Keith spent 10 years working in various positions across a number of industry sectors before switching to academics, where he held Chairs at Cranfield and Lancaster Universities and was Lancaster Leadership Centre Director.
Keith Grint
Featured Leadership Topics
Lead Confidently
“So, I think that notion is that they saw and they say in the U.S., I think it’s the same kind of movement and in Southern America, the same kind of movement, that what we want, we want a strong man back to be able to sort this problem out because now it’s gone on for so long, only a strong man can do it, and a strong man who is popular enough and confident enough to be able to say, no, I can fix it. It goes back to Durkheim’s arguments about sacred nation leadership. People want a god.”
Description of the video:
Need a mechanism for getting them to change their mind that doesn't involve either physical violence or an argument. But I think I just experimented with that and found out. I'm going to ask you about university here just a second, but Yeah. Whenever I have looked up information on you and the nice statement they put together for your lifetime achievement award all says that he was a blue collar worker. And you were. So here's what I would like you to talk about. As you look back on that experience, post office, the factory, the farm, the things that you did, how does that influence the professional Keith Grant or the professional that you came. I take away from that. Two things. The first thing I would say is that I learned a lot in about six months and the other nine years I didn't need to do. So I did waste a lot of time there. It wasn't as if I was learning all the time. Just in the interest of. I spent many years working on a dairy farm. Once you've learned a lesson, you don't need to learn it twice, but I learned lots of lessons, lots of times. I guess the most important thing is is to understand life from the bottom. Not from the top. So many of my colleagues that teach business I never been in business, I never worked outside the university. I don't quite know how they understand how the world of work works in the absence of any experience from that. I've always been able to a bring in lots of stories that have happened to me to illustrate what I'm talking about. B, There is something in here and I talked about this in one of the talks I gave yesterday was about dissent there is so much effort built into, we need to get all our employees on board here and get a high level of consent, and then we'll be able to do this and that. Actually, in my experience, most people that go to work really don't care about the work. They go there because you pay them. They're not that bothered. If somebody next door gives them a higher pay deal, they'll go next door. They don't have that deal because frankly, the job, the work is really, really boring. So When you look at so much effort is built into building this wonderful consensual utopia about everyone's going to be so keen on this new strategy we've got. No, they're not. People at the top might be interested people at the bottom really couldn't care less. When I left the post office in York and went toe York University. One of the first books I've read was a book on the kind of skills you need in the labor market in the UK to be successful in the 1980s. The very last line of this huge empirical work was this. More people use more skill getting to work than at work. Which I thought was a terrible indictment of what we did to people. And I had suffered from that. I had been to places where I'm thinking, Oh, my God, it's only 9:30. I've got another 8 hours to go. How can I possibly survive this? I have done those kinds of jobs and I think that gives me an understanding of what is it like to be at the bottom? Because now you're in the middle or at the top and it's a completely different understanding of what's going on. Do you think that it would do I mean, people who are in leadership programs that they would be in good stead if they understood that. Yeah, but I mean, there are some organizations that insist on management going work on the shop line, on the shop floor or the assembly line for a week at a time in a year. And I think that's a really important point just to remind yourself that most people's lives are not built around meetings and high flying jets plates and whatever, they're built upon drudgery and mundanenss The only way they keep going is because they've got enough mates around the table to keep them happy to keep them going. There's a paper called banana time. It's very old paper, 1960 something or other. And that the paper is really set around a machine workshop in the 1960s. What happens is the researcher goes to join the group in the factory and work on a machine. To try to work out The answer to this question, how did they put up with such a boring existence? Because life in the factory is as boring as hell. How did these people put up with it. So he joins the group and within a few weeks, he realizes that what's going on is these people around on the shop floor have gone insane. That's how they've coped with the boringss of life. They've gone insane. The insanity is represented by the banana time. What happens is every day, one of the guys on the shop floor puts a banana on top of his machine. Every day. Every day at 10:00. The other guys, it's always the same guy steals the banana and eats it in front of him. Then there's a row about whose banana is and what's going on. This is a manifestation of insanity as far as the researcher is concerned. Then the longer he stays there, the more he realizes this is not insanity. This is a way of coping with the day. What you have is banana time. 10:00, John puts his banana, Jack eats it. It's always a laugh. I always goes on. Then throughout the day there are these periods in the day where the same thing happens. You have conversation time, you have coke time, you have lunch, you talk about football time. It just makes the day pass. So the whole argument is these people don't go to work to produce lovely widgets. They go to work because you pay them and they have a bit of fun, and that's what they're at work for because when you read the paper, there's nothing about work in it, they're not really interested. There was something in that about how we cope with the boredom of life. I think that's one of the reasons why I had to get out of the post I think I'm going to waste my life like this. I'm going to be selling stamps forever unless I do something about it. So in 1976, if I got this right, you matipulated.
