What Kind of Leadership Works Best at Your Company?

Everyone agrees that strong leadership is vital to the success of any organization — but it can be hard to tell what kind of leadership vision your company has embraced. In this piece, the authors suggest that one effective strategy is to pay attention to who gets hired and fired, since that can signal what traits your company values most. In a recent study of MIT graduates, for example, the authors found that most of the participants hated calling themselves leaders. Instead, they prefer to use the language of problem-solving, reflecting a leadership culture that the university is proud of. Ultimately, the authors argue that leadership is contextual: Different kinds of leaders are minted in different organizations, and their success is often specific to the environment in which they feel most comfortable.