The myth of the perfect CEO or perfect leader is prevalent in many organisations, sports teams and indeed even in the politics of nations. We expect more and more from our leaders and invest such hope in their miraculous powers to turn things round, and then are quick to criticise and blame them when they do not live up to our unrealistic expectations. It is a subject of continuous debate. Only recently Radio 4 ran a two-part series on the Psychology of Leadership.

In this article we have a sneak preview into Peter Hawkin’s book ‘Leadership Team Coaching’ to be published by Kogan Page in April 2011. The book explores how high-performing teams rise to the challenge of performing at more, rather than less, than the sum of their parts but will argue that they need the right sort of development, learning and support to do so and generally this has been missing.

The myth of the perfect CEO or perfect leader is prevalent in many organisations, sports teams and indeed even in the politics of nations. We expect more and more from our leaders and invest such hope in their miraculous powers to turn things round, and then are quick to criticise and blame them when they do not live up to our unrealistic expectations.

Warren Bennis, who has spent a life time studying leadership, writes:

‘Our mythology refuses to catch up with us. And so we cling to the myth of the Lone Ranger, the romantic idea that great things are usually accomplished by a larger-than-life individual working alone. Despite evidence to the contrary –including the fact that Michelangelo worked with a group of 16 to paint the Sistine Chapel – we still tend to think of achievement in terms of the Great Man or the Great Woman, instead of the great Group.’

Bennis, 1997

Since Bennis wrote this the challenges of the world have continued to grow exponentially, in terms of complexity, interconnection, speed of change and the major threats now facing us as a species - and there is more to come.

‘The next thirty years will be the most exciting time to be alive, in the whole history of human beings on this planet,’ says Tim Smit, the inspirational founder of the UK’s Eden Project, ‘for in that period we will discover whether Homo is really Sapiens or whether we are going are going to join the fossil records of extinct species.’

The leadership challenge is indeed greater now than it has ever been, for, when we wake up in the morning and look in the mirror, we see staring back at us one of the many endangered species on this planet. The challenge would be great if we were just facing global warming or population explosion or technological interconnectedness or the volatility and fragility of the financial markets or the exhaustion of accessible oil supplies or the extinction of species at a rate 1,000 times greater than ever before; but we are not. We are facing a world where all of these challenges and many more are happening in a systemically complex web of interconnecting forces, at an exponentially accelerating rate so that no expert can possibly understand the whole pattern, let alone know how to address it.

These interconnected challenges cannot be addressed satisfactorily by individual expert scientists, nor by teams of scientists drawn from the same discipline, not even by multi-disciplinary teams of scientists drawn from the finest institutions in the world. It certainly cannot be solved by politicians, even with coalitions and a greater level of cross border co-operation than has ever existed, nor by pressure groups focussing on one aspect of the complex pattern. The current world challenges task us as a species to find a way of working together, across disciplines and borders, beyond local and self interest in a way that has never been attained before in history. In working together we need to generate new ways of thinking, for as Einstein so memorably pointed out, you cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.

So, if the world needs more highly effective collective leadership and leadership teams, and the challenges and hurdles they have to overcome are getting even greater, we need to explore what can be done to support the development of such leadership.

Yet even here, I would contend, the tide has been flowing against the direction that is needed. So much of the literature and training on leadership is based on developing leadership capability within individuals. The industry of leadership development, including coaching, which together is a multi-billion dollar business world wide, has so far failed to move fast enough to address the changing challenges and needs.

Many people use the term ‘leadership development’, when what they are actually talking about is leader development. Leadership does not reside in individuals for leadership is always a relational phenomenon which at a minimum requires a leader, followers and a shared endeavour. A great deal of leadership development has taken individual leaders, many of whom have IQs (intelligence quotients) many times greater than their EQs (emotional quotients) and who are, by nature, over individualistic and less skilled at collaboration, away from their current context and challenges and provided them with individual and cognitive based learning. No longer are yesterday’s leadership development practices adequate for the enormity of the task that faces leadership.

A series of initial research projects into best practice in leadership development (conducted by Bath Consultancy Group) found leadership development was best when it was:

• Real time – based on the real challenges that were current for the leaders and which they had a hunger to resolve.
• Behaviourally transformative – not just leading to new insight and good intention, but to new actions and relationships, live in the work- shop, coaching session etc.
• Relational – leaders learning together with colleagues, where attention is given not only to the individuals changing but also the relationships between them.
• Involving real stakeholder perspectives – including the challenges from employees, customers, partners, commissioners and regulators in live interaction.
• Including unlearning – addressing limiting assumptions, mind-sets, habitual patterns that have been successful in the past and previous roles but need to be unlearnt for leadership to progress.

The changing challenge for teams

So how do these global challenges manifest in the world of leadership teams? Here are some of the key themes that are experienced by nearly all the leadership teams we have worked with or seen reported in the major research studies. These challenges are requiring all the members of leadership teams and those who coach and support them to raise their game.

• Managing expectations of all the different stakeholders
• Leadership teams have to run and transform the business in parallel
• Teams need to increase their capacity for working through systemic conflict
• Human beings learning to live with multiple memberships and belonging
• The world is becoming more complex and interconnected
• The growth of virtual working
• The major leadership challenges lie not in the parts but in the interconnections

No single leader can continue to meet the demands placed on them and there is a growing recognition of the need for highly effective leadership teams. Teams have so much more potential than individuals to rise to the growing, current and future challenges that face all organisations, countries and our species, and this is being increasing recognised in many areas.

Peter Hawkins is Emeritus Chairman and Founder of Bath Consultancy Group. He is also Professor of Leadership at Henley Business School. Parts of this article were originally published in the Henley Manifesto 2010.

This article is based on material from Peter Hawkins latest book ‘Leadership Team Coaching’ to be published by Kogan Page in April 2011. This book explores how high-performing teams rise to the challenge of performing at more, rather than less, than the sum of their parts but will argue that they need the right sort of development, learning and support to do so and generally this has been missing.

To receive details of when the book is published please email This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it