European Management Journal (2010) 28, 253–259

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/ locate /emj

Looking for the key to leadership under the lamp post

David Sims *

Cass Business School, 106 Bunhill Row, London EX1Y 8TZ, UK

02do

*

KEYWORDSLeadership;Leadership teams;Contemplation;Dialogue;Narrative;Arts

63-2373/$ - see front mattei:10.1016/j.emj.2010.05.00

Tel.: +44 0 20 7040 8362.E-mail address: d.sims@ci

r ª 2014

ty.ac.uk

Summary The proliferation of books on leadership continues to be fed by a widespreadanxiety about leadership. When in doubt, wicked problems in organizations are oftendefined as leadership problems, and every new offering from the leadership �alchemists�is seized on in the hope that at last there may be technique which enables us to turneverything to organizational gold.

The flow of books on leadership shows no sign of diminishing, and we do not seem to bemuch closer to having a practical grasp of the subject. How much progress are we making?If we look harder under the lamp post where most of the work has been done and there-fore where the light is, will we find out about leadership? Or are we seeking answers in thewrong place?

This paper argues that we have indeed been looking for answers in the wrong place, andsuggests new areas to search instead. In particular, it argues that:

• Leadership is an activity, not a role.• To understand leadership we need to look at activities, not at individual namedleaders.

• We need new and better metaphors for the activities of organizational leadership, suchas the poet in residence, contemplation, narrative, and dialogue.

ª 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction: leadership as cure-all

This paper is born out of desperation. The flow of books onleadership shows no sign of diminishing. However, we do notseem to be any closer to having a grasp of the subject whichhelps to fill our needs. The reign of leadership as the newalchemy continues, as if good leadership could turn

0 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

everything else in the organization into gold. If there is aproblem and no one can work out what to do about it (a�wicked� problem), the fashion is currently to label it as aleadership problem. There is a huge output of books andconsulting on leadership, and it seems that there is a large,hungry audience who are keen to hear more ideas on thissubject even if those ideas are not always well considered.To be fair to writers on leadership, this is demand led asmuch as supply led. The readers of the books too may treatthem like diet books; it is easier to buy another book than it

254 D. Sims

is to absorb and practise the content of the book that youalready have.

The title of this paper is based on the story about thedrunk who had lost his keys and was searching for them un-der the lamp post. �Where did you drop them?� asked hisfriend. �Not here,� said the drunk, �it was over there.� �Thenwhy are you looking here?�, asked his friend. �Because thelight is better here�, replied the drunk. The starting positionfor this paper is that we are continually looking in the sameplaces that people have looked before, hoping that theexisting body of work will be able to enlighten our search.Given the length of time for which leadership has been stud-ied, and the amount of resource put into the study, maybe itis time to ask if we are actually looking in the right place.

One of the issues that we struggle with is related to iden-tity. If a junior person in an organization is asked if they as-pire to be a leader, they will usually be expected to answer�yes�. It has been seen as an ambition that we should allshare. If you do not see yourself as a leader or at least anaspirant leader, what is wrong with you? Do you not haveanything significant to contribute? Are you satisfied with amediocre position and package? There is an expectationthat the identity of �leader� is a good one to have. Theremay have been a recent change in this, because it has be-come the case recently that, if you ask MBA students whowants to be a leader, not everybody puts their hand up. Thisis encouraging. It may mean that we are beginning to pro-gress beyond the point where the question �do you want tobe a leader� would have meant, �Do you have a good self-im-age�? We may also be progressing beyond the point where itmeans �Do you want to be rich and famous?�. However, todeny leadership aspirations is still a dangerous position totake in public. A young investment banker rejected the of-fer by the HR department of a place on the leadershipdevelopment programme, and was asked in his next apprai-sal meeting how his search for a new job was going.