Resolve Conflicts and Crisis
“Leadership is having followers. But I think, in my work, what I’ve tried to do is differentiate between leadership management and command, which means I end up with a strange definition of leadership, which is more to do with getting the collective, however that is defined, getting the collective to face up to and respond to what we would call wicked problems or really complex issues that don’t necessarily get resolved very easily. So, I try to differentiate between management, which is the dealing with tame problems where we know what the process is and we know how to fix them, from leadership, which is about a collective response...Command is just dealing with crisis and, in some ways, command is the opposite of leadership. So, if leadership is about getting the collective to engage with a particular issue, command is telling the collective what they’re about to do.”
Description of the video:
Need a mechanism for getting them to change their mind that doesn't involve either physical violence or an argument. But I think I just experimented with that and found out. I'm going to ask you about university here just a second, but Yeah. Whenever I have looked up information on you and the nice statement they put together for your lifetime achievement award all says that he was a blue collar worker. And you were. So here's what I would like you to talk about. As you look back on that experience, post office, the factory, the farm, the things that you did, how does that influence the professional Keith Grant or the professional that you came. I take away from that. Two things. The first thing I would say is that I learned a lot in about six months and the other nine years I didn't need to do. So I did waste a lot of time there. It wasn't as if I was learning all the time. Just in the interest of. I spent many years working on a dairy farm. Once you've learned a lesson, you don't need to learn it twice, but I learned lots of lessons, lots of times. I guess the most important thing is is to understand life from the bottom. Not from the top. So many of my colleagues that teach business I never been in business, I never worked outside the university. I don't quite know how they understand how the world of work works in the absence of any experience from that. I've always been able to a bring in lots of stories that have happened to me to illustrate what I'm talking about. B, There is something in here and I talked about this in one of the talks I gave yesterday was about dissent there is so much effort built into, we need to get all our employees on board here and get a high level of consent, and then we'll be able to do this and that. Actually, in my experience, most people that go to work really don't care about the work. They go there because you pay them. They're not that bothered. If somebody next door gives them a higher pay deal, they'll go next door. They don't have that deal because frankly, the job, the work is really, really boring. So When you look at so much effort is built into building this wonderful consensual utopia about everyone's going to be so keen on this new strategy we've got. No, they're not. People at the top might be interested people at the bottom really couldn't care less. When I left the post office in York and went toe York University. One of the first books I've read was a book on the kind of skills you need in the labor market in the UK to be successful in the 1980s. The very last line of this huge empirical work was this. More people use more skill getting to work than at work. Which I thought was a terrible indictment of what we did to people. And I had suffered from that. I had been to places where I'm thinking, Oh, my God, it's only 9:30. I've got another 8 hours to go. How can I possibly survive this? I have done those kinds of jobs and I think that gives me an understanding of what is it like to be at the bottom? Because now you're in the middle or at the top and it's a completely different understanding of what's going on. Do you think that it would do I mean, people who are in leadership programs that they would be in good stead if they understood that. Yeah, but I mean, there are some organizations that insist on management going work on the shop line, on the shop floor or the assembly line for a week at a time in a year. And I think that's a really important point just to remind yourself that most people's lives are not built around meetings and high flying jets plates and whatever, they're built upon drudgery and mundanenss The only way they keep going is because they've got enough mates around the table to keep them happy to keep them going. There's a paper called banana time. It's very old paper, 1960 something or other. And that the paper is really set around a machine workshop in the 1960s. What happens is the researcher goes to join the group in the factory and work on a machine. To try to work out The answer to this question, how did they put up with such a boring existence? Because life in the factory is as boring as hell. How did these people put up with it. So he joins the group and within a few weeks, he realizes that what's going on is these people around on the shop floor have gone insane. That's how they've coped with the boringss of life. They've gone insane. The insanity is represented by the banana time. What happens is every day, one of the guys on the shop floor puts a banana on top of his machine. Every day. Every day at 10:00. The other guys, it's always the same guy steals the banana and eats it in front of him. Then there's a row about whose banana is and what's going on. This is a manifestation of insanity as far as the researcher is concerned. Then the longer he stays there, the more he realizes this is not insanity. This is a way of coping with the day. What you have is banana time. 10:00, John puts his banana, Jack eats it. It's always a laugh. I always goes on. Then throughout the day there are these periods in the day where the same thing happens. You have conversation time, you have coke time, you have lunch, you talk about football time. It just makes the day pass. So the whole argument is these people don't go to work to produce lovely widgets. They go to work because you pay them and they have a bit of fun, and that's what they're at work for because when you read the paper, there's nothing about work in it, they're not really interested. There was something in that about how we cope with the boredom of life. I think that's one of the reasons why I had to get out of the post I think I'm going to waste my life like this. I'm going to be selling stamps forever unless I do something about it. So in 1976, if I got this right, you matipulated.
