Book:The High Impact Leader

I Just completed reading the book “The High Impact Leader” written by Bruce J.Avolio and Fred Luthans(2006, McGraw Hill).While the book describes authentic Leadership Development(ALD) in detail, the authors provide some very interesting statistics about confidence and trust in leadership in different types of situations. A survey conducted by Gallup Leadership Institute over a period of thirty years shows that the confidence and trust in the US military leaders has more or less remained at 80 on a scale of 1 to 100 in spite of the Vietnam debacle, 9/11 or even recent criticisms against Iraq War. In contrast to this, confidence and trust in business leadership hovered around a low 28 This is, in spite of a jump in the number of ethics officers appointed in US organization by 25%.One thing business leaders can be happy about is that it has not dipped considerably despite the dot-com bubble burst,9/11 and Enron & WorldCom. The authors go on to analyse the reasons what makes people more confident about military leaders or what makes military leaders to be seen as more authentic? The authors feel that there is no better way of demonstrating one’s authenticity than the willingness to sacrifice your life for a cause, a mission and in the military people’s case your fellow soldiers, for the people and the country. To others, self-sacrifice signals your commitment. “It may be as simple as waiting in line last to be fed, delaying your vacation to help someone get their project done, evenly splitting the rewards from a successful project, giving up something you value for the good of your group, and/or saying what you think when it most matters, even if it will detract from your career prospects or compensation bonus” . says Avolio & Luthans. The authors narrate some of the well-known examples like Disney’s Eisner , who over a recent 5-year period, returned -41% to the shareholders, but was paid a whopping $706.1 million over the same period to point to why business leaders don’t create confidence and trust in the minds of the people.

A good book on authentic leadership development. The only drawback I could notice was that the authors have not given living examples of authentic leadership. They have mentioned only one example from the business world, Buffet in the whole text. Of course , they argue that the book is on Authentic Leadership Development and not on Authentic Leaders. I feel that people usually will be able to get more inspired if they already know somebody who has been successful using the ALD process.