Real leadership is hard and requires selfless service; it is ultimately the leader’s responsibility to deal with difficult problems; and it is easier to be too harsh rather than balancing hard and soft, according to Miles Anthony Smith in his book Why Leadership Sucks: The Fundamentals of Level 5 Leadership and Servant Leadership. In the long term the only kind of leadership that brings lasting results and true self-fulfilment is uncomfortable, humbling, self-denying, painful and counter-intuitive.
The book goes on to provide an extensive range of insights into aspects of leadership, grouped into four parts:
- Part 1: To serve or not to serve, describing numerous ways in which effective leadership requires the leader to be a servant, rather than an overlord
- Part 2: Do what’s best for your organization, discussing various aspects of organizational culture and its relationship with leadership
- Part 3: Humility 101, dealing with self-examination, apologies, authenticity, controlling and displaying emotions, and handling adversity
- Part 4: Specific management situations, discussing some other leadership issues
While Jim Collins’ concept of Level 5 Leadership and Robert Greenleaf’s concept of Servant Leadership, both referenced in the book’s subtitle, reflect the author’s views of leadership quite well, they are dealt with only briefly in the introduction, and a reader who is not familiar with the writings of those authors may be left wondering, for example, what Levels 1 to 4 are.
The author has a concise writing style, which means that the book contains a lot of useful information while remaining fairly short. His overt Christian faith informs both his leadership philosophy and his approach to the ethical dilemmas which leaders inevitably face. Although there is nothing radically new in what the book has to say, there are plenty of ideas that provide helpful starting points for leaders to reflect on their own situations.