Why ‘leadership’ is so difficult — and elusive

This paper suggests that as the focus on ‘leadership’ has intensified over recent years, the quality of management in both public and private sectors has diminished. The two phenomena may be linked. Our capacity to run things properly and to manage people in a dignified and productive way has been trammelled by an over‐emphasis on the behavioural and a consequent under‐emphasis on authority, role clarity and task. The managerial vacuum thus created has been filled, imperfectly, by executive coaching and a range of other ‘learning and development’ stratagems. In the real world of complex systems, management and leadership are merely opposite sides of the same coin.