Leading E-Book

Reinhard K. Sprenger

• Herausgeber: Campus Verlag
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 112

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

In this compact, punchy book, the renowned German leadership expert Reinhard K. Sprenger draws on decades of experience to distil his key findings. It provides managers at all levels and in all sectors with an indispensable compass in times of change, time pressure, and uncertainty. Sprenger argues that the art of leadership is to find a narrative that clearly identifies the dangers but helps us look to the future—a vision that makes the benefits of change emotionally tangible and gives us confidence that the best is yet to come. »Germany's only management guru who really deserves this title.« Financial Times

Leseprobe

Reinhard K. Sprenger

LEADING

The Quintessence

Translated by Joe Paul Kroll

Campus Verlag

Frankfurt/New York

About the book

In this compact, punchy book, the renowned German leadership expert Reinhard K. Sprenger draws on decades of experience to distil his key findings. It provides managers at all levels and in all sectors with an indispensable compass in times of change, time pressure, and uncertainty. Sprenger argues that the art of leadership is to find a narrative that clearly identifies the dangers but helps us look to the future—a vision that makes the benefits of change emotionally tangible and gives us confidence that the best is yet to come.»Germany's only management guru who really deserves this title.« Financial Times

Vita

Reinhard K. Sprenger is considered the doyen of German leadership experts. Born in Essen in 1953 and the holder of a doctorate in philosophy, he today lives in Winterthur, Switzerland and in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His best-known publications “Mythos Motivation,” “Prinzip Selbstverantwortung,” “Radikal führen” and “Das anständige Unternehmen” have permanently changed the way many managers understand leadership. He also reaches a large number of private readers with his work “Die Entscheidung liegt bei dir.” A bestselling author, Sprenger is known as a critical thinker and an emphatic advocate of fresh thinking and independent action.

Übersicht

Cover

Title

About the book

Vita

CONTENTS

Copyright notice

CONTENTS

0.

Leading — or, decisions must be made

1.

Leading Further — or, the road to the future

Ensuring survival

Leading to success

Disturbing

Leading from the future into the future

The Quintessence

2.

Leading People — or, why trust is the foundation

Performance partnerships

Trust

Decisions for a shared future

The Quintessence

3.

Leading Together — or, how team spirit is created

How to organize cooperation

How does team spirit grow?

The Quintessence

4.

Leading Out — or, living with crises

Balancing

The value of hierarchy

The Quintessence

5.

Leading To — or, how to make transformation succeed

Creating the willingness to change

Institutions before individuals

Decluttering before repairing

Outside before inside

Experimentation before planning

The Quintessence

6.

Leading Staff — or, a rule of thumb for practical purposes

Find the right people

Challenge them

Keep talking to them

Trust them

Pay well and pay fairly

Get out of the way

The Quintessence

7.

Leading Ourselves — or, the freedom we give ourselves

The Quintessence

8.

Leading to Completion — or, why nobody needs to be of one opinion

0. Leading

or, decisions must be made

We live in a time of economic, technological, and geopolitical turbulence, a time in which management as we think we know it is forced to recognize its limits. Once again, we need people who can lead.

I have put together the essentials for people seeking inspiration and looking to rethink their own leadership—without fads and fashionable moralizing.

“What can be said at all can be said clearly …”—thus begins a celebrated dictum by Ludwig Wittgenstein, the end of which instructs us to remain silent on all other matters. With the passage of time, I find myself less and less convinced by this. Clarity contains an element of looking away, which at some point is simply irresponsible. Experience suggests that things are unclear, ambiguous. But it also tells us that ambiguity calls for a decision to made—until it’s time for the next adjustment.

Now for the things that call for decisions.

1. Leading Further

or, the road to the future

If leading is the answer—what was the question? After all, do my subordinates really not know what to do? But leading seems to meet a need. What’s at stake here? It’s about the Future. In one form or another, leading is always oriented toward the future. That is the core of leading, its essence.

The future is not only unknown (it always has been) but increasingly uncertain. More and more, it defies calculations of probability. Hardly anybody saw 9/11 coming, the global financial crisis, Covid, the war in Ukraine, the explosive development of artificial intelligence.

Ensuring survival

Leading as we understand it here is therefore at heart care. Care is not to be confused with worry, though it does imply concern—concern for the future and concern for others. Both are ancient principles of human self-preservation. By looking ahead and taking precautions, leadership “takes care” of our ability to face the future. From this follows the purpose of leading, the key task of which is to ensure the organization’s survival.

The contribution of leaders to ensuring survival assumes that they deliver benefits in excess of their cost. This stipulation is less self-evident than it may sound. It is difficult to isolate leadership from the entire process of value generation; as a “contribution margin,” it is scarcely measurable. What is more, we must consider the opportunity costs that may widen the gulf between possible and actual results. Yet these costs are never given a reliable price tag. Consider, for example, employee resignations under the full cost method. We know that people join organizations but leave executives. And yet, even though qualified staff is increasingly hard to come by, the link between leadership and an employer’s attractiveness continues to be underestimated.

Three distinctions follow from these reflections:

Leading vs. seniority: When we speak of leading, the causal condition is risk. Executives lead their organization to the point where it can fail—in order not to fail. They take risks because otherwise the organization has no future. They do so not only by investing capital but also as employees who administer the investors’ capital. If failure was not a possibility, we would have no need of leadership.

Risk also extends to executives themselves. An executive whose leadership job is absolutely safe may be in a position of seniority but is not a leader in the emphatic sense. What is lacking is that existential, disciplining force: danger.

