Product Description

A leader is: someone people follow. But why do people follow? Books abound on leaders, but much less is known about followers. In The Leaders We Need, Maccoby steps into this yawning gap in the literature.

This insightful book shows that followers have their own powerful motivations to follow. Many relate to their leader as to some important person from the past—a parent, a sibling, a close friend. With major shifts in family structure and other social changes (especially transformations in technology and work life), these “transferences” have grown complex—making leaders’ work more challenging.

The key for modern-day leaders? Being sensitive to how a group’s collective psychology and social context shape its leadership needs. For example, factory workers in a large city during a period of relative calm would need very different leaders than people working in a star management consultancy during a time of stiffening competition. The author outlines the profound shift from a more bureaucratic society and leadership model to an interactive, collaborative one—and provides crucial advice on how to become a “leader we need.”

Offering provocative psychological insight and thoughtful analysis of social and cultural changes, this book examines leadership through an entirely new lens.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #360805 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

About the Author
Michael Maccoby (PhD) is a business consultant, anthropologist, and psychoanalyst based in Washington, DC. He currently teaches at Oxford University and The Kennedy School of Government. He wrote the best-selling business book, The Gamesman (1976), and has authored seven other books including HBSP’s new Narcissistic Leaders: Who Succeeds and Who Fails.

Customer Reviews

The importance of "principled pragmatism" in a "market-dominated world"

Those who have read Michael Maccoby's previously published Narcissistic Leaders already know that he has formulated a number of unconventional opinions about effective leadership. That soon becomes obvious in this book as he explains in the Introduction that his approach to the study of leadership "is shaped by my academic training and professional experience as a psychoanalyst and anthropologist for over thirty-five years has studied and counseled leaders in business, government, universities, and unions. As an anthropologist, I view leadership within a cultural context, a system that weaves together modes of work, political institutions, family structure, and values. And as a psychoanalyst, I focus on the way personality determines how we relate to others, especially at work." Therefore, Michael Maccoby's focus is on what he characterizes as "Personality Intelligence," (i.e. the ability to understand people).

Although he does not agree with all of Sigmund Freud's theories, "I do make extensive use [in this book] of his concept of unconscious transference, and I build on his theory of personality types. Transference helps to explain why people sometimes idealize leaders, projecting onto them comforting childhood images of protective parents. And it also explains why they sometimes turn against these leaders, seeing them as inept or neglectful parents." These brief excerpts, I hope, indicate Michael Maccoby's specific approach as he explains who "the leaders we need" are, and, "what makes us follow them."

What are their dominant characteristics? According to Maccoby, the leaders needed "in these tumultuous times" possess a combination of leadership types: transformational visionaries, operational obsessives, and trust-creating bridge- builders. "They are the leaders motivated to achieve the common good who have the qualities required to gain willing followers in a particular culture, at a historical moment when leadership becomes essential to meet the challenge of the time and place."

In this context, "Personality Intelligence" best understood in terms of certain qualities that add up to a leader's personality. The leaders we need have it or can develop it with proper supervision and support. They also have or can develop "Strategic Intelligence" which is an interactive mix of analytic, practical, and creative elements that are needed to anticipate future trends, think systematically, understand how to design effective social systems, communicate meaning and purpose to motivate and educator collaborators, and partner with other types of leaders who complement these strengths.

Curiously, there is no reference in this book to the research of Howard Gardner who has made a number of valuable contributions to our understanding of multiple intelligences, most recently in Five Minds for the Future in which he examines five separate but related combinations of cognitive abilities that are needed to "thrive in the world during eras to come...[cognitive abilities] which we should develop in the future." Gardner refers to them as "minds" but they are really mindsets. Mastery of each enables a person:

1. to know how to work steadily over time to improve skill and understanding;

2. to take information from disparate sources and make sense of it by understanding and evaluating that information objectively;

3. to build on discipline and synthesis, to break new ground;

4. by "recognizing that nowadays one can no longer remain within one's shell or one's home territory," to note and welcome differences between human individuals and between human groups so as to understand them and work effectively with them;

5. and finally, "proceeding on a level more abstract than the respectful mind," to reflect on the nature of one's work and the needs and desires of the society in which one lives.

Gardner notes that the five "minds" he examines in this book are different from the eight or nine human intelligences that he examines in his earlier works. "Rather than being distinct computational capabilities, they are better thought of as broad uses of the mind that we can cultivate at school, in professions, or at the workplace."

These are essentially the same capabilities that, according to Maccoby, leaders need in order to attract interactive followers by engaging and convincing them of the purpose of the work to be done together. Then, "by understanding them and fitting them into roles where they can demonstrate and develop their strengths," leaders gain their respect, perhaps even their trust. Only then will the people [led] become collaborators who help [their leaders to] succeed."

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out those written by Gardner (notably the aforementioned Five Minds for the Future) as well as Justin Menkes's Executive Intelligence: What All Great Leaders Have, Steven Feinberg's The Advantage-Makers: How Exceptional Leaders Win by Creating Opportunities Others Don't, Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis' Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls, and Launching a Leadership Revolution: Mastering the Five Levels of Influence co-authored by Chris Brady and Orrin Woodward.

A study of leadership that puts followers, social change, personality type and public policy in context.
Anthropologist and psychoanalyst Michael Maccoby has been writing about leadership for more than three decades. Here he ventures an argument with an unusual perspective for managerial literature. His fundamental thesis is that changing times demand a leadership model that leaves the industrial, bureaucratic era behind. He explains that new family structures and contemporary ways of working - especially knowledge work - have created a different kind of follower. Maccoby calls these workers "Interactives" and explains their demands in psychological terms. His emphasis on "Personality Intelligence," collaboration and teamwork is not really new, but his explanation of why these factors matter and what impact they have upon public policy is striking. We find his willingness to tackle big leadership challenges - health-care policy, education and even the U.S. presidency - fresh and thought-provoking.