There are many books on leadership, but only a few of them provide unique insights. Manfred Kets de Vries’s book The Leadership Mystique: Leading behaviour in the human enterprise is one such book. Filled with helpful self-test questionnaires to help the reader identify personal and organisational leadership issues, the book tackles a number of important issues such as leadership in cross-cultural contexts.
In an environment of increasing globalisation, businesses can no longer hope to run efficiently by assuming that American leadership practices will work everywhere. Churches are increasingly facing similar issues if they want to reflect the nature of the Christian faith truly by reaching people from every nation, rather than just people from a homogeneous group. Attributes required of inter-cultural leaders include an interest in the socio-economic life of other countries, a willingness to hear and understand other views, openness to travel and new cultural experiences, and a high tolerance for frustration and ambiguity.
Another interesting insight is the deconstruction of the leadership role into a charismatic role and an architectural role, and the deconstruction of the elusive quality of “charisma” into the separate qualities of challenging the status quo, creating hope, dramatising risk, manipulating symbols, setting a right example, and making people feel significant. Once leadership charisma is understood as a set of skills, it becomes possible for people to acquire them.