Authentic Leadership and Organizations: The Goffee-Jones Collection (2 Books)

TWO

Know and Show Yourself—Enough

LEADERSHIP BEGINS WITH YOU —and you will not succeed as a leader unless you have some sense of who you are. Your colleagues—potential followers—have a simple but basic need: they want to be led by a person, not by a corporate apparatchik. It is unlikely that you will be able to inspire, arouse, excite, or motivate people unless you can show them who you are, what you stand for, and what you can and cannot do.¹

Consider Sir Martin Sorrell, the leader of the world’s largest communications services company, WPP, which owns, among many companies, the JWT ad agency. Sorrell runs an organization full of creative talent. Creative people are notoriously difficult to lead or even manage but are critical to WPP’s success. ...