'Power & Leadership' with Dr Richard Claydon
“The manager does things right; the leader does the right thing.”
β Warren Bennis
Warren Bennis is the foundation father of modern leadership studies. In 1961, he wrote an essay for Harvard Business Review, entitled a “Revisionist Theory of Leadership” which changed the landscape of how we understand the concept of leadership.
Not necessarily for the best.
From Bennis’s perspective, and for those that followed him, leaders have a certain set of values and traits. Humanistic, progressive, empathetic, and empowering. It’s a vision of leadership that has seduced many.
I have deep sympathy for Bennis’s humanism. I’d love for leadership to look like that. But Bennis’s work is normative - it looks at how leadership “ought to be”. It’s not empirical, examining how leadership “actually is”.
I have a deep problem with that. All of my leadership development work starts with that problem in mind. I do not teach the fluffy fantasies of leadership. I reveal the hard realities.
In this Drinking Dialogue, I will look at one such hard reality - Leaders have a High Need for Power. Not humanistic progressivism. Not collective empowerment. Not empathetic support. Power.
To understand leadership, we thus need to understand power. What it is, how to get it, and how to use it.
We will look at:
- McLelland’s Needs Theory - how and why the Need for Power predicts effective leadership more accurately than many other models
- Power Over v Power To - the difference between the restricted Power Over perspective of leadership, which dominates mainstream organisational thought, and the Power To perspective, which is a far deeper concept
- Tactics of Power - how the seven tactics of power in organisations intersect with the above models, and how people with different needs tend to employ them
This is a virtual dialogue on Zoom:
Tue, 28 June, 18:30-20:30 Hong Kong Time
Fri, 1 July, 08:00-10:00 Hong Kong Time
Check your local time zone.
Dr Richard Claydon is the co-founder of EQ Lab, and the designer of the Future of Leadership module at Macquarie Business School’s Global MBA Program (ranked #6 globally by CEO Magazine).
He was awarded the highest achievable marks for a Ph.D in behavioural science. A Harvard Top-200 Management expert and business columnists for the Guardian newspaper have described this research as “a touchstone for the future work in management and organisation”, “outstanding in daring imagination” and “at the forefront of modern discussion and debate.”
Richard is a tier one tennis player, have coached tennis professionally, and also designed the tactics creator for the multi award-winning and world-leading management simulation, Football Manager.
