeon--forced to do whatever it takes to save a patient's life. But as the company rebounded, the CEO shed that "any decision is better than no decision" style. He has become a participative, hands-off leader-setting strategies and goals from above but letting WellPoint's line managers and executives figure out how best to achieve those goals. Most recently, Schaeffer has turned into a reformer--a leader who works with one foot outside the company to spur changes in health care and society. There are pitfalls in switching leadership styles, Schaeffer admits, but this flexibility is necessary for realizing corporate- and personal-success.     

Are you picking the right leaders?

When it comes time to hire or promote, top executives routinely overvalue certain skills and traits while overlooking others. Intuitively, for example, they might seek out team players, people who shine operationally, dynamic public speakers, or those who are demonstrably hungry for greater responsibility. But some attributes that seem like good indicators of leadership potential are, paradoxically, just the reverse. Team players and those who excel operationally often make better seconds in command. Many a great public speaker lacks the subtle one-on-one persuasive powers that a top leader needs. And shows of raw ambition may be more an indicator of ego than of leadership talent. Unfortunately, few organizations have the right procedures in place to produce complete and accurate pictures of their top prospects. Assessments are often based on hearsay, gossip, and casual observation. Many companies spend too much effort trying to develop leaders and not enough effort trying to identify them. A new evaluation process will help you avoid that trap. Candidates are assessed by a group of people who have observed their behavior directly over time and in different circumstances. Using a carefully crafted series of questions, the group can probe a wide range of leadership criteria, including such "soft" attributes as personal integrity, that are difficult to assess. Without such information, senior management will remain vulnerable to misidentifying leadership talent, and the wrong people will continue to make their way up the corporate ladder.     

The 2003 HBR list. Breakthrough ideas for tomorrow's business agenda

International conflict. Bear markets. Corporate scandals. The events of this past year have prompted intense soul-searching in many quarters and led us, in this year's list of the best business ideas, to reassess some of the most basic assumptions about strategy, organizations, and leadership. We began by reconsidering the role of the leader. Whether the boss is a hero or villain, discussions of leadership focus almost exclusively on the CEO. But attention also needs to be paid to the other people who make organizations work, not only to the corporate boards that oversee CEOs but to the followers--to their responsibilities, their power, and their obligation not to follow flawed leaders. And we considered the fate of soft issues, like emotional intelligence, in hard times. It's tempting to dismiss them when your employees will do anything just to keep their jobs. But hard times are good times to employ such tools on yourself. They can arm you with the self-awareness you need to understand, anticipate, and outwit your enemies. Where tools may fail, an attitude adjustment may be what's needed. Despite valiant efforts to lead change and eliminate inefficiencies, organizations stay messy. Perhaps it's better to learn to live with messiness and even focus on its benefits, one of which may be growth. Not the meteoric, effortless illusion we indulged in during the 1990s, but significant gains nonetheless. These can come when managers embrace messiness not just within their organizations but along the boundaries of the firm, blurring the line between their own core assets and functions and those of other companies. There's growth potential, too, in considering the company as a portfolio of opportunities--but only if managers can sell off poorly performing business units as easily as they've been shedding ailing stocks of late.     

Putting leaders on the couch. A conversation with Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries. Interview by Diane L. Coutu

Much of the business literature on leadership starts with the assumption that leaders are rational beings. But irrationality is integral to human nature, and inner conflict often contributes to the drive to succeed. Although a number of business scholars have explored the psychology of executives, Manfred F.R Kets de Vries has made the analysis of CEOs his life's work. In this article, Kets de Vries, a psychoanalyst, author, and instead professor, draws on three decades of study to describe the psychological profile of successful CEOs. He explores senior executives' vulnerabilities, which are often intensified by followers' attempts to manipulate their leaders. Leaders, he says, have an uncanny ability to awaken transferential processes--in which people transfer the dynamics of past relationships onto present interactions--among their employees and even in themselves. These processes can present themselves in a number of ways, sometimes negatively. What's more, many top executives, being middle-aged, suffer from depression. Mid-life prompts a reappraisal of career identity, and by the time a leader is a CEO, an existential crisis is often imminent. This can happen with anyone, but the probability is higher with CEOs, and senior executives because so many have devoted themselves exclusively to work. Not all CEOs are psychologically unhealthy, of course. Healthy leaders are talented in self-observation and self-analysis, Kets de Vries says. The best are highly motivated to spend time on self-reflection. Their lives are in balance, they can play, they are creative and inventive, and they have the capacity to be nonconformist. "Those who accept the madness in themselves may be the healthiest leaders of all," he concludes.     