None of this would matter if leadership were not impor-tant. In our research centre on leadership we had many hoursof high quality and high value help from an extremely brighthead-hunter who devoted a lot of energy to the centre�s re-search during what he knew were the last few months ofhis life. His reason for this was that he wanted his children,whowere in junior jobs in the commercial world, to be betterled than he had been. This paper would meet its objectives ifit could honour his memory by contributing something whichhelps those who lead his children to do a better job as lead-ers. So, while the paper takes a sceptical position about thevalue of most of what is appearing under the leadership la-bel, it does not challenge the importance of leadership itself.There can be no doubt that we can detect differences in thequality of leadership in different places. Leadership is not ahopeless task, or one that can only bear fruit incidentally,as was the case with all the hard work of the alchemists. Thisis a difficult task that is too important to ignore. To seewhy, let us take a definition of leadership from a recenttextbook:

�Leadership is imagining, willing and driving, and therebymaking something happen which was not going to happenotherwise. It is not following instructions on pieces ofpaper or the latest theory pronounced by a leadershipguru�. (Fineman et al., 2010)

This definition is concerned with the activity of leading,with making something happen that was not going to happenotherwise, and makes no mention of the status of leader-ship. It also separates out a number of activities (imagining,willing and driving) that are needed for leadership to hap-pen. In so doing, it is clear that making things happen thatwere not going to happen otherwise is not an optional extra,but an essential part of bringing about good outcomes inorganizations. Similarly, the three activities of imagining,willing and driving might lead us to question whether allthree need to be, or can be, undertaken by the sameperson.

The search for the key, or platform 93=4

So far I have been questioning whether we are looking in theright place to enhance our understanding of leadership, butshould we also question what we are looking for? Is leader-ship one thing, which could be unlocked by one key if wecould only find that key? Or should this be looked at withcritical detachment as possibly reflecting the views of thosewho wish to make money or reputation out of offering a key?

Leadership is a multifarious collection of related activi-ties, each of which can have many different missing aspectswhich might bring leadership to fruition. The search for a�key� to leadership is part of the problem. Our poor drunkis searching for a key which does not exist, at least not inany form which he would recognize as a key. Such a searchcan be sustained for a long time, especially in communitieswhere people believe that they have hidden knowledgewhich is denied to those outside their community (see, fora parallel situation, (Filoramo, 1992)). Searches can be pro-tracted where people believe that they, or their colleagues,are privy to secret knowledge which is denied to others.

In the Harry Potter books, the train to Hogwarts leavesfrom platform 93=4. This is reached by walking through thebarrier between platforms 9 and 10 at Kings Cross Station.The platform is invisible to Muggle (non-initiated) eyes. Inother words, if you cannot see the platform, this is becauseof your own deficiencies, because you are a mere Muggle,outside the community of those who know and understand.If you are an insider to the community you are expected notonly to be able to see it, but to show your confidence in yourunusual perceptions by walking straight through what ap-pears to Muggle eyes to be a very solid barrier which is def-initely going to be painful if it does not admit you toplatform 93=4.

In short, leadership researchers are caught in the samekind of bluff as the Chief Executives of NHS Trusts in theUK, who all have to pretend that they can deliver what is de-manded of them on an inadequate budget. If they own up tonot being able to square the circle, to not being able to de-liver health outcomes that are beyond the possibility of thebudgets they have been given, then they are just seen asineffective. Likewise, the pressure is on leadershipresearchers to collude in the view that the emperor doesactually have clothes on, and that their leadership researchis actually getting somewhere. Most of them are in aca-demic jobs where the pressure is on them to continue topublish as if they had something firm, clear and new tosay. Alternatively they are working in companies or for con-

Looking for the key to leadership under the lamp post 255

sultancies which expect them to believe in what they aredoing and above all to appear to customers to believe inwhat they are doing, and not to be sidetracked by too manycritical questions. In addition, they will want to show thattheir research is going well enough that it must be worthother people paying them for their consulting services,and buying their books.

