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The Leaders We Need: And What Makes Us Follow

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We need Michael Maccoby's insights about leaders and our world today to follow or become The Leaders We Need. People don't want to be managed by autocratic father figures, though they will follow and better yet, collaborate with, the right kind of leader. This book is trenchant and practical.

Disclaimer: Michael Maccoby and I have worked together for 35 years. For some this might imply a lack of objectivity. For others, this qualifies a reviewer who knows his subject. You are free to make up your own mind.

Dr. Maccoby's insights are based on over 45 years of research (for example, with Erich Fromm in Mexico), teaching (Harvard, Chicago, Oxford, the Brookings Institution), consulting (IBM, AT&T, World Bank, ABB, etc.), and writing. He facilitated a national health care coalition, and directed a foundation-funded research project on exemplary health care systems. He advises diverse leaders and organizations, being trusted by both corporate and union leaders. He is a fellow of the American Psychological and Anthropological Associations, a psychologist, psychoanalyst, and anthropologist.

The Leaders We Need And What Makes Us Follow provides many examples of leaders and their organizations from this rich body of work. It is his most comprehensive book, giving readers the fruits of his productive lifetime in what might be called a grand integrated theory. His wisdom is useful for those who would lead in any way or at any level of an organization, or for understanding leaders we may choose to follow.

He raises the question why none of the existing authors on leadership give a convincing definition of leadership. Many describe leadership traits, others define their ideal leader. Maccoby's definition of a leader is deceptively simple: a leader is a person others follow.

Since both Hitler and Gandhi were people others followed, Maccoby asks: why and how do people follow a leader? Winston Churchill, a great wartime leader, was rejected by voters both before and after the war. Different contexts require different leaders.

Maccoby understands leaders in their historical context, relationship to followers, and results sought. Personality is also important. The most effective leaders will develop their Personality Intelligence, a combination of conceptual and emotional understanding, head and heart.

At the national level, we need leaders who can respond to a world aflame with fundamentalist ideologies, the global ecological crisis, and an increasing percentage of the world facing inadequate food, water, shelter, health. At the organizational level, we need leaders who can organize and inspire knowledge workers in healthcare organizations, schools, and innovative global companies. Traditional bureaucratic managers who built great corporations and government agencies of the industrial era lack the personality and understanding needed to engage a new social character, raised in dual career families rather than the paternalistic families of the past.

The new interactive social character is composed of free agents motivated by continual learning, teamwork, transparency, participation and above all, meaningful purpose. If led as collaborators they are a source of ideas, energy, and solutions. But they are turned off by rules and carrot and stick-based managers. Maccoby describes the changing attitudes of the interactives who don't idealize father figures; and the various kinds of intelligence needed to lead today.

Maccoby writes that leaders need foresight and systems thinking, and he models it. He describes leaders who are resolving today's challenges: transforming health care; creating schools that educate poor minority students who go on to college; an orphanage run on humanitarian principles where graduates lead the organization in eight countries. Maccoby shows that in the most effective knowledge creating organization, different leadership roles-- strategic, operational, and networking-- work together, and that these roles are best filled by different personality types. In "The President We Need" chapter we gain understanding to help us predict how candidates will act once elected. This book is a significant contribution, useful for would-be leaders and followers.

Anthropologist and psychoanalyst Michael Maccoby has been writing about leadership for more than three decades. Here he ventures an argument with an unusual perspective for managerial literature. His fundamental thesis is that changing times demand a leadership model that leaves the industrial, bureaucratic era behind. He explains that new family structures and contemporary ways of working - especially knowledge work - have created a different kind of follower. Maccoby calls these workers "Interactives" and explains their demands in psychological terms. His emphasis on "Personality Intelligence," collaboration and teamwork is not really new, but his explanation of why these factors matter and what impact they have upon public policy is striking. We find his willingness to tackle big leadership challenges - health-care policy, education and even the U.S. presidency - fresh and thought-provoking.

I have been reading Maccoby's work for years. He is very thoughtful in his approach and willing to call life as he sees it through a trained lense of keen observation. I find the book refreshing because he looks at leadership from a much richer and deeper perspective than most other writers on the subject. For instance, his work on narcissistic leadership challenges many of the cherished notions held by Jim Collins and others. I get tired of those who extol "goodie goodie" leaders as the norm. Maccoby helped me understand the different leadership types who are out there and how I need to think both about those I want to follow and about those I hope will follow yours truly.

If you want a five step approach, then the book is not for you. If you want to be challenged to think and evaluate both yourself and your own organization, then I think you will really enjoy the book.

