On Purpose: Why great leaders start with the PLOT

CHAPTER 3LEADERSHIP

Everyone has a reaction to the word ‘leadership', and rightly so. There is nothing new or surprising about this. Given that it is so well researched, and there's so much great reading freely available to us all, why does it go so wrong and why is it so hard to get right? Why the dearth?

Let's start by acknowledging that time is a key commitment; it is vital to make the time to be better leaders — time for ourselves and for those around us. Stress, pressure, world events, life: they all impact what we do. And then we get hit with everything that comes with being human — from our fortitudes to our flaws.

I am neither a philosopher nor a psychiatrist, nor do I pretend to be, so I reach out to the many experts.

C. G. Jung gave us the concepts of archetypes, the collective unconscious, extraversion and introversion. These are key concepts in a world where human capital — knowledge and thinking — are your competitive advantage. Quoting Jung helps frame leadership as something that is collective rather than individual: ‘The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed'. Transformational leadership is the new minimum standard.

Power made by many

Traditional models of leadership are changing. The changes may not have taken hold in every corporation, but they certainly have in fast-growing start-ups. In these nimble worlds, hierarchy is architecture, not a reporting line.

In ‘Understanding ...