High Challenge, Low Threat: How the Best Leaders Find the Balance

Book excerpt: This is a book about the things that wise leaders do. It is informed through thousands of conversations with leaders and argues that these leaders do not shy away from the tough stuff. It points to the conditions which these leaders create to allow colleagues to engage with difficult issues enthusiastically and wholeheartedly. It is taken from observations of leaders at work in a variety of settings. While these are mostly schools, these observations are checked against what is happening in wider leadership and management thinking. This book makes the case that any leadership role is concerned primarily with the relationships between individuals. It is the quality of these, whatever the size of the organisation, which make the difference between organisations which thrive, and those which stagnate. This is not to argue for soft, easy and comfortable options. Instead it considers how top leaders manage to walk the line between the impossible and the possible, between the undoable and the doable and to create conditions for productive work which transcend the difficulties which come towards us every day. Instead of dodging them, they embrace them.And by navigating high challenge, low threat, they show how others how to do the same.