An understandable reaction to my decision to write and publish a book on effective business leadership has been: do we really need another one?
There must be thousands of titles on business leadership. We have known for decades about the commercial and social benefits of managing through the team, ensuring psychological safety and upholding an honest culture. I am the first to acknowledge that, while I feel my perspective is distinctive and helpful, the evidence base that forms the foundation of the new book, Optimal Leadership, is well-established. I absorbed the principles of a high-performance culture as a young business student in the late 1990s, from such teachers as Peter Drucker and Jeffrey Pfeffer. I have had the opportunity to put them into practice as a CEO and found them to be even more effective than I hoped.
Yet the very longevity and strength of the evidence base begs a pressing, and fundamental, question: Why has there not been a decisive shift towards its implementation?
In Optimal Leadership I discuss this puzzle. Alternative leadership approaches continue to appeal. A contrastingly authoritative leadership style has become prominent in geopolitics, with predictably chaotic consequences. In this article, I wish to discuss some of the problems that confront an executive who does wish to be a genuinely effective leader of people and enterprises, in particular:
- It remains counter to some deep-seated cultural assumptions that the evidence base has not fully overcome,
- It is difficult.
While the evidence base on the participative, high-performance culture has had some influence, it is often grafted on to an understanding of the organisation that is somewhat mechanistic, divorced from the people who will ultimately be responsible for achieving the strategic aims – or not. I have frequently observed how senior managers over-estimate the impact of a company restructure, and under-estimate the impact of a change in key personnel. Similarly, I have been quizzed over the extent to which I as a CEO have invested in communication, including appointing a Chief Communications Officer.
Neither of these attitudes would be as common if more of the leadership literature on enlightened and empowering leadership had been widely appreciated and its findings thoroughly absorbed. So, for all the literature that has been published over the past few decades, we still seem to be at the start of the journey.
Some executives approach the leadership task by categorising elements into ‘hard’ matters, such as strategy, finances, assets, structure and systems; and ‘soft’ issues, such as talent, culture, communication and engagement. I have not found this segregation to be helpful. Once in role as a CEO, I have not encountered two such completely separate categories of the executive role. My experience is that you are always dealing with people; that there are logistical, intellectual and relational challenges, all of which are closely interconnected, none of which is ‘soft’.
It helps to remind ourselves that the concept of the organisational structure is a metaphor – it is abstract. While the concept helps clarify areas of responsibility and lines of accountability, as a CEO you are not at the top of a pyramidal structure, rather you sit at the heart of a network of relationships. This brings me on to a significant obstacle to creating an empowering, high-performance culture:
Mini-dictators interrupt the flow: It can happen that a CEO empowers their direct reports, but instead of empowering their own teams in turn, they create mini-dictatorships with a command-and-control style. The mistake here is to neglect the importance of having the right divisional leaders in place – paying more attention to the structure and objectives, than to key personnel, their capabilities and values.
This need to be decisive over key managerial appointments within the organisation leads on to another feature of building the empowering culture: it’s not about being nice all the time.
The personal challenge for the CEO is difficult: At times, you need to be empathic, nurturing and empowering; at other times you have to be decisive in ways that may make you unpopular – closing a unit that is unprofitable, removing a manager who is unsuitable for the role. These contrasting qualities are not cognitively close – you must be able to be adaptable and switch between very different modes of operating, and you have to be able to make a judgement on when to apply which. Such decisions are not always obvious.
On this matter, and others, I have found that an optimal balance is essential, hence the title of the book. Now, the quest to be optimal and balanced is not eye-catching, not easily reducible to a soundbite. However, succeeding in the real world means addressing real dilemmas.
Another issue on which a balanced approach helps is employee engagement. It is well established that this helps performance – but again, this should be optimised, not maximised. If employee engagement scores are above 90%, I see this is a warning sign. People are risking overwork, over-reach and burnout. To mitigate this, it is helpful to encourage a life outside of the workplace.
For all that there are formidable challenges, the good news about this optimal approach to creating a high-performance culture is this: it really does work. In the implementation phase, I have had to overcome objections, but these melt away once the results improve, and the Board is delighted.
Optimal Leadership, by Wilf Blackburn with Philip Whiteley, (Breakthrough Books 2025, ISBN 978-1-0687185-3-3) is available from the publisher’s online store, online from Amazon and can be ordered through local bookstores in the UK.
