Harvard Business Review (HBR) Top 25 Articles

Leadership is different from management, but not for the reasons most people think. Leadership isn't mystical and mysterious. It has nothing to do with having charisma or other especial personality traits. It's not the province of a chosen few. Nor is leadership necessarily better than management or a replacement for it. Rather, leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems of action, argues John Kotter in this article, first published in 1990. Both are necessary for success in today's business environment. Management is about coping with complexity. Its practices and procedures are, for the most part, responses to the emergence of large, complex organizations in the twentieth century.... Note: Originally published May/June 1990.

Boards of directors typically believe that transforming a company from good to great requires an extreme personality, an egocentric chief to lead the corporate charge. Think "Chainsaw'' AI Dunlap or Lee Iacocca. But that's not the case, says author and leadership expert Jim Collins. The essential ingredient for taking a company to greatness is having a "Level 5" leader, an executive in whom extreme personal humility blends paradoxically with intense professional will. In this 2001 article, Collins paints a compelling and counterintuitive portrait of the skills and personality traits necessary for effective leadership. He identifies the characteristics common to Level 5 leaders: humility, will, ferocious resolve, and the tendency to give credit to others while assigning blame to themselves.... Note: Originally published Jan 2001.

We all know that leaders need vision and energy, but after an exhaustive review of the most influential theories on leadership–as well as workshops with thousands of leaders and aspiring leaders–the authors learned that great leaders also share four unexpected qualities. The first quality of exceptional leaders is that they selectively reveal their weaknesses (weaknesses, not fatal flaws). Doing so lets employees see that they are approachable. It builds an atmosphere of trust and helps galvanize commitment. The second quality of inspirational leaders is their heavy reliance on intuition to gauge the appropriate timing and course of their actions. Such leaders are good “situation sensors”–they can sense what’s going on without having things spelled out for them. Managing employees with “tough empathy” is the third quality of exceptional leadership....

Companies that enjoy enduring success have a core purpose and core values that remain fixed while their strategies and practices endlessly adapt to a changing world. The rare ability to balance continuity and change--requiring a consciously practiced discipline--is closely linked to the ability to develop a vision. Vision provides guidance about what to preserve and what to change. A new prescriptive framework adds clarity and rigor to the vague and fuzzy vision concepts at large today. The framework has two principal parts: core ideology and envisioned future. Core ideology combines an organization's core values and core purpose. It's the glue that holds a company together as it grows and changes....

The article discusses leadership traits and characteristics. Distrust in leaders has increased over the last five years due to high profile scandals, and it has become necessary to look for a new type of leader. The article focuses on "authentic" leadership, consisting of people who find their own voice rather than emulating those perceived to be good leaders. The article details research done to discover how leaders developed their leadership abilities and interviews with 125 leaders in profit and nonprofit enterprises.