Understand Leadership
“Aristotle would talk about this, that sometimes you have to do things and then reflect on what you just did and learn from the mistakes and the successes. I think leadership has got a lot of that practice aspect to it. You have to do it and then think, well, it looked like something that happened last week, but the response is completely different, so maybe I need to rethink; maybe there isn’t a kind of universal model of stuff in here; maybe I need to be more aware of the particular context and how that operates.”
Description of the video:
Need a mechanism for getting them to change their mind that doesn't involve either physical violence or an argument. But I think I just experimented with that and found out. I'm going to ask you about university here just a second, but Yeah. Whenever I have looked up information on you and the nice statement they put together for your lifetime achievement award all says that he was a blue collar worker. And you were. So here's what I would like you to talk about. As you look back on that experience, post office, the factory, the farm, the things that you did, how does that influence the professional Keith Grant or the professional that you came. I take away from that. Two things. The first thing I would say is that I learned a lot in about six months and the other nine years I didn't need to do. So I did waste a lot of time there. It wasn't as if I was learning all the time. Just in the interest of. I spent many years working on a dairy farm. Once you've learned a lesson, you don't need to learn it twice, but I learned lots of lessons, lots of times. I guess the most important thing is is to understand life from the bottom. Not from the top. So many of my colleagues that teach business I never been in business, I never worked outside the university. I don't quite know how they understand how the world of work works in the absence of any experience from that. I've always been able to a bring in lots of stories that have happened to me to illustrate what I'm talking about. B, There is something in here and I talked about this in one of the talks I gave yesterday was about dissent there is so much effort built into, we need to get all our employees on board here and get a high level of consent, and then we'll be able to do this and that. Actually, in my experience, most people that go to work really don't care about the work. They go there because you pay them. They're not that bothered. If somebody next door gives them a higher pay deal, they'll go next door. They don't have that deal because frankly, the job, the work is really, really boring. So When you look at so much effort is built into building this wonderful consensual utopia about everyone's going to be so keen on this new strategy we've got. No, they're not. People at the top might be interested people at the bottom really couldn't care less. When I left the post office in York and went toe York University. One of the first books I've read was a book on the kind of skills you need in the labor market in the UK to be successful in the 1980s. The very last line of this huge empirical work was this. More people use more skill getting to work than at work. Which I thought was a terrible indictment of what we did to people. And I had suffered from that. I had been to places where I'm thinking, Oh, my God, it's only 9:30. I've got another 8 hours to go. How can I possibly survive this? I have done those kinds of jobs and I think that gives me an understanding of what is it like to be at the bottom? Because now you're in the middle or at the top and it's a completely different understanding of what's going on. Do you think that it would do I mean, people who are in leadership programs that they would be in good stead if they understood that. Yeah, but I mean, there are some organizations that insist on management going work on the shop line, on the shop floor or the assembly line for a week at a time in a year. And I think that's a really important point just to remind yourself that most people's lives are not built around meetings and high flying jets plates and whatever, they're built upon drudgery and mundanenss The only way they keep going is because they've got enough mates around the table to keep them happy to keep them going. There's a paper called banana time. It's very old paper, 1960 something or other. And that the paper is really set around a machine workshop in the 1960s. What happens is the researcher goes to join the group in the factory and work on a machine. To try to work out The answer to this question, how did they put up with such a boring existence? Because life in the factory is as boring as hell. How did these people put up with it. So he joins the group and within a few weeks, he realizes that what's going on is these people around on the shop floor have gone insane. That's how they've coped with the boringss of life. They've gone insane. The insanity is represented by the banana time. What happens is every day, one of the guys on the shop floor puts a banana on top of his machine. Every day. Every day at 10:00. The other guys, it's always the same guy steals the banana and eats it in front of him. Then there's a row about whose banana is and what's going on. This is a manifestation of