Content area
Full Text
Barbara Kellerman, the James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Leadership at the Kennedy School of Harvard University, has steadfastly attempted through her writing to lift the veil of misinformation that clouds our understanding of the leadership phenomenon. In her book Bad Leadership in 2004 she warned of the pervasiveness of harmful leaders and offers some remedial strategies.[1] In Followership in 2008, she called attention to the critical role of the follower in the leadership system.[2] In The End of Leadership in 2012 she indicted the deficiencies of the leadership industry.[3] In her new book, Professionalizing Leadership, she argues that we can do better and offers a bold prescription for training effective leaders.[4] Some of her provocative assessments of the state and practice of leadership training:
Leadership training is a business, a money-making operation that depends nearly entirely on its dubious claim to be able to teach how to lead wisely and well.
Surveys indicate that about half of all leaders and managers are still judged a disappointment.
Despite signs that dissatisfaction with training and developing leaders continues to increase, the leadership industry has been growing.
There is precious little evidence that the leadership industry has in any meaningful, measurable way benefited society.
Bad leadership puts on vivid display the unbreakable link between leaders and followers – a link that the leadership industry willfully ignores precisely because there’s no money in it.
Bad leaders haunt leadership theory and leadership practice.
To be effective, the leadership development process must adopt and achieve three goals: educate leaders, train leaders and develop leaders.
If leadership training is professionalized it can be taught – to a point.
In this interview, she is challenged to explain the basis for her radical new approach to resolving dysfunctional leadership training.
Her interviewer is Robert J. Allio, a member of the team that in the 1970s founded Planning Review, the publication that became Strategy & Leadership. Now an S&L contributing editor, he is the author of some 45 articles on leadership. A principal of Allio Associates, a strategy consultancy located in Providence, RI ([email protected]), and an Adjunct Professor at Brown University, his lengthy list of books ranges from Corporate Planning: Techniques and Applications (1979) to The Seven Faces of Leadership (2002).
Strategy & Leadership: