Search for Leadership [Hardcover]

William Tate (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 21, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0955768187 | ISBN-13: 978-0955768187

Most organizations - public, private and third sector - know they need to offer better leadership. But, in trying to do so, they too often look in the wrong place. Experience tells us that even heroic leaders are no better than the systems they work in. Flawed systems strangle leadership. The answer? Stop polishing the fish and tackle the water they swim in! "The Search for Leadership" shows why it is naive to expect much leadership from individual managers acting alone. Only when we start to see leadership as a property of the organization can we begin to improve it. William Tate pulls no punches in his examination of leadership in business, politics and institutions like the police and the Health Service. Using forensic analysis, cogent argument and damning case studies, he shows why conventional leadership models and programs miss the point and waste our money. In their place he presents a proven and practical 'Systems Thinking' approach that will transform the way leadership is developed, applied and held accountable for delivering results. "The Search for Leadership" is a comprehensive study of the way leadership operates in organizations. Split into two parts - the thinking challenge and the more practical intervention challenge - it tackles each aspect of leadership on a theme-by-theme basis and is an invaluable resource for anyone working to improve leadership in an organization. The chapters provide an in-depth focus on current leadership issues, from discussing the difference between managing and leading, through learning the language of Systems Thinking and developing a leadership culture, to exploring a range of processes by which leadership can be held to account. This eye-opening account of the challenges organizations face is written for managers as well as developers, teachers, researchers and coaches. Its systemic focus sets it apart from other leadership books. It will change the way you think about leadership and help improve the way any organization is run.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

William Tate is a consultant, writer, researcher, teacher and speaker in: leadership; organisation development; the shadow side; change and learning; innovation and corporate social responsibility (CSR). He runs the independent consulting practice Prometheus Consulting and is a director of Conduct Becoming, a CSR consultancy. He is former head of HR Strategy and Management Training at British Airways. William is the author of seven books and many magazine and journal articles, and has written papers for The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, the Council for Excellence in Management and Leadership, and the Centre for Tomorrow's Company. He has taught Strategic HRM and Corporate Social Responsibility on Cass Business School's Executive MBA Programme.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 324 pages
• Publisher: Triarchy Press (May 21, 2009)
• ISBN-10: 0955768187
• ISBN-13: 978-0955768187
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,125,773 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars An important step forward in The Search for Leadership, July 20, 2009

By 

Jim Stroup - See all my reviews

This review is from: Search for Leadership (Hardcover)

Books on individual leadership, rather amazingly, continue to come out, and continue to promise great things from the superlative leaders their secrets will help readers become. What they also all do, though, is assume that there is no controversy regarding the location of leadership: it is in individuals, and emanates from them into the organizations which they grace with their presence. Indeed, many of these observers go so far as to say that the organization exists to give expression to the leader's leadership - or, at least, must re-form itself around the unique ways each leader exhibits that leadership.

William Tate, a consultant in the United Kingdom with extensive experience as a senior manager, offers some long-overdue questions about these assumptions in his new book, "The Search for Leadership: An Organizational Perspective." It must be said that he neither denies the essential concept of individual leadership, nor the destructive contention that it is separate from and superior to management. Indeed, he, curiously, offers a fairly rigorous justification of it.

The value he adds, though, is in the context in which he places the concept. Tate asks with disciplined focus what, precisely, leadership in organizations is intended to serve, and how we are to make sure that it does so. In the course of this, he comes to conclusions regarding the modern leadership movement that echo many of those expressed on this site. He is concerned that it has produced not merely an understanding of leadership that is untethered from the purpose it might ordinarily be expected to pursue, but that also has generated an industry that perpetuates fundamental errors in perspective and practice that can no longer be tolerated.

For example, he argues that leadership, in a phrase found often in these pages, should be "thought of as a resource to be managed." This observation is the inevitable expression of the heart of his argument: that it is well-past time to stop thinking of leadership as principally a personal attribute, but rather to understand it as a set of actions that take place within and for the betterment of the organization.

He is especially concerned with the problem of leadership development as it is typically conceived and undertaken in contemporary organizations. He insists that it must not be allowed to continue as a patchwork of personal improvement modules pursued independently of the needs of the outfit.

The first step in the creation of such programs, he laments, is ordinarily an almost eerie disassociation from the organization's needs. Rather, developers turn earnestly but disconnectedly to the assemblage of boilerplate individual leadership components. He argues repeatedly that such programs should begin not with a discussion of what the attendees may need, but of what the organization needs from the leadership it wishes to generate and benefit from in its strategic and operational efforts.

Tate urges us to understand that "the organization is not a passive vessel waiting to have leadership poured into it." "The popular mistake made by executives and their coaches," he notes, "is to assume or pretend that leaders have more control than they really do." To underscore this, he quotes a colleague on the attendant attribution error:

"The tendency [is] for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviours, while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences. In other words, people assume that what a person does is based more on what kind of person he or she is, rather than the social and environmental forces at work on that person."

Tate is concerned not only that leadership should be conceived of as something in the service of and bound to the organization - rather than the reverse - but also that it should be supervised, held accountable, and redirected when necessary. As he says, "there is a need to manage leadership, however oxymoronic that may sound."

But, of course, it's not oxymoronic at all, despite the author's curious presentation in sundry chapters of the standard patter about what leadership is, who expresses it, and how it is even presumably superior to management. At bottom, he rightly makes a strong case for the view that leadership is, at the very least, inferior to the organization.

And he does so in an engaging, readable manner, reinforced with vivid expression and memorable metaphors. This book represents an important full forward step in the right direction toward an effective understanding of leadership - and how to rein it in.

Buy "The Search for Leadership," by William Tate. You will enjoy it, and find yourself considering questions that you may not have encountered before, deepening and enriching your strategic effectiveness as a manager.