insanity as far as the researcher is concerned. Then the longer he stays there, the more he realizes this is not insanity. This is a way of coping with the day. What you have is banana time. 10:00, John puts his banana, Jack eats it. It's always a laugh. I always goes on. Then throughout the day there are these periods in the day where the same thing happens. You have conversation time, you have coke time, you have lunch, you talk about football time. It just makes the day pass. So the whole argument is these people don't go to work to produce lovely widgets. They go to work because you pay them and they have a bit of fun, and that's what they're at work for because when you read the paper, there's nothing about work in it, they're not really interested. There was something in that about how we cope with the boredom of life. I think that's one of the reasons why I had to get out of the post I think I'm going to waste my life like this. I'm going to be selling stamps forever unless I do something about it. So in 1976, if I got this right, you matipulated.
Inspire Followership
“[Regarding the impact of Leadership (journal)]- "I think we created something which is the home for lots of leadership scholars in Europe... I think that also generated the community that kept the conference going.. So, I think it was kind of building up a community, which is what we wanted in the first place- is just to build up a community." ”
Description of the video:
Need a mechanism for getting them to change their mind that doesn't involve either physical violence or an argument. But I think I just experimented with that and found out. I'm going to ask you about university here just a second, but Yeah. Whenever I have looked up information on you and the nice statement they put together for your lifetime achievement award all says that he was a blue collar worker. And you were. So here's what I would like you to talk about. As you look back on that experience, post office, the factory, the farm, the things that you did, how does that influence the professional Keith Grant or the professional that you came. I take away from that. Two things. The first thing I would say is that I learned a lot in about six months and the other nine years I didn't need to do. So I did waste a lot of time there. It wasn't as if I was learning all the time. Just in the interest of. I spent many years working on a dairy farm. Once you've learned a lesson, you don't need to learn it twice, but I learned lots of lessons, lots of times. I guess the most important thing is is to understand life from the bottom. Not from the top. So many of my colleagues that teach business I never been in business, I never worked outside the university. I don't quite know how they understand how the world of work works in the absence of any experience from that. I've always been able to a bring in lots of stories that have happened to me to illustrate what I'm talking about. B, There is something in here and I talked about this in one of the talks I gave yesterday was about dissent there is so much effort built into, we need to get all our employees on board here and get a high level of consent, and then we'll be able to do this and that. Actually, in my experience, most people that go to work really don't care about the work. They go there because you pay them. They're not that bothered. If somebody next door gives them a higher pay deal, they'll go next door. They don't have that deal because frankly, the job, the work is really, really boring. So When you look at so much effort is built into building this wonderful consensual utopia about everyone's going to be so keen on this new strategy we've got. No, they're not. People at the top might be interested people at the bottom really couldn't care less. When I left the post office in York and went toe York University. One of the first books I've read was a book on the kind of skills you need in the labor market in the UK to be successful in the 1980s. The very last line of this huge empirical work was this. More people use more skill getting to work than at work. Which I thought was a terrible indictment of what we did to people. And I had suffered from that. I had been to places where I'm thinking, Oh, my God, it's only 9:30. I've got another 8 hours to go. How can I possibly survive this? I have done those kinds of jobs and I think that gives me an understanding of what is it like to be at the bottom? Because now you're in the middle or at the top and it's a completely different understanding of what's going on. Do you think that it would do I mean, people who are in leadership programs that they would be in good stead if they understood that. Yeah, but I mean, there are some organizations that insist on management going work on the shop line, on the shop floor or the assembly line for a week at a time in a year. And I think that's a really important point just to remind yourself that most people's lives are not built around meetings and high flying jets plates and whatever, they're built upon drudgery and mundanenss The only way they keep going is because they've got enough mates around the table to keep them happy to keep them going. There's a paper called banana time. It's very old paper, 1960 something or other. And that the