Hello KSKOers
This week’s blog captures a thread that’s been running through my thinking for a long time. It started with a simple question I asked early in my career, and over the years that question has shifted, stretched and grown alongside my own experience of leadership. What you’ll read below isn’t a grand theory or a neat conclusion, but rather, a reflection on how my understanding has evolved and what I’ve learned along the way.
Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!
If you’d asked me twenty years ago ‘what makes a leader effective?’, I might have given you a fairly familiar list: competence, confidence, good communication, trust, perhaps a touch of charisma. At that time, my research was focused on a simple question: does a leader need to be liked to be effective?
That question was the focus of my masters’ dissertation, which explored likeability and leadership within the NHS in South Wales. I was interested in the lived experience of leadership rather than abstract theory, and in understanding what people actually respond to in workplaces shaped by pressure, service delivery and human complexity. The findings were clear. The qualities associated with being likeable and the qualities associated with effective leadership were almost identical, differing only in emphasis rather than substance.
At the time, that felt reassuringly logical. Leaders who are liked are often perceived as effective. People value fairness, warmth, approachability and respect. It aligned with my experience and with much of the practical wisdom shared in organisations by those people who’d been around the block once or twice.
But, the answer felt incomplete, something felt unresolved. Likeability described what people experienced, but it didn’t really explain the mechanism behind it. It showed me the outcomes rather than causes. My questions started to shift toward whether likeability was the reason for leadership effectiveness, or simply a by-product of something more fundamental?
Years later, my doctoral research returned to leadership, but from a different starting point. Instead of asking whether leaders were liked, I began exploring self-awareness and its relationship to…….
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