Leadership Best Practices: How Far We Have Come and How Far We Need To Go (Part I)

Excerpt

Our understanding of leadership has come a long way. As an area of research with one of the richest histories, we are fortunate enough to be able to look back and see how far we have come. One hundred years ago, we submitted to the “Great Man” theory of leadership, accepting good leadership as only attributable to the more Herculean of us (Borgatta et al. 1954; Rost 1991). Now, in business schools across the globe, we see leadership development programs transform undergraduate students into decisive, confident, and approachable leaders—at least that is the hope. In this two-part column, we examine how far we have come in leadership research and discuss where we need to go. In the current part (Part I), we provide a bite-sized overview of leadership principles, plucking tried-and-true best practices and also presenting more nuanced findings from the leadership research. In Part II, we will discuss leadership in a context that challenges some of our current approaches: virtual leadership. …