For example, Diane went as a participant on an AdvancedManagement Programme at one of the world�s most presti-gious business schools. She found that it taught that leader-ship is engaged in by heroic figures, that only a certainproportion of people have the capacity to develop as lead-ers, and that even those people need their potential drawnout by skilful leadership development. While this mightseem very old fashioned and not to be a very appealing orhelpful view of leadership for the 21st century, we canunderstand why this is being taught. The pressure on peopleteaching such a programme will be to get good grades on thefeedback sheets that are filled in by participants at the endof each module. How might they get such grades from theclientele of a prestigious and expensive Advanced Manage-ment Programme? By telling the participants that they areworth the money they are being paid, and that people suchas themselves should be strong leaders, should regard them-selves as entitled to order other people about and mouldother people to their desires, and that this is in the interestsof everybody. So they recruit a cohort of senior people whoalready have a very positive image of themselves, and rein-force that impression. They encourage the view that this co-hort already hold, that leaders are dragon slayers (Sims,2005b), heroes, and deserve the admiration (and the cash)of others.

So far I have argued that it is not worth continuing to lookunder the same lamp posts that we have been looking un-der, and that what we are looking for is the wrong thing.So what should we be looking for, and where? I am goingto make six suggestions which would help us to take ourunderstanding of leadership in a more helpful direction:

• Leadership is an activity, not an attribute.• Leadership is put together by several participants.• Leadership is done by the poet in residence.• Leadership is a contemplative art.• Leadership is a narrative art.• Leadership is a dialogic art.

Leadership is an activity, not an attribute

The study of leadership has been dominated by the study ofleaders. Let us take the Bennis study as an example of aclassic, well respected study of leadership (Bennis and Na-nus, 1985). Bennis started in a climate of opinion whereleadership was seen as being mostly to do with the success-ful conduct of organizational politics. In order to explorethis, he interviewed large numbers of Chief Executives oftop American companies about what they did as leaders.He found that many of them had very little interest in thepolitics of their organizations, and that the common factoramong them was an emphasis on vision, – hence visionaryleadership. This study was talked about with admiration,with people frequently mentioning the fact that, as Presi-

dent of the University of Cincinnati, Warren Bennis had rareaccess to the most influential Chief Executives, and hadtherefore been able to discover something that would havebeen hidden from lower status researchers. The studygained a lot of interest, and many later studies looked tobuild on its findings, to look under its lamp post.

This study can be taken to illustrate some of the prob-lems with the way leadership has been studied. There aremany visionary people in organizations. A typical way ofdescribing them would be the way that a senior person ina computer company was described to us a few years ago:

�He�s quite mad, of course. He sits there and comes upwith ideas, and 95% of them are hopeless. However, 5%are wonderful, and he�s worth it for that 5%.�

The visionary person on their own, seeing visions, mayget sent for psychiatric assessment. Alternatively, theymay be ignored, or seen as in the quotation above, as a li-censed outsider in the organization, left in a corner butoccasionally asked for inspirational ideas. In any case, thevisionary is unlikely to be influential unless their visionsare interpreted by someone else. The visionary leader, sim-ilarly, cannot function on their own. Being Chief Executiveis not enough to get visionary behaviour tolerated, unlessthat behaviour is made effective, and that can only be donewith the assistance of others. The visionary leader can onlyfunction if they have people around them who can fulfil atleast the following functions:

• sifting the good visions from the bad ones.• protecting the visionary from being stabbed in the back.• managing the politics.• managing the aesthetics.• keeping the organization moving effectively.• making sure that practical implementations take place.• understanding the financial implications of plans.

Bennis, unfortunately, did not interview the team of oth-ers who collaborated with the visionary leader. If he had, Ibelieve he would have found at least the above functionsbeing performed. He needed not only to interview the chiefexecutive, but also the other people associated with thatperson to find out what those others were contributing toleadership. I am not arguing that visionary leadership isnot important, but that it would not work without the otheractivities listed above being achieved in addition to the vi-sion building. It is not necessary to have each of those activ-ities done by a different person, but it is highly unlikely thatthey will all be done by one person.

