Number 12 - Leadership

Christakis' insights on leadership

I often have mixed feelings when finishing a good book: a mix of inspiration and clarity with some nostalgia and sadness that the little adventure ended. A very good way to cope with the nostalgia part is to talk about the lessons learned from a book. And I would very much like to share with you my takeaways on the topic of leadership from the phenomenal book of human relations professor, MD Nicholas Christakis "Blueprint".

I will focus on two insights: 1) The effect of network mobility, 2) The two types of leaders

1) Effective leadership is often linked to how collaborative the team members are. It turns out network mobility, or how big of a say team members have to stay or leave their team, is inherently linked to how collaboratively they act. Furthermore, there is a goldilocks network mobility to maximize members' "Cooperativeness", after which selfishness increases. In other words, leaders need to make sure that all members are working in the team voluntarily and willingly, not because of lack of better options and not having high turnover due to bad HR practices.

2) Leaders can be effectively divided to two flavours: instrumentative leaders and expressive leaders. Instrumenative leaders are good at setting the right goals, implementing them and making trade-offs making them excellent at championing change. Expressive leaders on the other hand emphasize team solidarity, minimize group in-fighting, promote justice and are calm under pressure. Different situations call for different approaches so its good to be aware of this fact to effectively choose one's approach.

Of course, there are a lot more to unpack in the book on the topic of leadership and human social networks. I might post more about this in the future. Also feel free to check the book yourself if you are interested!

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