THE TIMES: 'TELL THE BOSS WHAT YOU REALLY THINK'
By Carol Lewis, Lancaster University Management School

Keith Grint, Director of the Lancaster Leadership Centre, and Professor of Leadership Studies in the Department of Management Learning, is featured in the Times, talking about 'followship' and why leaders need followers who will tell them what they really think.

The article's author, Carol Lewis, quotes Keith:

“Individuals who do it on their own are inclined to get their head shot off. It has to be a cultural change,” says Keith Grint, Professor of Leadership Studies and director of the Lancaster Leadership Centre. “You need institutional changes to protect people.”

By sacking, or allowing dissenters to resign, you remove the responsible followers. Grint points to the spate of resignations that hit the Cabinet over Iraq. “When war broke out, people who should have stayed in the Cabinet left and we were left with an even more homogenous group. So the leader was getting more positive feedback and assumed he was right. After all, he must be right if everyone agreed, mustn’t he?” For too long bosses have surrounded themselves with people like themselves. But boards and workers siding with a boss who is making the wrong decisions have led to the downfall of more than one organisation. “Many formal leaders associate with people who think in a similar way and it is difficult for them to understand the difference between support and sycophancy,” Grint says.

The collapse of companies such as Enron has led to the current decline in the status of leaders. “It is also partly a fashion trend. We are beginning to recognise that what we are currently doing doesn’t work. We are starting to realise that it isn’t just a case of finding a heroic leader.

FOR THE REST OF THIS STORY VISIT:
http://www.lums.lancs.ac.uk/news/3973/