Those who have read Michael Maccoby's previously published Narcissistic Leaders already know that he has formulated a number of unconventional opinions about effective leadership. That soon becomes obvious in this book as he explains in the Introduction that his approach to the study of leadership "is shaped by my academic training and professional experience as a psychoanalyst and anthropologist for over thirty-five years has studied and counseled leaders in business, government, universities, and unions. As an anthropologist, I view leadership within a cultural context, a system that weaves together modes of work, political institutions, family structure, and values. And as a psychoanalyst, I focus on the way personality determines how we relate to others, especially at work." Therefore, Michael Maccoby's focus is on what he characterizes as "Personality Intelligence," (i.e. the ability to understand people).

Although he does not agree with all of Sigmund Freud's theories, "I do make extensive use [in this book] of his concept of unconscious transference, and I build on his theory of personality types. Transference helps to explain why people sometimes idealize leaders, projecting onto them comforting childhood images of protective parents. And it also explains why they sometimes turn against these leaders, seeing them as inept or neglectful parents." These brief excerpts, I hope, indicate Michael Maccoby's specific approach as he explains who "the leaders we need" are, and, "what makes us follow them."

What are their dominant characteristics? According to Maccoby, the leaders needed "in these tumultuous times" possess a combination of leadership types: transformational visionaries, operational obsessives, and trust-creating bridge- builders. "They are the leaders motivated to achieve the common good who have the qualities required to gain willing followers in a particular culture, at a historical moment when leadership becomes essential to meet the challenge of the time and place."

In this context, "Personality Intelligence" best understood in terms of certain qualities that add up to a leader's personality. The leaders we need have it or can develop it with proper supervision and support. They also have or can develop "Strategic Intelligence" which is an interactive mix of analytic, practical, and creative elements that are needed to anticipate future trends, think systematically, understand how to design effective social systems, communicate meaning and purpose to motivate and educator collaborators, and partner with other types of leaders who complement these strengths.

Curiously, there is no reference in this book to the research of Howard Gardner who has made a number of valuable contributions to our understanding of multiple intelligences, most recently in Five Minds for the Future in which he examines five separate but related combinations of cognitive abilities that are needed to "thrive in the world during eras to come...[cognitive abilities] which we should develop in the future." Gardner refers to them as "minds" but they are really mindsets. Mastery of each enables a person:

1. to know how to work steadily over time to improve skill and understanding;

2. to take information from disparate sources and make sense of it by understanding and evaluating that information objectively;

3. to build on discipline and synthesis, to break new ground;

4. by "recognizing that nowadays one can no longer remain within one's shell or one's home territory," to note and welcome differences between human individuals and between human groups so as to understand them and work effectively with them;

5. and finally, "proceeding on a level more abstract than the respectful mind," to reflect on the nature of one's work and the needs and desires of the society in which one lives.

Gardner notes that the five "minds" he examines in this book are different from the eight or nine human intelligences that he examines in his earlier works. "Rather than being distinct computational capabilities, they are better thought of as broad uses of the mind that we can cultivate at school, in professions, or at the workplace."

These are essentially the same capabilities that, according to Maccoby, leaders need in order to attract interactive followers by engaging and convincing them of the purpose of the work to be done together. Then, "by understanding them and fitting them into roles where they can demonstrate and develop their strengths," leaders gain their respect, perhaps even their trust. Only then will the people [led] become collaborators who help [their leaders to] succeed."

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out those written by Gardner (notably the aforementioned Five Minds for the Future) as well as Justin Menkes's Executive Intelligence: What All Great Leaders Have, Steven Feinberg's The Advantage-Makers: How Exceptional Leaders Win by Creating Opportunities Others Don't, Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis' Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls, and Launching a Leadership Revolution: Mastering the Five Levels of Influence co-authored by Chris Brady and Orrin Woodward.

When I started to read this book I got engaged inmediately, it has a fresh language that make us think about what leadership means since the first chapter, several examples and concise quotes let us create our own idea of what the people need from a leader, what they are looking for and why they follow certain people in differente circumstances, a must read in this knowledge age.

Dr. Michael Maccoby continues to dominate the leadership arena, with his latest book being relevant to today's leaders and followers alike. His book provides insights not found in other books on leadership.

If you want some insight as to why people follow the leaders that they do
and how the types of leaders we need today are not like the leaders of the
past, read this book. A lot of practical psychological info you can apply
to life.

Well written, easy to understand with some new insights to management tactics. This book is great if your going to write a report. I was lucky enough to choose this book which in chapter one includes a brief summery of all the chapters in bullet point format. If your looking for a book that deviates from your boring mundane business management theory class and want to show up to class with some good "logical" insights this is it. A couple of examples of this books insights into the theory of management are "understanding people in the knowledge workplace" and "personality intelligence."

The author describes the leadership process from the kwowledge workers perspective. When reading this book I truly understood for the first time why workers follow some leadership styles, why leadership must adapt to context, and the deep forces at work in the interactions between possible followers and leaders. The author questions many assumptions we take for granted like the Maslow model, Maciavelli and others. Even if you read just the first two chapters, you will benefit from this book.