paper is really set around a machine workshop in the 1960s. What happens is the researcher goes to join the group in the factory and work on a machine. To try to work out The answer to this question, how did they put up with such a boring existence? Because life in the factory is as boring as hell. How did these people put up with it. So he joins the group and within a few weeks, he realizes that what's going on is these people around on the shop floor have gone insane. That's how they've coped with the boringss of life. They've gone insane. The insanity is represented by the banana time. What happens is every day, one of the guys on the shop floor puts a banana on top of his machine. Every day. Every day at 10:00. The other guys, it's always the same guy steals the banana and eats it in front of him. Then there's a row about whose banana is and what's going on. This is a manifestation of insanity as far as the researcher is concerned. Then the longer he stays there, the more he realizes this is not insanity. This is a way of coping with the day. What you have is banana time. 10:00, John puts his banana, Jack eats it. It's always a laugh. I always goes on. Then throughout the day there are these periods in the day where the same thing happens. You have conversation time, you have coke time, you have lunch, you talk about football time. It just makes the day pass. So the whole argument is these people don't go to work to produce lovely widgets. They go to work because you pay them and they have a bit of fun, and that's what they're at work for because when you read the paper, there's nothing about work in it, they're not really interested. There was something in that about how we cope with the boredom of life. I think that's one of the reasons why I had to get out of the post I think I'm going to waste my life like this. I'm going to be selling stamps forever unless I do something about it. So in 1976, if I got this right, you matipulated.
Lead Across Sectors
“Once you learn a lesson once, you don’t need to learn it twice, but I learned lots of lessons lots of times. I guess the most important thing is to understand life from the bottom and not from the top.”
Description of the video:
Need a mechanism for getting them to change their mind that doesn't involve either physical violence or an argument. But I think I just experimented with that and found out. I'm going to ask you about university here just a second, but Yeah. Whenever I have looked up information on you and the nice statement they put together for your lifetime achievement award all says that he was a blue collar worker. And you were. So here's what I would like you to talk about. As you look back on that experience, post office, the factory, the farm, the things that you did, how does that influence the professional Keith Grant or the professional that you came. I take away from that. Two things. The first thing I would say is that I learned a lot in about six months and the other nine years I didn't need to do. So I did waste a lot of time there. It wasn't as if I was learning all the time. Just in the interest of. I spent many years working on a dairy farm. Once you've learned a lesson, you don't need to learn it twice, but I learned lots of lessons, lots of times. I guess the most important thing is is to understand life from the bottom. Not from the top. So many of my colleagues that teach business I never been in business, I never worked outside the university. I don't quite know how they understand how the world of work works in the absence of any experience from that. I've always been able to a bring in lots of stories that have happened to me to illustrate what I'm talking about. B, There is something in here and I talked about this in one of the talks I gave yesterday was about dissent there is so much effort built into, we need to get all our employees on board here and get a high level of consent, and then we'll be able to do this and that. Actually, in my experience, most people that go to work really don't care about the work. They go there because you pay them. They're not that bothered. If somebody next door gives them a higher pay deal, they'll go next door. They don't have that deal because frankly, the job, the work is really, really boring. So When you look at so much effort is built into building this wonderful consensual utopia about everyone's going to be so keen on this new strategy we've got. No, they're not. People at the top might be interested people at the bottom really couldn't care less. When I left the post office in York and went toe York University. One of the first books I've read was a book on the kind of skills you need in the labor market in the UK to be successful in the 1980s. The very last line of this huge empirical work was this. More people use more skill getting to work than at work. Which I thought was a terrible indictment of what we did to people. And I had suffered from that. I had been to places where I'm thinking, Oh, my God, it's only 9:30. I've got another 8 hours to go. How can I possibly survive this? I have done those kinds of jobs and I think that gives me an understanding of what is it like to be at the bottom? Because now you're in the middle or at the top and it's a completely different understanding