The second reason why I think this study has increasedthe amount of light under the wrong lamp post is that itmay mostly reflect the current fashionable discourse aboutleadership among the group of people being interviewed(Grant et al., 2004). Senior leaders are no less sensitive tothe impression they are making on others, even researchers,than anyone else. To sound good, they may well feel theyshould suggest that what they bring to the party is some spe-cial and rare gift. They are relatively unlikely to claim thattheir contribution is:

• quality control on others� visions.• being a minder.

256 D. Sims

• political manoeuvring.• making the leadership attractive.• maintenance.• follow through.• basic accounting.

to give the previous set of bullet points their least excitingturns. Take Bennis� original question; are leaders mostlyconcerned with the politics of their organization? It can beargued that anyone who says that they are good at organiza-tional politics is, by definition, not. You make yourself lesseffective politically by claiming any effectiveness in thatarea. So this is not a suitable topic for self-report, unlessyou are clear that you are studying the discourse of leader-ship and not attempting to study any underlying processes.That was not the claim that Bennis was making; he believedhe was studying leadership behaviour.

Leadership is put together by severalparticipants

More recent and more nuanced studies of leadership stillend up with an emphasis on studying leaders. For example,Keith Grint�s study of the Arts of Leadership (Grint, 2000)seems to me to be a fascinating and helpful set of insightsinto the different arts that leaders engage in. Starting fromthe argument that studying leadership as a science has beena failure, Grint offers four arts of leadership which he thinksexplain many of the different activities involved, namely:

• The philosophical arts: identity: who are we?• The fine arts: vision: what are we trying to do?• The martial arts: organization: does everything work?• The performing arts: charisma: why would anyone wantto follow?

By implication, it may require the exercise of several ofthese arts to put together the activity of leadership, but be-cause of the kind of high profile political and military exam-ples that Grint uses, leadership is seen in terms of theproperties and skills of particular leaders. In other words,although the argument offers the opportunity to look atthe possible need for complementarity in leadership, wefind ourselves once again following the individualistictradition.

There is a narrative explanation as to why case studies ofleadership so often emphasise the individual leader. Wehave queried with journalists who write stories about highprofile leaders in national newspapers why they alwayswrite as if leadership were an individual activity and theiranswer is clear; it makes a better story. They are aware thatsometimes there are many contributors offering differentactivities and qualities to leadership, but they are also keento get their stories read, and the story is seen as more likelyto be read and retold (both of which are essential for thecontinuing work of the journalist) if there is a single protag-onist. Very few novels feature groups or departments ex-cept as a context within which their individual heroes andvillains operate; they are much more likely to be cast sothat the story centres round an individual. The essence ofengaging stories is character (McKee, 1998), and there is

no group equivalent for individual character. As McKee putsit, �The finest writing not only reveals true character, butarcs or changes that inner nature, for better or worse, overthe course of the telling� (p. 104). Groups can only be said tohave character as a relatively weak metaphor. Hence, onceagain, we have a methodological bias which may lead to thepublished work on leadership, whether in the newspapers,the practitioner magazines or in the academic literature,being excessively individualised. This is a problem for manytopics which are of practically interest; you may have beenthinking for the last few paragraphs, �Go on, give an exam-ple�, but any such example could only be told as if it were astory about an individual character. The cases which Grintgives to illustrate and support his structure are necessarilyas individualised as the stories about great business leadersin the newspapers.

Leadership is done by the poet in residence

Recent research has considered leadership on board ships(Sims and Gharibyan-Kefallonitis, 2006). Merchant shippingis a notoriously lonely and potentially dangerous life, con-ducted out of sight and out of mind of most of society, usu-ally in all male company. Their expectation had been to findleadership that was fairly unforgiving, very macho, possiblyquite brutal in the way that people related to each other.The research showed that this expectation could not havebeen more wrong. The findings were that leadership onboard merchant ships is full of emotion and aesthetics. Aes-thetics is the more fundamental concept of these two, asthe emotional experiences are mostly generated by the aes-thetic ones.

