Exceptional Leaders Do It Both Ways

This item from theweek.com illustrates the tension at the heart of effective organizational leadership. Successful execution--getting a group of people to do things right--requires conscientiousness, a linearity of focus, dependability and punctuality--whereas successful innovation requires messiness, divergent thinking, and rapid and iterative failures. It would be tempting and simplistic to emphasize one over the other; indeed, most of us probably have a proclivity for one to a much greater extent than we do for the other.

Since most international and independent school leaders were themselves successful in school, it is probably not much of a stretch to posit that they excel at what leads students to do well: careful and conscientious work, diligence, persistence, delay of gratification, etc. What makes a leader exception is the capacity to switch modes, to become different for a time when the situation requires something other than one's usual strength. So add to your inventory of leadership skills the ability to "hit from both sides of the plate" (yes, following yesterday's post, I am in a baseball frame of mind), AND the ability to diagnose when to use which mode. This diagnostic understanding is what separates method from randomness.

Thanks to Landis Green for the pointer.