The Engaging Leader by Ed Gubman - (Dearborn 2003)

This book focusses on the issue of motivating the majority of today's workforce which has a "free agent" mindset rather than one of loyalty to their current employer. Most models of leadership assume that the "target audience" is more or less captive, not that it is footloose and frequently employed by another company. Ed Gubman takes professional sports as a model for understanding the "free agent" mentality and the "war for talent" which is now being engaged by businesses, as well as sports teams.

Ed Gubman sees "a leader as someone who can engage people for success". Leadership is focussed on winning since winning is the great motivator. Leaders may be "drivers", who push for short term results, or "builders", who develop people to achieve results in the longer term. Ed Gubman sees leaders as committed, yet adaptable - "engaging leaders are versatile" both in how they engage talented people and in coping with constant change. In his view talented people want freedom, control of their lives, accountability and caring relationships. One of the key factors in having talented people is to ensure "culture fit". This is not cloning but a process of selecting creative and positive thinkers rather than disruptive people and negative thinkers. All recruits need to be team players even if some have star quality.

Ed Gubman differentiates between genius and talent quoting an old saying: "Genius does what it must, talent does what it can". Geniuses "lift everyone else around them" but are usually difficult to harness to objectives other than their own. Harnessing geniuses is a key test of the Engaging Leader. They can be the yeast which raises the performance of a competent team, comprising a core of talented loyalists and a succession of mobile free agents. Often it is the star performer who attracts support to the enterprise or the team, yet he is building for himself rather than for his team. Ed Gubman warns about "big egos" who destroy the trust needed to sustain teams. The Engaging Leader should be "building a dynasty" and should engage genius on his own terms, not those of the individual concerned.

"Building a dynasty" requires both trust and structure to obtain the best results from the talent which is recruited. Trust depends on shared goals and mutual respect, sustained by engaging leadership. Structure "is about designing what tasks need to be done, creating jobs to do them and assigning them to people. For an "engaging leader" the key elements of structure are - accountability, execution, roles and rewards. Accountability involves challenging goals and rigorous standards. Execution requires constant discipline, unremitting attention to detail and not trying to do too much at one time. Roles need to be allocated to create a balanced and effective team; within these roles the stars need to perform as peer leaders not as prima donnas. Rewards should follow success, not be a condition for it "You can win for years with average pay if you have strong leadership and chemistry". The prime condition for rewards is fairness - team members know who are the real performers and will respect just rewards.

This book is not immediately accessible to a British audience, since most of its examples are from American sports. It is written on the premise that "engaging leadership" is more highly developed in team sports since sports stars are all "free agents". It would have been instructive to have explored talent-dependent industries such as investment banking, in order to make the messages more compelling. To draw comparisons between sports and business can be deceptive - sports stars have a limited time to perform, free agents in the business world have to move in order to progress, to retrain and learn new skills, and to continue to succeed in the long term. The leadership needed to engage both may differ more than this book has revealed.

Adrian Davies - 16th May 2005