Leadership run amok. The destructive potential of overachievers

The desire to achieve is a major source of strength in business, and it is on the rise. The authors' consulting firm has seen a steady increase in the extent to which achievement motivates managers. There's a dark side to the trend, however. By relentlessly focusing on tasks and goals, an executive or company can damage performance. Overachievers tend to command and coerce, stifling subordinates. Psychologist David McClelland identified three drivers of behavior: achievement, meeting a standard of excellence; affiliation, maintaining close relationships; and power, having an impact on others. He said the power motive comes in two forms: personalized, in which the leader draws strength from controlling people, and socialized, where the leader derives strength from empowering people. Studies show that great charismatic leaders are highly motivated by socialized power. To look at how motives and leadership style affect a group's work climate and performance, the authors studied 21 senior managers at IBM.The leaders who created high-performing and energizing climates got more lasting results by using a broad range of styles, choosing different ones for different circumstances. Rather than order people around, they provided vision, sought buy-in and commitment, and coached. If you're an overachiever seeking to broaden your range, you can study your actions and ask your team, peers, and manager to give you honest feedback. You can adopt specific new behaviors, such as engaging your team in a discussion of how to achieve goals, rather than issuing a set of directives. The company as a whole can play a part, too: Organizations must learn when to draw on the achievement drive and when to rein it in.     

Why people follow the leader: the power of transference

We all admire leaders. In trying to understand how leadership works, however, we often lose sight of the fact that followers are a crucial part of the equation. Regrettably, they get short shrift in the management literature, where they are described as merely responding to their leaders' charisma or caring attitudes. What most analyses seem to ignore is that followers have their own motivations and are as powerfully driven to follow as leaders are to lead. In this article, psychoanalyst, anthropologist, and management consultant Michael Maccoby delves into the unconscious recesses of followers' minds. He looks closely at the often irrational tendency to relate to a leader as some important person from the past--a parent, a sibling, a close friend, or even a nanny. Sigmund Freud discovered this dynamic when working with his patients and called it"transference." But as important as it is, the concept remains little understood outside the realm of clinical psychoanalysis. This is unfortunate, because a solid understanding of transference can yield great insight into organizational behavior and endow you with the wisdom and compassion to be a tremendous leader. The author explains the most common types of transference--paternal, maternal, and sibling--and shows how they play out in the workplace. He notes that they have evolved as our family structures have changed. Whether followers perceive a leader as an all-knowing father figure, as an authoritative yet unconditionally loving mother figure, or as a brother or sister who isn't necessarily a model of good behavior, the leader can manage transferential ties by bringing unconscious projections to light. Then debilitating resentment and animosity can give way to mutual understanding and productivity--and a limping organization can start to thrive.     

The young and the clueless

It's natural to promote your best and brightest, especially when you think they may leave for greener pastures if you don't continually offer them new challenges and rewards. But promoting smart, ambitious young managers too quickly often robs them of the chance to develop the emotional competencies that come with time and experience--competencies like the ability to negotiate with peers, regulate emotions in times of crisis, and win support for change. Indeed, at some point in a manager's career--usually at the vice president level--raw talent and ambition become less important than the ability to influence and persuade, and that's the point at which the emotionally immature manager will lose his effectiveness. This article argues that delaying a promotion can sometimes be the best thing a senior executive can do for a junior manager. The inexperienced manager who is given time to develop his emotional competencies may be better prepared for the interpersonal demands of top-level leadership. The authors recommend that senior executives employ these strategies to help boost their protégés' people skills: sharpen the 360-degree feedback process, give managers cross-functional assignments to improve their negotiation skills, make the development of emotional competencies mandatory, make emotional competencies a performance measure, and encourage managers to develop informal learning partnerships with peers and mentors. Delaying a promotion can be difficult given the steadfast ambitions of many junior executives and the hectic pace of organizational life. It may mean going against the norm of promoting people almost exclusively on smarts and business results. It may also mean contending with the disappointment of an esteemed subordinate. But taking the time to build people's emotional competencies isn't an extravagance; it's critical to developing effective leaders.     

Crucibles of leadership

What makes a great leader? Why do some people appear to know instinctively how to inspire employees--bringing out their confidence, loyalty, and dedication--while others flounder again and again? No simple formula can explain how great leaders come to be, but Bennis and Thomas believe it has something to do with the ways people handle adversity. The authors' recent research suggests that one of the most reliable indicators and predictors of true leadership is the ability to learn from even the most negative experiences. An extraordinary leader is a kind of phoenix rising from the ashes of adversity stronger and more committed than ever. In interviewing more than 40 leaders in business and the public sector over the past three years, the authors discovered that all of them--young and old alike--had endured intense, often traumatic, experiences that transformed them and became the source of their distinctive leadership abilities. Bennis and Thomas call these shaping experiences "crucibles," after the vessels medieval alchemists used in their attempts to turn base metals into gold. For the interviewees, their crucibles were the points at which they were forced to question who they were and what was important to them. These experiences made them stronger and more confident and changed their sense of purpose in some fundamental way. Through a variety of examples, the authors explore the idea of the crucible in detail. They also reveal that great leaders possess four essential skills, the most critical of which is "adaptive capacity"--an almost magical ability to transcend adversity and emerge stronger than before.     

