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Choice 1
Take the job. The corporation best understands its needs and if you have
been selected you can make your greatest contribution by meeting those
needs elsewhere if that is what the company expects.

Commentary
There is much to be said for the general idea that the company needs to
deploy its people according to their key strengths. The company pays for
all resources including people so that they may be used effectively to make
a contribution to achieving the business goals and mission. And here lies a
potential problem. Charismatic leaders only function effectively when they
love what they are doing – and it shows. A charismatic leader who accepts
second best to satisfy personal ambition frequently has been shown to fail.
Because neither the job to be done nor the people that he or she must work
with excite the leader he or she tends to become increasingly isolated.
People experience little or none of the early success that they expect and
informal leaders tend to emerge, isolating the leader increasingly from
what is happening in the team. A well-established law of managerial psy-
chology is that of idiosyncrasy balance.

Idiosyncrasy balance says that:
The team perceives the leader as being worth following, if and only if, that
leader brings the team the success that it craves. A new leader has around
one hundred days in which to deliver success. Any failure or perceived lack
of progress beyond one hundred days reduces the effectiveness of the
leader and leads to the emergence of informal leadership. In effect the
team “fires the boss”.

Questions for discussion
1. In what other sphere of leadership is the first one hundred days

considered vital?
2. What examples can you think of where a leader has been effectively

fired by the team?
3. Is informal leadership always a problem?

Choice 2
Ignore your very strong understanding that the new job will require your
full attention and negotiate a “watching brief” over your old operation
with some sort of dotted line reporting structure that will enable you to
guide your successor and protect the future of the department to which
you are devoted.

Commentary
Research has shown that one of the major causes of conflict within an
organization is where the past leader of a team is perceived as “meddling”
in things that should no longer concern them. Such interference under-
mines the new leadership and often causes “warring” factions to develop
where some support the old leadership while others support the new. This

“Leadership is what leaders DO!” 95