Purposeful Leadership is in the news

As many of you know, 2017 has been a big year for the Linkage team. We shared our findings from the largest leadership research study we’ve ever conducted in our 30 years of business in: Rethinking Leadership: The Power of Purpose.

Ultimately, our data revealed that purpose differentiates great leaders from the rest and is best defined by five commitments that the most highly rated leaders make to themselves, their teams and their organizations.

We’re excited to share that this work is featured in the latest issue of AMA Quarterly: The 5 Key Commitments of Leadership (pp 10–13). Here’s an excerpt:

What enabled Charles Martin IV of Martin Guitar to reinvigorate guitar manufacturing in the United States? How did Maxine Clark of Build-A-Bear execute a retail growth strategy that fundamentally repositioned her company within the toy industry ecosystem? Why has Oprah Winfrey been so successful at building a multibillion-dollar, multimedia empire? And what differentiates these great leaders from the average leader?

Questions like these have kicked off countless lectures at business school campuses around the world for decades. But the big surprise is that after all these years of giving props to the likes of In Search of Excellence (Harper and Row, 1982) and Good to Great (HarperBusiness, 2001), it turns out that the traditional models of leadership long held up as paragons have all too often gotten it wrong…