August means leaders for AFR
BOSS.
Each year in August BOSS publishes its True Leaders List.
This year is the sixth edition of the list. One of the things it does
for Spiral Path is to make us stop and think about how our feelings
about leadership have developed over the last 12 months.
BOSS editor Helen
Trinca wrote this year’s piece. We think she adds an air of experience
and ever so slightly deeper style than last year’s author, Catherine
Fox.
This year’s piece nicely teases out the changes in perception of leadership
over the last 12 months. Certainly, the panel believes the hero CEO
is dead. We’re not sure they’re right about that, but it’s nice to
hear them say it.
The usual suspects are along with perhaps some surprises in Greg
Combet and Noel
Pearson.
Having shared some experiences with him more than a decade ago, we
were very pleased to see quiet achiever Craig
Winkler included in the top 25.
So how has Spiral Path’s thinking about leadership changed over 12
months? Perhaps the greatest change is that we are less likely to think
of leadership as a quality that some people have and others don’t.
We are more likely to think of leadership as something some people
do in the situation they are in at the time and perhaps won’t be able
to in another situation. We think of David
Loader, a visionary, inspiring and loved principal at Melbourne’s Methodist
Ladies’ College. His experience at Wesley
College was reported to be quite different.
We think True Leaders is useful in getting each of to think
about what parts of ourselves we bring to our role as leaders. This,
we believe, is the real work of a leader. Not useful, we think, is
looking for qualities in other leaders that seem to make them ‘successful’
and then trying to emulate them.