Citation
Adair, J. (2006), "How to Grow Leaders: The Seven Key Principles of Effective Leadership Development", Strategic Direction, Vol. 22 No. 8. https://doi.org/10.1108/sd.2006.05622hae.002
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2006, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
How to Grow Leaders: The Seven Key Principles of Effective Leadership Development
How to Grow Leaders: The Seven Key Principles of Effective Leadership Development
John Adair,Kogan Page, London, 2006
The dilemma whether leaders are born or made is still under discussion. John Adair, a widely regarded foremost authority on leadership, presents another approach. He states that leaders grow and wise organizations can create conditions for that growth.
The book How to Grow Leaders is a beneficial read both for scholars and practitioners-business leaders. The text extends a framework of leadership exploring leadership qualities, differentiation of leader and manager, levels of leadership through group or functional, qualities and situational approaches. Answering the question how to grow leaders, the author identifies the seven key principles – selection, training and education at team, operational and strategic levels.
John Adair says that the chief error of the most organizations is that they do not think about leadership or think when it really hurts. This book is one of those that challenge the reader’s thinking. And it does not matter if a reader is a researcher or executive of organization, or a person willing to grow as a leader.
From the beginning John Adair invites a reader for a journey to discover the nature of leadership and how it can be taught. What a leader has to be, what a leader has to know and what a leader has to do – these are the questions the author is answering in the first part of the book Exploring Leadership – a Personal Odyssey. Adair discovers the generic role of leadership through group/functional, qualities and situational approaches. The author says “it is a discovery as significant in the social field as either Einstein’s general theory of relativity in physics or Crick and Watson double-helix structure of DNA in biology”. The generic role of leader symbolized by the Three Circles of need (task, team and individual) is important to perceive before we explore how leadership can be developed. Furthermore, leadership is now coming to be seen on three different levels: team, operational and strategic. The author calls it the “leadership revolution”. The book encourages to think by raising the questions whether leadership qualities can be developed, what differences between managers and leaders are, if a leader has to be inspirational, why it is that one person in a group is perceived to be and accepted as the leader, if leadership can be learnt, what the role of strategic leader is and, etc.
As the author says, there is plenty of evidence to support the finding that organizations are short of good leaders. The second part of the book How to Grow Leaders: The Seven Principles outlines the principles helping organizations to develop their own leaders. “The principles – in no order of importance – are like bricks that you have to build into a wall of your own design”. Leadership grows by a natural process, and John Adair helps to understand that natural way so that organizations could work with a grain of nature rather than against it. To grow leaders and leadership does demand clear thinking, as organizations should have their own path of leadership development. “The best organizations take pride in the fact that they grow more leaders than they need. It maybe partly true, that organizations grow leaders, but it is more even true, that to say, that leaders grow the business.” The author summarizes that there are many ways how organizations may help a person grow as a business leader, but giving the chance to lead, training and line leaders whom they can respect, trust and learn from – are the most necessary conditions. Selection of people, who already have potential for leadership, educational institutions that begin the growth of leaders and equip the potential leader with general knowledge, also the strategy for leadership development in organization, and chief executive which leads the leaders growing process in front – are the conditions for leadership growth, explored by the book also.
In addition providing valuable insights How to Grow Leaders is an immediate dialogue between the author and reader, what makes it a pleasure and easy to read.
A version of this review was originally published in the Baltic Journal of Management, Volume 1 Number 1, 2006.