The findings suggest that people in positions of responsi-bility in organisations such as merchant marine ships believethat they need to be artistic experts in the poetics of con-versation. As one seaman put it, �sometimes badly timedspoken words are more dangerous than gunshots�. The ex-tremely careful choice of words to frame a situation, verylike the careful choice of words by a poet, was seen by manyof the participants in this research as the core skill to beexercised by those involved in leadership. This would sug-gest a fifth leadership art which we believe is independentof any of the other arts. Poetry is not simply one of the finearts, and nor is its value in leadership limited to the area ofdesigning a vision. Poetry as the skilled and entailing use ofwords is more important than that. As Cunliffe says, �Poeticforms of talk do not give us information about an alreadystructured situation but help us form or constitute for thevery first time, a way of orienting toward or relating our-selves to our surroundings and the circumstances of ourlives’’ (Cunliffe, 2002). The notion of the poet in residenceas a leadership art is that all of the arts in Grint�s list can beenhanced when someone contributes the right, memorable,influential words. Leadership requires someone to frame themantras by which the organization lives and meditates. TheMarketing and Communications department, when creating�messaging�, is potentially offering leadership through thepoetic arts, although the clunkiness of the output suggeststhat they may not be conscious of this or of the implicationsit could have for how they go about their work. They givewell crafted sets of words which can be used by themselves

Looking for the key to leadership under the lamp post 257

or others to express identity, vision, organization andcharisma.

Leadership is a contemplative art

The contemplative is the person who is aware of who theyare, what qualities they bring, what they are good at andwhat they are not good at. Contemplation involves beingstill and reflective enough to be aware of these qualities,stepping at least temporarily out of the action frameworkby which you are determined to make something happen,and being content to be aware of and understand the worldin quietness. This is much the sense in which Izaak Waltonused the word contemplation (Walton, 1653).

Much of my argument so far has been that we are lookingunder the wrong lamp post because we are looking for indi-vidual actions where we should be looking to see how anumber of people put the action and process of leadershiptogether. In this case, would there be anything generic thatwe can say about leadership? The argument so far hasbegged the question about how leadership action is put to-gether by a number of people. Is it a happy chance that anappropriate collection of people becomes able to do this, oris there a skill in bringing together a group that can provideleadership? The Chief Operation Officer of a major financialcompany put it like this:

�It is a matter first of looking at the task, saying �Whatkind of leadership do we need here?� And that is as muchabout deciding what we do not need. Too much leader-ship is like too much of anything else – it just makesyou feel a bit sick. Makes the company fat too, and thelast thing (my company) needs is to store its energyround its waist!�But then I have to think out quite carefully who we needfor that task. Obviously we need the right technical mix,but that on its own won�t do it. More to the point, I needto make sure we have got someone who can get everyoneexcited, someone who can scope it and work out what itis all about, someone who can look after things wheneveryone�s a bit down, someone who can plan the timing,someone who can check the cash flow, someone who canmake sure that the report doesn�t just get written butthat it gets put in an envelope with the correct addresson it and so on. And it�s not just like finding the piecesin the puzzle because they�ve all got to be able to trusteach other and work together too. Sometimes I am partof that group, which is fine, and sometimes I don�t fit,and I have to be prepared for that to be fine too. I thinkthis is one of the main things I bring to the company.�

This is the art that I am characterising as the �contempla-tive� art of leadership. This person knows themselves, knowsthe other people who can become involved him and theirpotential contributions to leadership, is at ease with thediversity of skills and interests and with making clear deci-sions about who can bring what to the leadership activity.

A part of many traditions of contemplation is an emphasison generosity, in the sense that this kind of understanding ofself and others seems to be associated with a generosity to-wards the views of others. I was given this description of awidely respected leader from one of his senior colleagues:

�In some ways he had everything; he was widelyrespected, he was undoubtedly very bright, everybodyliked him, he knew what he wanted and he had this reallyclear view of what made everybody tick. The funny thingis how little he left behind when he went – nothing last-ing was really built. It�s like he had a meanness of spiritwhich kept him really well connected with everybodybecause we all wanted to be his friend and he was sowitty and cutting about everyone else, but once he hadgone and taken his tongue with him there was nothingleft.�

Part of the contemplative art is a recognition of theimportance of generosity in leadership, often seen in fa-mous leaders such as Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Ghandi orJesus Christ, but little commented on in the leadership lit-erature. The contemplative person may have a betterchance than others of seeing beyond their own narrowinterests.

