Three Myths of Leadership

My husband likes to poke fun at my profession. He insists that if you put the word leadership into the title of any publication, it will immediately go to the top of the best-seller list. "Leadership for Losers," he says, "it's a slam dunk! Write it, and we can retire on the profits!"

Myth 1: Leadership is "Good"

Barbara Kellerman from Harvard Kennedy School tells us we tend to equate leadership with bravery, skill, and good character. That fascination has made us susceptible to thinking that leadership is by default a good thing. This inspired Kellerman to write a book called Bad Leadership (2004), in which she examines leaders who fall into one of seven categories: incompetent, rigid, intemperate, callous, corrupt, insular, or evil.

Myth 2: Leadership is Synonymous With "The Boss"

In today's lexicon, the term leader is regularly used to describe top executives. This sloppy labeling creates the impression that leadership is only about the behavior of people with hierarchical power.

Myth 3: Good Leaders Are Heroic

Underlying that response is the most powerful myth of all - the myth of the heroic leader. We all know this archetype: a solitary individual, almost always a man, with qualities of "toughness" and "greatness," who rides into town and single-handedly saves the day.

Insight 1: Leadership is a Process, Not a Person

What if leadership isn't about the attributes of an individual or the powerful position that individual holds? Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky (2009) suggest that leadership is a process of mobilizing people to tackle adaptive challenges.

Insight 2: Leadership Demands Self-Awareness

Adaptive leadership calls for self-awareness, a new set of leadership skills that help us step back and observe, reflect, and learn. Only when we learn to recognize our worldviews and habits of thought are we able to distinguish our own "wiring" from what's happening in the world around us.

Insight 3: Leadership Has a Purpose

Australian scholar Amanda Sinclair says that more thinking in the past 50 years has gone into how to do leadership than into what leadership is for. What I've since discovered is that purpose is the central question of our work.