Invested Leadership · Chapter 01
01What Got Us Here Won’t Get Us There
Why authentic leadership, on its own, can be the most toxic style of all.
“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”Peter Drucker
The problem
Why authentic leadership, on its own, can be the most toxic style of all.
Leadership advice has spent two decades telling you to be authentic. Read the actual definition and you will find it means only one thing: being true to yourself. It says nothing about the people you lead.
That is the flaw. A leader can be the single biggest problem in an organization and still be a textbook authentic leader. If your authentic self is impatient, self-absorbed, or absent, authenticity gives you permission to stay that way and a vocabulary to feel good about it.
Meanwhile the numbers move in one direction. Turnover in professional services ran to 57 percent in 2023. Half of all employees were not engaged. The advice is not working.
The turn
Steve Jobs’s first run at Apple and his second were not the same. The company that fired him and the company he brought back from near-bankruptcy had the same founder, the same instincts, the same appetite for control. Something in between shifted enough to change the outcome.
The chapter separates two things most leaders blur together. Structures — autocratic, democratic, paternalistic, laissez-faire — are tools. A good leader picks one to fit the project and swaps it out when the project changes. Nobody quits over a structure.
Styles are different. A style is closer to who you are, far harder to swap, and it is what determines whether people stay. This is where authentic leadership runs out of road, and where the narcissistic styles that dominate the top of most organizations do their damage.
Invested Leadership is what you add to authenticity to make it safe: the same honesty about who you are, pointed at the people in your charge rather than at yourself.
Key takeaways
The authors’ own summary, from the end of the chapter.
- Leadership structures — autocratic, democratic, paternalistic, laissez-faire — are all in the toolbox of a good leader, who chooses one depending on what a project needs.
- Leadership styles are less fungible and far more likely to affect whether people stay. The most involved and effective style is Invested.
- Authenticity in leadership is a promising idea and a buzzworthy term, but it is not enough — particularly among the many leaders exhibiting narcissistic styles.
- Invested Leadership is the antidote to narcissism.
If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.
Go further
Have them teach this
to your team.
This chapter is one talk in the keynote. The seminar is where your leadership team actually does the work.