If you search for books on Leadership on amazon.de, you get 50,000 titles.
We keep on writing books on the topic and we seem to be unable to stop writing about it. Yours truly is guilty of having added one book on sustainable leadership to that list in 2017.
I ask a simple question.
How come we keep on thinking about leadership so much?
I see some plausible answers.
The first answer is because it’s an important topic. Leadership of low quality can have tremendous effects. So we had better invest in it.
The second answer might be, because time are changing, and so does leadership. Indeed, we know that charisma is not the only way and not the best way to have influence. But is that new? Since situational leadership was coined as a term, we know that we need to differentiate leadership according to situations and persons. Leaders need to steer and support and have to think about today and tomorrow, at the same time.
Leaders need to steer and support and they have to think about today and tomorrow simultaneously.
The third answer might be the best. Leadership is simply difficult. There are few born leaders and so everyone who wants to be a leader needs to go through a learning path. But if we accept that it’s difficult, we can prepare for it.
The essence of Leadership is influence: getting people to move towards a certain goal. We know what motivates people. We “just” have to apply it. But it’s not that simple.
Let’s accept that leadership is not easy.
Original Post
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/leadership-simply-difficult-david-ducheyne/
