Improving Managerial Talent

16Leadership and personality

This book is essentially about ‘management’, a prosaic functional term which is sometimes conflated with the more exotic concept of ‘leadership’. Literature on the latter, more exciting expression, is burgeoning. Most of our earlier sections reported the results of research into the connections between personality and either comfort or performance in management. As we shall see, the SME study¹ included leadership as one of 16 competencies believed to be associated with effective management. The definition of that competency was brief, ‘developing unity and purpose in a group’; it predated a new leadership paradigm ...