Leadership and the Job of the Executive

Good management skills alone will not get executives and their organisations far enough - what is needed is a quality called leadership. Leadership lies in the emotional side of management, it brings life into organisations and gives meaning to management structures. This work presents an assessment of what leadership is, its various dimensions, its place among other executive skills, and how it can be nurtured and propagated, containing examples from the worlds of business, politics, sports and the military. The book starts by describing the emotional side of management, the paradoxical nature of leadership, and how it fits into the full set of executive responsibilities and skills. It then goes on to break leadership down into 20 components, and in the subsequent chapters devoted to each component, it provides readers with descriptions of leadership characteristics: desire, decisiveness, vision, integrity, anchoring, following, kinship, caring, inspiring, listening, telling and mentoring. The work then reassembles the parts and shows how leadership works in Washington DC. It closes with a detailed discussion of the six most important leadership issues.