Leadership is a narrative art

It has been said that we are �homo narrans narratur� (Chris-tie and Orton, 1988), that is, human beings as a species arestory tellers and at the same time stories. This narrativeview of people (Boje, 1995; Czarniawska, 1997; Gabriel,2000, 2004; Linde, 1993; Sims, 2005a) offers us a differentway of thinking about the art of leadership and both the�story telling� and the �being a story� part may be helpful.

One of the arts of leadership is to be able to tell a storywithin an organization that other people want to be part of,one in which they want to appear as a character. This can bedone at any level with the Annual Report being an exampleof how it is done at the level of the whole organization. Thestory telling is not always done with skill, partly because noteverybody realises that this is what they are doing. How-ever, as the chairman of a large construction companyacknowledged:

�All the detailed jobs are taken care of, but what theyreally need me for is to say where we�ve been and we�regoing. Because I was a founder I have known our storyfrom the beginning, and I can tell it warts and all; I knowwhere our story went off track, I know who had to dowhat to get it back on track, I know where I can see itgoing in the future, and I know what stories I want peopleto tell about our story. I also know that only a part of thegroup will ever hear me tell this story directly, so it isreally important that I tell it in a way that has highpass-on value – that I give others the raw material togo and spread the story more widely.�

This illustrates a leader who is aware of his narrativeresponsibilities. He sees his role in terms of creating acoherent narrative for the organization, a story that otherscan relate to and which they can buy into. Sims (2003) hasdiscussed the particular difficulties when middle managersare torn between the different stories that they have to tellupwards, to assure their superiors that all is well in theirdepartments, and the stories that they have to tell down-wards, to assure their subordinates that the superiors aregoing to permit them to live out their stories withoutdestructive intervention. The chairman quoted above is very

258 D. Sims

aware that his storytelling sets a context for the whole orga-nization, and that his employees are living out their liveswith the story of his company being an important part oftheir own stories.

It has been said that �the meaning of life is the extent towhich we can write ourselves into the stories of others� (Ed-wards, 2000). Leadership roles usually entail makingappearances in the stories of others. Anyone who takes ona leadership role is likely to be an important character inthe lives of others around them, and thus to have writtenhimself or herself into the stories of others. But not all lead-ers do this with equal awareness or skill, and that is why Iwant to suggest that this is a separate leadership art.

Leadership also involves being a story. Making somethinghappens that was not going to happen otherwise impliesthat the person has some notions about where they mightdevelop the story of themselves and their organizations next– that they are ready to tell the next part of that story. Tobe part of a leadership activity also inevitably means thatothers will tell stories about you, and that those stories willhave an effect on how you can work. Many high profile busi-ness figures appear to have enjoyed generating stories forothers to tell about them (Henry Ford, Thomas WatsonJr., Bill Gates etc.) while others have been overwhelmedby a flood of stories about their behaviour that they cannotcontrol (Lord Browne, former Chairman of BP, for example).Some deliberately encourage stories to be retold for stan-dard setting in the organization, others leave the processto follow its own momentum, either because they do notbelieve the stories about them will have an impact (rare)or because they do not know how to influence them (morecommon). It seems that some people can survive the mostextreme stories being told about them with little damage.

At an organizational level we can see some people iden-tifying strongly with the stories of their organization (Sims,2004). Some people intertwine their stories of themselveswith the stories of their organizations, which can be seenas loving your organization and as one of the roots of orga-nizational engagement. Others keep their stories strictlyseparate, giving time to work for which they expect �com-pensation�, but never seeing that time as a part of theirown story. Telling the story of an organization in such away that others want to be a part of that story is an impor-tant part of the narrative art of leadership. Telling it in sucha way that they choose characters for themselves whichtake the plot in the direction you would like to see it go isa further skill of good narrative leadership.

