MIT Sloan Management Review

Among charismatic executives, for every Steve Jobs, there is at least one Dick Fuld — maybe more. Fuld presided over the downfall of Lehman Brothers. Nor is Fuld alone: Six out of 18 of Germany’s most recent “Manager of the Year” winners were responsible for dramatic missteps, including Daimler’s disastrous acquisition of Chrysler Corp. under CEO Jürgen Schrempp. That raises a question: do charismatic business leaders typically outperform their more ordinary counterparts over the long run?

There is no magic formula for successful leadership, says Deborah Ancona, director of the MIT Leadership Center at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Instead, each leader needs to figure out his or her own unique leadership signature — one that draws on his or her own strengths.

It’s a false construct to divide the world into the creatives and the non-creatives, says IDEO founder David Kelley. He helps business people “turn fear into familiarity, and they surprise themselves. That transformation is amazing.”

Smart leaders know that what can save you can also kill you — that traits that are good in many ways can boomerang back and hit you in the face if you take them too far. Excerpts from “How to Become a Better Leader.”

Self-awareness is crucial for evolving and finding coping strategies for weaknesses. An excerpt from “How To Become a Better Leader.” Image: PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi.

HEC Paris associate professor Valérie Gauthier has developed a management approach she calls “savoir-relier” to help managers build relationships and encourage diversity.

Good leaders make their work look easy. But the reality is that most have had to work hard on themselves — by managing or compensating for potentially career-limiting traits. To grow as an executive, you need to recognize and manage your strongest tendencies.

Executives become isolated if they don’t get on-point coaching and honest feedback. But too often, their “coaches” are people outside the company who don’t seem them in action. Robert S. Kaplan of Harvard Business School says that the better tactic is to get coaching from direct reports.

Susan Cain’s new book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” argues that introverted people who value quiet and solitude to be creative are as able as extroverts to be transformative leaders.

Image courtesy of Flickr user pasukaru76.

We have recently encountered a disturbing lack of concern for employee morale on the part of some executives. The head of HR at one successful organization even told us that employee morale in the organization was irrelevant.

When 33 Chilean miners were rescued after being trapped underground for 69 days, the world cheered. Here’s what your company can learn from key leadership decisions made during the mine cave-in crisis.

“The zoom framework offers a dynamic model that can help current and aspiring leaders increase their own range of vision and establish conditions that enable others’ success,” argues Rosabeth Moss Kanter in a new article.

At any given time, are you trying to juggle lots of projects at work? If so, you could be decreasing your output, recent research suggests.

A quarter-century after the best-known romance and breakup in modern executive history, the partner who vanished has popped up with insights to share.

Can you make yourself more creative? According to Shelley Carson, author of the new book Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life, you can.

 Think your colleagues are wasting time when they chat together? Think again. 

There's an interesting article in Forbes magazine about new research from MIT Professor Alex (Sandy) Pentland's group at the MIT Media Lab.

Teams that fight wildfires have much to teach business managers about preventing complex and dynamic problems from spiraling out of control.

Henry Mintzberg, the management scholar and professor at McGill University, is someone we pay a good deal of attention to here. Our editor Martha Mangelsdorf interviewed him on debunking management myths and let's not forget that he was one of the people who predicted the economic meltdown.

With its reporting of how political power is wielded in Washington, the only leadership lessons you're likely to get from The Washington Post most of the time are case studies of what not to do. But the website's video interviews with business leaders occasionally offer some positive models, too.

Henry Mintzberg, Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University

Management, according to Henry Mintzberg, is often misunderstood. Mintzberg, the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, sees a number of ways the managerial role is often mischaracterized.