For anyone, leadership is a journey, not a destination. It’s more of an art than a series of steps to implement. We all break down as much as we build up. It helps to have intelligent partners to dialogue with, but those are often hard to come by. Good books certainly provide helpful sparring partners to hone one’s style. This book seeks to help leaders advance their personal leadership by advancing how they build leaders in their organization. It aims to move “reactive leadership” to “creative leadership” and “creative leadership” to “integral leadership.”
The authors studied and compared ineffective leaders with effective ones according to varying strengths reported by their co-workers. The biggest statistical difference lay in people skills. The effective leaders tended to create with more openness and vulnerability that ineffective leaders. They were much more relational. While that finding is not entirely surprising, it does identify a skill that we all can work on. They describe leaders who simply individually act on others’ feedback as reactive leaders and leaders who build with others as creative leaders. In turn, they describe leaders who integrate others’ creative leadership as integral leaders, the highest form of leadership.
Admittedly, the book focuses primarily on the reactive-versus-creative divide, not the creative-versus-integral step. They do so with data, which I welcome as a data scientist, but since I listened to the audiobook, I didn’t ponder the numerical details as much as I would have in the print version. They build their conceptual framework from their other book Mastering Leadership, which I added to my to-read list. In that book, they describe a group of qualities which their research shows to comprise effective leadership across any domain.
Generally, leadership books seek to inspire, and this book certainly fulfilled that goal. However, like many leadership books, it occasionally fell into repetitious patterns of inspiring words instead of leading with bold, innovative ideas. I appreciated the rigorous study to identify data-driven insights, but they need to do further work to expound on integral leadership. Still, reading this book was certainly worth my time, and I appreciated their in-depth exploration of “creative” and “reactive” styles. It’s a distinction I’ll use in my thought processes as I work and live.
Scaling Leadership: Building Organizational Capability and Capacity to Create Outcomes that Matter Most
by Robert J. Anderson & William A. Adams
Narrated by Sean Pratt
Copyright (c) 2019
Gildan Media
ASIN B07NJ272YS
Length: 6:46
Genre: Organizational Leadership
www.amazon.com