Making yourself indispensable

Peter Drucker and other leadership thinkers have long argued that leaders should focus on strengthening their strengths. How should they do that? Improving on a weakness is pretty easy and straight forward: You can make measurable progress by honing and practicing basic techniques. But developing a strength is a different matter, because simply doing more of what you're good at will yield only incremental improvements. If you are strong technically, becoming even more of a technical expert won't make you a dramatically better leader. If, however, you use what the authors call "nonlinear development"--similar to an athlete's cross-training--you can achieve exponential results. Your technical expertise will become more powerful if, for instance, you build on your communication skills, enabling you to explain technical problems both more broadly and more effectively. The authors, all from the leadership development consultancy Zenger Folkman, present a step-by-step process by which developing leaders can identify their strengths (through either a formal or an informal 360-degree evaluation), select appropriate complementary skills (the article identifies up to a dozen for each core strength), and develop those skills to dramatically improve their strengths--making themselves uniquely valuable to their companies.     

Managing authenticity: the paradox of great leadership

Leaders and followers both associate authenticity with sincerity, honesty, and integrity. It's the real thing--the attribute that uniquely defines great managers. But while the expression of a genuine self is necessary for great leadership, the concept of authenticity is often misunderstood, not least by leaders themselves. They often assume that authenticity is an innate quality--that a person is either genuine or not. In fact, the authors say, authenticity is largely defined by what other people see in you and, as such, can to a great extent be controlled by you. In this article, the authors explore the qualities of authentic leadership. To illustrate their points, they recount the experiences of some of the authentic leaders they have known and studied, including the BBC's Greg Dyke, Nestlé's Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, and Marks & Spencer's Jean Tomlin. Establishing your authenticity as a leader is a two-part challenge. You have to consistently match your words and deeds; otherwise, followers will never accept you as authentic. But it is not enough just to practice what you preach. To get people to follow you, you also have to get them to relate to you. This means presenting different faces to different audiences--a requirement that many people find hard to square with authenticity. But authenticity is not the product of manipulation. It accurately reflects aspects of the leader's inner self, so it can't be an act. Authentic leaders seem to know which personality traits they should reveal to whom, and when. Highly attuned to their environments, authentic leaders rely on an intuition born of formative, sometimes harsh experiences to understand the expectations and concerns of the people they seek to influence. They retain their distinctiveness as individuals, yet they know how to win acceptance in strong corporate and social cultures and how to use elements of those cultures as a basis for radical change.     

Which of these people is your future CEO?

Americans have long believed that U.S. military officers--trained for high-stakes positions, resilience, and mental agility--make excellent CEOs. That belief is sound, but the authors' analysis of the performance of 45 companies led by CEOs with military experience revealed differences in how the branches (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps) prepare leaders for business. Those differences reflect the trade-off between flexibility and process that each branch of the armed services must make. Army and Marine Corps officers operate in an inherently uncertain environment. They define the mission but then give subordinates the flexibility to adjust to realities on the ground. This leadership experience tends to turn out business executives who excel in small firms, where they can set a goal and then empower others to work toward it. Navy and Air Force officers, who operate expensive, complex systems such as submarines and aircraft carriers, are trained to follow processes to the letter, because even small deviations can have large consequences. In corporations, these leaders excel in regulated industries and in firms that take a process approach to innovation. The larger lesson that the military can offer the business world is that fit matters. Different circumstances demand different leadership skills. Hire the person who fits the job.     

Thinking about ... leadership. Warts and all

Does using Tyco's funds to purchase a $6,000 shower curtain and a $15,000 dog-shaped umbrella stand make Dennis Kozlowski a bad leader? Is Martha Stewart's career any less instructive because she may have sold some shares on the basis of a tip-off? Is leadership synonymous with moral leadership? Before 1970, the answer from most leadership theorists would certainly have been no. Look at Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Tsetung--great leaders all, but hardly good men. In fact, capricious, murderous, high-handed, corrupt, and evil leaders are effective and commonplace. Machiavelli celebrated them; the U.S. constitution built in safeguards against them. Everywhere, power goes hand in hand with corruption--everywhere, that is, except in the literature of business leadership. To read Tom Peters, Jay Conger, John Kotter, and most of their colleagues, leaders are, as Warren Bennis puts it, individuals who create shared meaning, have a distinctive voice, have the capacity to adapt, and have integrity. According to today's business literature, to be a leader is, by definition, to be benevolent. But leadership is not a moral concept, and it is high time we acknowledge that fact. We have as much to learn from those we would regard as bad examples as we do from the far fewer good examples we're presented with these days. Leaders are like the rest of us: trustworthy and deceitful, cowardly and brave, greedy and generous. To assume that all good leaders are good people is to be willfully blind to the reality of the human condition, and it severely limits our ability to become better leaders. Worse, it may cause senior executives to think that, because they are leaders, they are never deceitful, cowardly, or greedy. That way lies disaster.