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Today’s top executives are expected to do every thing right, from coming up with solutions to complex problems to having the charisma and prescience to rally stakeholders around a perfect vision of the future. But no one leader can be all things to all people. It’s time to end the myth of the complete leader. Those at the top must understand their weaknesses and their strengths. Only by acknowledging what they lack can leaders fill in the gaps with others’ skills. The incomplete leader has the confidence and humility to recognize unique talents and perspectives throughout the organization—and to let those qualities shine. The authors’ work studying leadership has led them to develop a framework of distributed leadership. Within that model, leadership consists of four capabilities: sensemaking, relating, “visioning,” and inventing. Sensemaking involves understanding and mapping the context in which a company and its people operate. A leader skilled in this can quickly identify the complexities of a given situation and explain them to others. The second capability, relating, means being able to build trusting relation- ships through inquiring (listening with intention), advocating (explaining one’s own point of view), and connecting (establishing a network of allies who can help a leader accomplish his or her goals). Visioning, the third capability, means coming up with a compelling image of the future. It is a collaborative process that articulates what the members of an organization want to create. Finally, inventing involves developing new ways to bring that vision to life. Rarely will one person be skilled in all four areas. So it’s critical that leaders find others who can offset their limitations and complement their strengths. Those who don’t will not only bear the burden of leadership alone but will find themselves at the helm of an unbalanced ship. INSETS: Engage in Sensemaking;Build Relationships;Create a Vision;Cultivate Inventiveness [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professional growth can get stymied for all sorts of reasons. But one of the most important is rarely discussed: You’re contending with ghosts from your past. Early in life, family dynamics give rise to many fundamental behaviors and attitudes toward authority, mastery, and identity. When similar dynamics emerge at work, people often revert to childhood patterns. To enable change in the personal realm, psychologists often encourage clients to consider the nature of their original family system. This approach can—and should—be applied at work too. Guided by the tenets of family-systems theory and their own research, the authors have identified six elements of family dynamics that commonly play out in the workplace. To achieve your greatest potential as a leader, you need to recognize your own “family ghosts,” understand how they influence your behavior at work, and decide which ones to celebrate and which ones to leave behind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nobody really recommends command-and-control leadership anymore. But no fully formed alternative has emerged. So mature companies often struggle to balance the need for innovation with the need for discipline. The authors studied two exceptions: the new-product development stars PARC and W.L. Gore. Both companies, they learned, have three distinct types of leaders. Entrepreneurial leaders, found at lower levels, create new products and services and move their firms into unexplored territory. Enabling leaders, in the middle, make sure the entrepreneurs have the resources they need. And architecting leaders, near the top, monitor culture, high-level strategy, and structure. This system allows both companies to be self-managing to a surprising degree. Employees choose their work assignments and dream up new projects, whose success rests on colleagues’ volunteering to join in—making the companies collective prediction markets. And the mechanisms that enable self-management also balance freedom and control: The companies function efficiently and exploit new opportunities even as they minimize rules. INSETS: THE DOWNSIDES OF NIMBLE LEADERSHIP;HOW SATYA NADELLA IS REINVENTING MICROSOFT'S CULTURE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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