Leadership is a dialogic art

Dialogue has been described as the art of thinking together(Isaacs, 1999). This is another art of leadership which iswidely talked about by those involved in leadership butwhich does not seem to have been picked up much by lead-ership theorists. To quote from another company chairman,this time of a very large utilities repair company:

�I am still mystified by how little interest most of my fel-low chairs have in the wisdom on the shop floor. Thesepeople are doing it the whole time, they have their handson the task, they know what actually happens. They walkinto customers� premises and hear what it feels like to

have the system break down, what it feels like to waitfor the fitter, what it feels like not to know when the fit-ter might come. They are also on the ground talking topeople who could find more customers for us. Empowerthem and they can rule the world. Talk to them and theywill love telling you all about it. But if you really get toknow them and you can think with them, they have gotaccess to a whole lot of stuff you will never get to knowabout any other way.�

Perhaps this art should be seen as going hand in handwith narrative art. People do not just tell stories to listen-ers; a story can often be multi-authored (Boje, 1991), andcan both come from and inform the dialogue or thinking to-gether of more than one person. Work within the DialogueProject has emphasised the importance for dialogue of peo-ple finding their own voice, and also of listening generouslyand respectfully (Roberts, 1999). The more we are dealingwith situations too complex for one mind to be able to han-dle, the more important will the art of dialogue become as aleadership art.

Conclusion: moving the lamp post

I have argued that we have been looking in the wrong placefor our understandings of leadership, and suggested some ofthe reasons why we think this is so. In particular, the contin-uing search for leadership traits by any other name stillbedevils most of leadership writing and leadership develop-ment. I have suggested that we need to look for the key toleadership away from this trait-based lamp post, and thatwe can do so by looking at leadership as the exercise of acomplex set of arts, usually requiring the collaboration ofseveral different sets of skills or arts, rather than focusingon only one of the necessary but not sufficient componentsof it at a time. Those who have been studying traits of lead-ership have come, understandably, to different conclusionsbecause they have not all been studying the same thing. Thepaper has described what I regard as the most helpful set ofideas so far, the Arts of Leadership approach (Grint, 2000),but has gone on to expand this approach by offering fourmore leadership arts, namely poetic art, contemplativeart, narrative art and dialogic art. I argue that all of theseare helpful additions as we try to understand the differentactivities that are needed to piece leadership together. Ihave argued that leadership can fail for the absence ofany of these arts, so they are all crucial. So could any ofthese be described as more central than the others, theplace on which we should centre the relocated lamp post?

It seems to me that, if we have to define any of these asbeing the core leadership skill, the one which might best beexercised by the person seen as �the leader�, it would be thecontemplative art of being able to understand the task theself and others, and put together leadership groups thatwork. In order to do this, we need to know what skills, rolesor arts are that are needed for the leadership act to takeplace, what resources we have available to us, and to beable to find ways of sourcing any resources not yet to hand.Thus there is a need for someone who has the capacity toknow what they themselves are good at, what is neededfor leadership to take place, and therefore what they needto bring in from other people to make the group effective.

Looking for the key to leadership under the lamp post 259

This is not to say that this is the key to leadership, be-cause leadership is not a box to be unlocked, and it is thisexcessively unitary metaphor for leadership, as if it wereonly one thing, which has led to the great market place ofthose who peddle the seemingly endless array of �new� lead-ership approaches which are so widely available. While peo-ple are looking for one �key� they will be susceptible to suchapproaches. However this paper has argued that an under-standing of the different arts involved, including the onesnewly proposed here, will give a greater chance of helpingpeople to put together effective leadership activities.

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DAVID SIMS is Professor of OrganizationalBehaviour, Head of the Faculty of Manage-ment and Director of the Centre for Lead-ership, Learning and Change at Cass BusinessSchool. His interests are in how people learnand develop as leaders of change, in the wayin which people contribute different quali-ties and skills to the activity of leadership,and in the relationship between leadership,identity, and the narrative processes of life.