You might think about leadership as having to do with the intersection of psychology and business knowledge. All leaders have both an agenda they’re driving and an agenda that’s driving them. The agenda you’re driving is the business part of it. The agenda that’s driving you is the psychology part.
The agenda that you’re driving seems to me highly mutable because it’s dependent on lots of things: the context of the organization, the bigger epochal life cycles, and the smaller life cycles of an organization. You can see that different leaders are called for at different times, with different kinds of agendas.
An awareness of the agenda that’s driving the leader—that, to me, is a more timeless dimension. The self-awareness and understanding needed would seem to have been needed hundreds of years ago and will be a hundred years from now. “Leader, know thyself.”
Author: Robert Kegan
Source: McKinsey Quarterly
Subjects: Leadership, Personality / Behavior
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