Leadership in the Headlines

Chapter 6

Coping

The visionary parts of leadership and management – the hard-fought acquisition, the big product launch, even the signing of a big client – stir the blood.

But much of what counts for the day-to-day work of executives amounts to coping: coping with fractious staff, coping with difficult economic times, or coping with outright crises. What increasingly impresses me about leaders in business is that they manage at all.

All leaders are bound to struggle at times. Even among themselves, they must project an image of imperviousness to pressure that must in itself be hard to maintain. One unusually frank chief executive of a large UK company asked me once what I thought of a counterpart of his who had stepped down suddenly. He ...