Beyond Leadership: Balancing Economics, Ethics and Ecology, Revised Edition

Managerial Leadership

Effective leadership

Effective leadership, for rationally minded Jaques, is indistinguishable from “requisite” management. It demands four straightforward and basic conditions.

1. A person must have the necessary competence to carry the particular role, including strongly valuing it.
2. That person must be free from any severely debilitating psychological characteristics that interfere with interpersonal relationships.
3. The organizational conditions must be requisite, that is, conforming to the properties of hierarchical organizations and human nature.
4. Each person must be encouraged to use their natural style, namely, to allow the full and free expression of their natural self.

Cognition and capacity

Central to Jaques's concept of “requisite” management, as we have seen, is the manager's powers of cognition. In that sense, Jaques is a direct disciple of Piaget. However, he is also concerned with values, knowledge and skills, wisdom and temperament. Ever inclined to use mathematical formulae, Jaques describes the relationship between capacity and a group of seminal learning concepts:

current actual capacity (CAC) = fCP.V.K/S.Wi (−T), where CP is cognitive capacity (that is, mastery of complexity); V are values, interests, and priorities; K/S is the skilled use of relevant knowledge; Wi is wisdom about people and things; and (−T) is the absence of serious personality/temperament defects.

Current potential capacity (CPC), moreover, is the maximum level at which ...