Anderson and Adams did their research and asked 50'000 leaders and employees worldwide about a simple question:
What kind of leadership would enable the organisation to thrive in its current marketplace and into the future?
They wanted to find out the underlying nature of leadership without theories, frameworks and models.
Summary & my key takeaways.
Scaling a business equals growth, which they see as an essential dynamic in life. Thus, scaling in business also means to scale leadership. This requires developing new leaders that grow effectively and intelligently to support the scaling business's growth.
They call for integral leaders - servant leaders who value to receive objective feedback. Leaders can do that themselves using a leadership circle profile self-assessment as a feedback tool on leaders' effectiveness and by sustaining a feedback-rich environment.
Content Summary
They start by admitting that rapid growth solves many problems and brings with it a whole lot more. Their stances are that healthy businesses grow, whereas growth goes beyond improving products, services, becoming more secure and recruiting employees. Thus, business leaders must scale up their way of leadership alongside their organisations.
From their point of view, leadership scaling needs innovation, adaptability, sustainability, agility and engagement. Learning these things should be done openly and do so introspectively to become better people and better leaders. This they see to be done in a spiritual boot camp, where you should
start with yourself (introspection of weaknesses and strengths)
develop leadership teams (create a leadership plan for team members)
build leadership systems (institutionalise that agenda)
The result shall be to become enlightened, innovative, and more integral as a leader, meaning that influential leaders develop other leaders. Thus, not micromanaging like a reactive leader and not conforming only to conventional wisdom like conventional leaders. Instead, they shall become integral leaders that strive positively for a never finished-ness by continuing to develop themselves, asking for help and seeking a higher purpose.
This integral part is servant leadership. It means hearing what the team has to say, demonstrate passion, vision and drive — being positive and personal to empower their employees.
To reach this quite demanding list, they propose to have six conditions met:
being creative - inspiring to lead
having relationships with the people you lead
being radically human - showing humility, courage and vulnerability
being aware of systems - organise and design systems for the future
achieve a purpose - inspire others to strive for higher achievements
close the gaps between employees aspirations and the reality of the organisational situation.
The tricky part is that the higher you go up, the less feedback you get, as people fear speaking truth to power.
Thus, they recommend the Leadership circle profile self-assessment and, as a leader, operate and sustain a feedback-rich environment.
You can take that Leadership assessment on their website for free (sign up required, not affiliated, just, saying)
After the 140ish questions, takes about 2 minutes max, you get the report by email, and have access to additional questions regarding accountability and growth, your own leadership plan and so on.
I found it fairly interesting, to say the least, and I have plenty room to grow.
The report showed that I tend to be quite self-preserving, and that I distance myself from others fairly fast. This is definitely in alignment with what I am working on myself for the past year, as the last reviews I got in military showed similar traits and my sergeants mentioning that I shall show more emotions.
Also, my Girlfriend told me the same... I definitely have to keep working on that.
In my opinion, it is a somewhat technical and analytical book. Yet, there are concrete and applicable examples and the advice and take away was worth reading it.