of what's going on. Do you think that it would do I mean, people who are in leadership programs that they would be in good stead if they understood that. Yeah, but I mean, there are some organizations that insist on management going work on the shop line, on the shop floor or the assembly line for a week at a time in a year. And I think that's a really important point just to remind yourself that most people's lives are not built around meetings and high flying jets plates and whatever, they're built upon drudgery and mundanenss The only way they keep going is because they've got enough mates around the table to keep them happy to keep them going. There's a paper called banana time. It's very old paper, 1960 something or other. And that the paper is really set around a machine workshop in the 1960s. What happens is the researcher goes to join the group in the factory and work on a machine. To try to work out The answer to this question, how did they put up with such a boring existence? Because life in the factory is as boring as hell. How did these people put up with it. So he joins the group and within a few weeks, he realizes that what's going on is these people around on the shop floor have gone insane. That's how they've coped with the boringss of life. They've gone insane. The insanity is represented by the banana time. What happens is every day, one of the guys on the shop floor puts a banana on top of his machine. Every day. Every day at 10:00. The other guys, it's always the same guy steals the banana and eats it in front of him. Then there's a row about whose banana is and what's going on. This is a manifestation of insanity as far as the researcher is concerned. Then the longer he stays there, the more he realizes this is not insanity. This is a way of coping with the day. What you have is banana time. 10:00, John puts his banana, Jack eats it. It's always a laugh. I always goes on. Then throughout the day there are these periods in the day where the same thing happens. You have conversation time, you have coke time, you have lunch, you talk about football time. It just makes the day pass. So the whole argument is these people don't go to work to produce lovely widgets. They go to work because you pay them and they have a bit of fun, and that's what they're at work for because when you read the paper, there's nothing about work in it, they're not really interested. There was something in that about how we cope with the boredom of life. I think that's one of the reasons why I had to get out of the post I think I'm going to waste my life like this. I'm going to be selling stamps forever unless I do something about it. So in 1976, if I got this right, you matipulated.
About Keith Grint
Keith Grint is Professor Emeritus at Warwick University, where he was Professor of Public Leadership until 2018. He spent 10 years working in various positions across a number of industry sectors before switching to an academic career.
Amongst many jobs he has been an agricultural worker, a lifeguard, a postman, a freezer operative, and a karate instructor. Since becoming an academic he has held Chairs at Cranfield University and Lancaster University and was Director of the Lancaster Leadership Centre. He spent twelve years at Oxford University and was Director of Research at the Saïd Business School and Fellow in Organizational Behaviour, Templeton College. He remains an Associate Fellow of the Saïd Business School, Oxford. He is Fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences. He is also a Visiting Research Professor at Lancaster University.
He is a founding co-editor of the journal Leadership and founding co-organizer of the International Conference in Researching Leadership. He has written 45 journal articles and 46 book chapters. His books include Leadership (ed.) (1997); Fuzzy Management (1997); The Machine at Work: Technology, Work and Society, (with Steve Woolgar) (1997); The Arts of Leadership (2000); Organizational Leadership (with John Bratton and Debra Nelson); Leadership: Limits and Possibilities (2005); Leadership, Management & Command: Rethinking D-Day (2008); Sage Handbook of Leadership (edited with Alan Bryman, David Collinson, Brad Jackson and Mary Uhl-Bien) (2010); The Public Leadership Challenge (edited with Stephen Brookes) (2010); Leadership: A Very Short Introduction (2010); and Sage Major Works of Leadership (four volumes) (ed. with David Collinson & Brad Jackson) (2011). His most recent papers include: “Mindful Organizing in U.S. Navy SEAL Teams: Sustaining Mindfulness in High-Reliability Organizations (HROs)” (with Amy Frayer and Layla Branicki), Management Review Discoveries (forthcoming), and “‘No More Heroes’: Critical Perspectives on Leadership Romanticism” with Owain Smolovic-Jones and David Collinson, Organization Studies (forthcoming).
Explore the complete oral history of Keith GrintBorn or Made?
“I don’t know that it’s possible to answer. I think it’s only possible to answer to say that we’re all given different kinds of qualities, but then the question is: What do you do with those qualities that you’ve given? Do you ignore them, hone them, train them? I think what you can do is you can always improve somebody. It’s like any kind of sports skill, you can improve them if you train them.”
