Applicability of the contrarian's guide to leadership

Contrarian's Guide To Leadership

In the book, the Contrarian's Guide to Leadership by Dr. Steven B. Sample takes on an ambitious aim: to explain how leadership is both contextual, driven by emotional intelligence and also a learned skill that can be honed over time. This is an ambitious vision for any book, traversing the foundational aspects of leadership using a chapter framework that is autobiographical and also anchored in the theoretical. As a result of this autobiographical and theoretical focus, the book veers off in a pedantic direction at times, with this being evident in the chapter titled "You Are What You Read." In other chapters however the author attains the goal of traversing the spectrum of the pedantic and pragmatic, especially in Chapter 5, Decisions, Decisions. The intent of this position paper is to explain what areas of leadership the book excels in providing prescriptive guidance, and those areas that don't attain the ambitious vision the author defined in the introduction and forward.

A Strong Theoretical Foundation Lacking Pragmatic Focus

Dr. Sample has taught leadership courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and has created an exceptionally strong and agile framework for evaluating leadership traits. The framework's core strengths include agility and tolerance of ambiguity, two points the author invests heavily in during the first few chapters of the book. The chapter, Thinking Gray, and Free attempts to set the framework in motion as a means to better manage diverse facts, opinions and perspectives of decisions, yet trails off into a pedantic discussion of why it is best to embrace uncertainty. It is difficult to believe that decisiveness is a fault of leaders, yet the author contends that point throughout the book, with that point being made in Chapter 5.

Contending that it is best to sometimes make no decision at all until the facts are in is certainly an approach many leaders rely on. The strong focus in this book on that point however, of embracing ambiguity and having the luxury of waiting to make a decision, makes the book even more academic and pedantic in tone. Uncertainty demands that a leader focus on continually ferreting out of facts and viewpoints to find new opportunities for growth while mitigating risk (Scott, 2010). Leadership is a contact sport in this regard, and it would be very difficult to find that mindset in this book.

Perhaps the lack of urgency in academia with regard to market pressures that commercial businesses face is a factor in this willingness to tolerate ambiguity that could quickly turn into a threat to a company's existence. It is unsettling that this book meanders through the concepts of leadership from a market-driven organizational standpoint; there is scarcely a focus on customers shown. The author would have been better off thinking about customer-driven leadership from the standpoint of seeing students as those to be served rather than inculcated with knowledge. This is a pivotal philosophical point in the book, as the Machiavellian leadership concepts mentioned in the book make its structure more inward-focused and even myopic at times. When organizations of any type rely on Machiavellian approaches and strategies, knowledge often becomes a currency instead of an asset (Liu, 2008). When leaders become too centered on the internal aspects of keeping control of their organizations they lose sight of what is going to keep them relevant over the long-term. The endorsement of ambiguity in this book, and the willingness to at times make no decision at all is meant to give the reader insights into the virtues of patience and getting all the facts analyzed before making a decision. The hard reality of business and for-profit businesses however is that this is rarely possible given how fast markets move. This fundamental aspect of the alacrity and speed of change of markets and the risks they represent are not covered at the level of leadership theory in this book, and that is a major shortcoming. The book fails to address how to deal with exceptionally turbulent leadership times, as the last three years of the global recession has been. For organizations whose revenue streams are directly influenced by mercurial changes in markets and attitudes, leaders are expected to navigate successfully through risks to attain positive results (Scott, 2010). The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership says in this instance to concentrate more on the entire aspect of the decision instead of rushing to action. This is an excellent point of the book, yet the urgency to serve and sustain any organization through turbulent times is not captured in the framework or its ancillary points. The book therefore meanders through concepts, becoming pedantic in areas and autobiographical in others. Ironically the author makes the point that intellectual freedom is the catalyst of excellent leadership. The freedom of seeing time differently across an organization, from the long-term orientation of the leader to the short-term orientation of a manager or supervisor, is downplayed and ignored. Inherent in intellectual independence are the series of decisions as to how one will spend one's time. At a much more fundamental level, how a leader will compensate for wide variations in the perception of time across the organizations they serve also must be taken into account. None of these perspectives are mentioned, despite chapters of the book endorsing ambiguity and the strategy of not making any decision at all. It is a contradiction and paradox that also underscores this books' framework.

Leadership and Emotional Intelligence

The book's focus on the behaviors and perspectives of leaders includes chapters on Artful Listening (Chapter 2) and Follow the Leader (Chapter 9). These areas of leadership styles, specifically embracing transformational leadership and emotional intelligence, are found in Chapter 8, Work for Those Who Work for you and Chapter 9, Being President vs. Doing President. These are two of the better chapters in the book, as the author provides insights into how leadership can in fact be taught. He uses autobiographical examples from running USC and also shows how critical it is for a leader to be transformational in their approach to managing an organization. The role of transformational leadership has been proven to have a strong impact on individual employees' attitudes, commitment, and resulting performance, all centered on trust in the judgment and direction of their leaders (Pieterse, van Knippenberg, Schippers, Stam, 2010). Studies of transformational leaders also indicate they are more accountable, transparent and inspire higher levels of trust over time, thereby making the task of navigating an organization much more effective than if transactional approaches had been used (Liu, Siu, Shi, 2010). The last three chapters of the book bring the role of transformational leadership into a pragmatic context, illustrating how this skill set is essential for leading an organization. The author has examples from USC that show how, in an organization at times unwilling to change, there has been success with changing the direction and focus of the university. This is a major accomplishment, especially in an organization which can be incredibly resistant to change.