The Leadership Wheel: Five Steps for Achieving Individual and Organizational Greatness

It's a new world: after decades of evolution, the leadership theory taught by business schools across the country seems hardly recognizable anymore. Would-be CEOs, it seems, can no longer content themselves with beating competitors, winning market share, and growing profits. In this new world, the most effective leaders are expected to exercise keen emotional intelligence and do nothing else than help improve the lives of colleagues and surrounding societies. Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee popularized this idea with their bestseller, Resonant Leadership, and those who enjoyed that book will likely want to investigate fellow academic C. Clinton Sidle’s addition to the literature, The Leadership Wheel

Sidle's ambitions become clear early in the book, when he quotes not just pedestrian business leaders but Czech playwright and Nobel laureate Vaclav Havel. "The salvation of this world lies nowhere else but in the human heart…Without a global revolution of consciousness nothing will change for the better, and the catastrophe towards which this world is headed will be unavoidable." Sidle's leadership theory begins from a sweeping view of human nature and what he describes as the "evolutionary urge to become." The Cornell professor uses historical examples from a variety of fields to illustrate his point that when this urge becomes directed only to self-aggrandizing ends, people become dissatisfied. We must search for greater purpose. In that purpose, Sidle argues, leadership finds it truest extensions, and society finds its greatest value.

The "leadership wheel" to which the book's title refers rests on 5 roles, or stages, through which leaders develop. Sidle has developed his research on the roles through an extensive consulting practice and years of work with Cornell's MBA students, and many businesspeople will find the concepts familiar and resonant with other, similar exercises they may have done. Like many good business books, Sidle's calls not just for reading but active participation. The text contains numerous exercises and quizzes on which readers can explore their leadership personae and "fit" with different segments of the leadership wheel, and many will appreciate this hands-on approach to learning.

Throughout the text, Sidle exhorts his audience to embrace the emergent realities of the leadership environment: the fact that old command-and-control structures have lost ground to less hierarchical and more democratic organizational designs, and that leadership students are increasingly required to understand and even to speak language of self-actualization, both for themselves and their followers. While not all will agree with Sidle's ideas, few will be able to deny their popularity in today's world, and the need to adapt to them in one way or the other. Reading The Leadership Wheel provides a good start. --Peter Han