Leading vs. managing: In the day-to-day running of a business, the boundary between leading and managing is fluid. Though the difference is stressed here, in analogy to the zeros and ones of an algorithm, it becomes problematic only when thought of in stark terms of either/or. Managing is a craft, the craft of administering and optimizing the status quo. It works within the system. It knows things and can do things. Leading is an attitude, it looks forward, calculating what has not yet happened, does not yet exist. It works on the system. It sees things and wants things. In short: managing is about the present, leading is about the future. In most organization, it is managing that dominates. The imbalance is pointedly expressed in the complaint “overmanaged but underled.”

Principal concerns vs. incidental matters: There is no such thing as ideal leadership, effective in all situations. That is why, instead of attempting a precise definition, we shall focus on effective practices that work in a world in which seemingly straightforward cause-and-effect thinking (causality) is increasingly supplanted by thinking in terms of possibility (contingency). What is clear is that we understand leadership not as incidental—as something done, time permitting, on the side—but as a principal concern, a set of tasks leading a group of people into the future.

Leading to success

By what criterion can we measure somebody’s contribution to an organization’s survival? The usual suspects are “performance” or “results.” But performance is an imprecise term while results come up against expectations that may be disappointed. Both are therefore at best preconditions for survival. By focusing on essentials, we see that leading is paid only for one thing: success.

Success means attaining a goal agreed upon by two or more partners. It may be measurable in such concrete terms as profit, sales, return on investment, market share, delivery times, cost cutting. But it may also be seen in quantitative terms, for instance, an organization’s improved image in relation to the climate of opinion surrounding it. However they define success, it is by that definition that leaders should be measured and measure themselves.

Leading is therefore not a “position.” It is not a box on an organizational diagram, nor is it necessarily tied to a particular rung in the hierarchy. No doubt it’s helpful for an organization to gather a high degree of leadership ability when it comes to motivating the workforce or implementing goals. One may also accept degrees of success, or consider success in relation to different timeframes (short-term vs. long-term). But there is no such thing as leadership “as such” that can be weighed against the bottom line.

Against this background, popular oppositions seem increasingly questionable. Take that between “good” and “bad” leadership. In the sober light of day, everybody has their own idea of “good” or “bad” leadership, though people may agree on certain well-worn phrases. Yet this often directs attention away from the leader’s success. The same applies to “value-led” leadership: in a pluralistic society, an organization must be open to a variety of values, traditions, and attitudes. Or to “leadership style”: in a society of singularities, there is no longer a single kind of employee for whom a one-size-fits-all leadership style would be appropriate.

The same is true of the “location” of leadership. It has been suggested that leadership should by definition take place from the front, others see it operating behind the team, guiding it, others still walking alongside the team, coaching and accompanying it. Some observers would even do away with leadership altogether. Taken as absolutes, all these ideas are misleading. They fall into place only once (first) we recognize that people work for one another and (second) we develop a flexible notion of leadership, one that responds situationally to circumstances and individually to colleagues. But the welfare of the whole must remain the yardstick. An organization cannot humor every special request; a balance must be struck between homogeneity and diversity.

It follows that there are only two types of leaders: successful ones and unsuccessful ones. When an executive succeeds according to the terms laid down in advance and breaks neither the law nor the moral code in the process, there is no cause to demand corrections or to criticize their “leadership style.” A business does not exist to provide education or therapy. Conversely, when success fails to materialize and that seems unlikely to change in the medium term, an organization must reassign the task of leading it.

However, success also requires a factor often underestimated in business: luck. A lucky break. Not everything is under our control. Hence Napoleon’s far-sighted question when interviewing prospective generals: “Monsieur, avez-vous fortune?” (“Sir, are you lucky?”). Success is thus neither entirely predictable nor entirely accidental. What we as leaders can do, however, is to want success with all our might, to stay alert and be ready when fortune smiles on us.

So much for the purpose of leadership, its why. Let us now turn to the question of the fundamental tasks it has to fulfill in order to make an organization fit for the future—its what.

Disturbing

In times of quiet markets, when doing business seemed as straightforward as skimming the cream off milk, executives were expected simply “to keep the shop running smoothly.” That alone would be considered grossly negligent today. For the way a business is organized is the present’s answer to the questions of the past. We have reason to doubt whether it can also be applied to the questions of the future.

This is the stuff of transformative leadership: yesterday’s world is a thing of the past. The state of exception has become the normal state of affairs; improbable events are becoming ever more probable. What is new are both the speed and the extent of change.

This poses a particular danger for businesses that have been successful for a long time: the success trap. Few things are as likely to endanger tomorrow’s success as yesterday’s success. For success impedes learning. You want to be efficient and end up blinding yourself to alternatives. The very act of organizing turns “One way or another” into “This way only!”. This is what is known as “process” or “policy.” At the heart of the organization qua organization is the destruction of alternatives. Thus, from an early stage, businesses become increasingly self-referential and hostile to innovation.

Paradoxically, however, a business can stabilize itself only dynamically. However great its potential, a business will fall behind if loses its appetite for the new. Businesses fail not by doing the wrong thing but by doing the right thing for too long. They survive only to become survivals themselves, cleaving to outdated ideas. We must therefore assume that what has brought us here will not take us there.

It is from this insight that leadership’s mission to disturb derives—it must be ready to sound the alarm, always signaling vigilance, preparation for the new, and eternal wariness of falling into a rut. In homeopathic doses, it must keep sowing unrest in an organization, thereby forcing it to develop resilience. Reacting only when a crisis strikes leaves you with no choice but to improvise—if you’re lucky.

In order to fulfill this mission to disturb, leadership must interrupt. Only nervous attention keeps the founding spirit alive. Accordingly, leadership cultivates methodical doubt and keeps questioning the organization: How might it be better? Are there other ways of doing things—ways that are more intelligent, more creative, cheaper, more time-efficient?