by Lester Coupland

The Limelight Or The Shade

If you're reading this blog, the chances are you already have a view about what makes a great leader.

Here at LSC, we have noted an interesting phenomenon in our own leadership development work.

We will refer to this as two different paradigms; firstly, seeking the limelight; and secondly, staying in the shade.

Let's look at seeking the limelight. Some leaders crave being the centre of attention; they desire to be visible, take the credit for work done by their team and appear in all social media photos and posts. Success is perceived as being essentially centred on them and any perception of failure is subtly hidden, disguised or attributed to external factors. These leaders seek acclaim and glory. It’s essentially about ‘me’ and their underlying philosophy is ‘look what I did.’ If a complex problem or urgent priority arises, their impulse is to throw it over the fence for others to worry about and resolve. Naturally they depend upon having competent and committed people around them.

Let's turn to staying in the shade. Some leaders are more altruistic and see their job as getting the work done with and through others. So, they prefer to nudge their team into the limelight. They naturally want to recognise their team and champion team members wherever and whenever possible. Their philosophy is essentially ‘the team did it.’ However, they probably shared the pain of their team together with the stress, doubts and worries in delivering certain outcomes. They may well have co-created a solution to a problem or urgent priority and learned their way through a complex issue collaboratively with their team.

There will always be national cultural norms, personal values and political influences that shape a leader's mindset in terms of limelight or shadows. And there will always be a situational and contextual dimension to be considered.

However, here at LSC we do believe this aspect of a leader's mindset is significant. Our mission is to help you look in the mirror and think about your own approach. The worst thing we can do as leaders is to remain trapped in our own paradigm and assume that this is the only way……perhaps because we don’t know what we don’t know.