Information Development: Managing Your Documentation Projects, Portfolio, and People

Chapter 12. Developing as an Effective Leader

	In trying to tip the balance toward excellence, we try to identify great leaders’ qualities and behaviors so we can develop them ourselves.
	--Robert E. Quinn, Professor of Business Administration, University of Michigan

Senior managers involved in The Center for Information-Development Management (CIDM) have written extensively over the past 10 years about leadership. The ideas they have espoused have come from their personal experience and from their reading in the literature of leadership. This chapter reviews a few of the leadership perspectives that I have learned from these managers.

In pursuing a leadership role for yourself in managing your organization, you can learn much from the best practices of skilled and effective leaders, both from those in your field and more broadly from leading theorists and practitioners about leadership and management. You can also learn from the practices of legendary leaders in very different professions. This chapter focuses on the experiences and leadership style of the Antarctic explorer, Ernest Shackleton, a superb leader who kept his team together under the most extreme circumstances. As you read about other leaders, you will also learn from their experiences and from the analyses done by management experts. I hope that the perspective here is only the beginning.

Remember that the management of ...