Description of the video:
So when we consider effective leadership or good leadership. How much do you think is attributable to the talent with which a person is born and how much based on education and training and experience? I don't I don't know I can answer that question. I think that's I think people always want to know the answer. I mean, I'm not asking you to quality. Yeah. No. I don't think it's I don't know if it's possible to answer. I think it's only possible to answer to say that we are all given different kinds of qualities. But then the question is, what do you do with those qualities that you've given? Do you ignore them, home them, train them or deed or whatever? Let's go back to the karate is a good example of this. I some of my students or students that were in my group ended up in the England karate team. One of them only ended up in the art team for about a week and then left. He has extraordinarily talented individual but couldn't be bothered to train properly. The one that did last for a long time wasn't as talented but just trained all the time. There's something, of course, we get different talents. The issue is, what do you do with the talent? I think it's the same with leadership. You can tell at school, some people are really good and some people are. But I think what you can do is you can always improve somebody like any kind of sports skill. You can improve them if you train them. If you train hard enough, you can improve what you're doing. You may never end up in the United States football team, but you can be pretty good in your local team. I think it's a question of recognizing that we can all do this. In some senses, we all end up leaders at some point of your family or the school or whatever it as a. There are always opportunities, but the issue would be Do you practice enough. Do you keep this going because I think it's like most physical skills, you have to practice It's a bit like negotiating. I taught negotiating for a long time and students quite often say to me at the end, how I am going to improve myself? I say, you need to go to car manufacturer shop. Don't take any money with you. Just go practice negotiating. Because you're not going to buy anything, then all those concerns that you have are disappearing and you'll see how good you are. Okay. And then the car dealers around the university really love. And then and then go back and buy all properly because we don't know when you buy a car, you do it once every three or four years, you get no training in how to negotiate for cars. So do it more often. That's why they're so good because they do it all day. So and doing my background work for this and reading through some of the things that you published and so on. I was as an American. I was really struck by some of the work you did with Linda Su Warner. All right. On American Indians? Yeah. American Indian ways of leading and knowing and leadership, 2006, the case of the noble savage, sacred places indigenous perspectives of leadership. So I looked up Linda Sue Warner and in 2012, at least, she was special assistant to the president of tribal affairs Northeastern Oklahoma A&M Miami Oklahoma. Now, I I taught at Oklahoma State University a year, so I know where this place is most people don't. So on multiple levels, Oklahoma A&M in Miami, Oklahoma is a long way from Work. Number one, how did you ever come to collaborate with this woman? And then I want to ask follow up question. Okay. So I think it was one of the very early leadership conferences. I started a leadership conference up with a colleague of mine David Collinson when I was at Oxford, that's an annual conference that runs not the same as this conference, it's mainly a European one. It's very critically focused international studying of leadership have about 150 scholars, very critical. Not many consultants turn out. Anyway. One of the early ones, I'm running I can't think I think it might be at Lancaster. I can't remember. Anyway. Don't he a difference. I get an e mail from Linda saying, I really like to come to this At conference, and I've half written a paper, but I'm not a leadership scholar. Would you be interested in coming on board and adding a bit of your leadership talent to this particular paper, which is about indigenous communities, I've always been interested in that kind of sure. We wrote bits of the paper and then we ended up delivering it actually it was at Exeter University where we delivered the paper. Since then, I've been in regular contact with when we published a few things together. I was just struck by
Leaders Are Readers
“You can learn a lot from a book, but it doesn’t necessarily make you a better leader. It might make things a bit better, but there is still something about the accumulation of practical wisdoms...”
Books I Recommend
- A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Leadership
—by Brad Jackson
Books I’ve Written
- Leadership: A Very Short Introduction
- Leadership: Classical, Contemporary, and Critical Approaches
- The Machine at Work: Technology, Work and Organization
- The Art and Science of Leadership: Explorations Into the Classics
- The Arts of Leadership
- Leadership: Limits and Possibilities
- Management: A Sociological Introduction
- Fuzzy Management: Contemporary Ideas and Practices at Work
- Leadership, Management and Command: Rethinking D-Day
- Mutiny and Leadership
- The Sociology of Work
