Two Heads Are Better Than One

Two heads, they say, are better than one, and that’s often true in leadership situations. For one thing, the public pressure of leadership often calls for a loyal colleague or assistant to take care of vital behind the scenes work. For another, the temperamental qualities make for inspirational leadership often conflict with the temperamental qualities that make for effective organization, and the two functions are often best handled by two separate people. Finally, the pressures of task achievement in any group often conflict with the need to maintain good relationships within the group. Very few leaders are good at both.

Every group or organization, from a neighborhood scout troop to a multinational corporation, exists in order to achieve certain goals. At the same time, every group has to maintain workable relationships among its members. In a social club where relationships are most important, a hard-driving leader would be out of place. In a dire emergency when survival is at stake, group members are often willing to submit to hard-driving authoritarian leadership and forget about relationships for the time being. But in between those extremes, where most of the world’s work is done, tasks and relationships are both important and both need attention from leaders. Unfortunately, very few people are outstanding at both task leadership and human relationships. Thus we often find different people specializing in different roles under different conditions. Every now and then exceptional leaders emerge who can handle both the public and private, the inspirational and organizational, and the task and relationship problems of leadership. But we shouldn’t rely on them, for they are rare. In many cases, two heads are better than one.

Failure and the Courage to Risk

What’s so free about free enterprise? We hear an awful lot about business leaders who build successful enterprises, and we love to stress the freedom to succeed that our business system provides. What we often prefer to forget is that a free enterprise system implies the freedom to fail as much as the freedom to succeed. The function of failure and the courage to take risks are keys to effective leadership.

Students of social and organizational effectiveness are quick to stress flexibility, adaptability, and innovation as critical virtues in any organized enterprise. Underlying those virtues is the courage to risk failure in pursuit of worthy goals. In a changing and uncertain world, success can never be guaranteed, and very often the attempt to guarantee security or protection from change and competition will backfire and cause stagnation and rigidity. Where no risks are taken, nothing new is created.

This is why the most successful creators and founders of business empires often achieve success only after a painful string of failures. Thomas Edison, for example, expected his experiments to fail hundreds of times for every time they worked. The trick, of course, is to keep your eye on the goal, to avoid taking failure personally, and to think in long-range terms. It may be true that nothing succeeds like success, but it’s also true that nothing teaches like failure.

Overcoming Handicaps

Over the last few generations, the problems faced by handicapped individuals have received a good deal of long-overdue attention. Overcoming handicaps may in fact be one of the most effective ways of developing extraordinary skills, and we seldom recognize the fact that many of history’s greatest leaders suffered from one handicap or another.

Contemporary psychology has learned that one of the most important developmental events of anyone’s life, particularly in youth, is the experience of overcoming adversity, bad luck, or handicap and prevailing over circumstances. When the handicap is not too severe, the strength and courage it helps generate can produce the potential for leadership. Alexander the Great, an epileptic who dominated much of the world by the age of 21, may be the most dramatic ancient example, and Franklin Roosevelt directing the course of our nation from his wheelchair may be the best modern example.

Until recently, of course, visible handicaps were mostly kept out of the limelight, and FDR went to great lengths to disguise his polio. Nowadays we are learning to deal with the idea of handicaps and to take advantage of whatever human talent may be hidden behind them, or even driven by them – including leadership talent.