Letters to a Leader: Twelve Lessons in Being a Leader

By Bill Critchley

This book is for the many men and women who find themselves in leadership roles, not necessarily at the top of their organisation - where a lot of the attention tends to go - but nevertheless responsible for orchestrating and coordinating the work of people. 

There have been many 'cookbooks' on leadership, academic treatises, case studies of successful leaders, and so forth, but this book tells leaders what most treatises on leadership don't tell them - that there are no easy recipes or models which actually work. Letters to a Leader addresses the problem of why 'pulling the levers' does not seem to work and of why it is often so difficult to 'get the message' through to people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Libri Publishing Ltd
• Release date: May 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781911450818

Bill Critchley

Bill Critchley has been working as an Organisation Psychologist for some 25 years. He practises as an Organisation Development consultant, an Executive Coach, a Supervisor of coaches, and a Gestalt Psychotherapist. He runs his own business, Bill Critchley Consulting Ltd. and is accredited as a coaching supervisor by EMCC, and as a psychotherapist by UKCP. Bill was the founder and director of the Ashridge MSc in Organisation Consulting, the Ashridge programme in Coaching for Organisation Consultants, and the Ashridge Professional Doctorate in Organisation Consulting. He was also a visiting Professor at Middlesex University. He has designed and led many programmes in leadership and facilitated many Executive teams and Boards.

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Letters to a Leader

Twelve Lessons in Being a Leader

Bill Critchley

Testimonials for

Letters to a Leader

Through five powerful questions and twelve lessons in leadership, Bill Critchley challenges prevailing assumptions on leadership whilst provoking the reader to enquire into their own experiences of working in and leading organisations. This book is a concise and brilliant exploration of the key facets of leadership and combines practical case studies with prompts for action. It is essential reading for anyone looking to make a meaningful difference through their leadership.

Chris Askew OBE

Chief Executive, Diabetes UK

Bill has known for thirty years that, contrary to what many

business books say, real organisational life is ‘messy’. (E.g. Critchley’s Law: ‘the number of unintended consequences will at least equal the number of intended consequences’.) Thankfully he also gives us a wealth of practical lessons and tips to navigate through it in a whole new, unexpected, practical, and deeply humane way. I can see myself giving a copy of this book to every person I coach, and drawing practical ideas and reassurance from my own copy for years to come.

Catherine Devitt

Chief Executive of Meyler Campbell,

a leading coach training organisation

Bill Critchley’s Letters to a Leader brings a fresh approach to leadership studies. Spirited and concise, the book proposes that extra-ordinary management is best achieved when leaders are willing to move away from conventional ideas of leadership and, instead, are prepared to adopt a relational view which understands and works within a perspective of organisations as complex,

interactive, social processes. The implications of this shift from fixed entity to fluid process for leaders is explored via a sequence of five ‘letters’ packed full of practical wisdom, pertinent case vignettes, and multiple challenges to dominant assumptions about leadership. I feel certain that every reader of this fine book will be enriched by it.

Professor Ernesto Spinelli

Existential therapist and executive coach

Imprint

First published in 2021 by Libri Publishing

Copyright © Bill Critchley

The right of Bill Critchley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

ISBN: 978-1-911450-74-0 print

ISBN: 978-1-911450-80-1 epdf

ISBN: 978-1-911450-81-8 epub

ISBN: 978-1-911450-82-5 mobi

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder for which application should be addressed in the first instance to the publishers. No liability shall be attached to the author, the copyright holder or the publishers for loss or damage of any nature suffered as a result of reliance on the reproduction of any of the contents of this publication or any errors or omissions in its contents.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library

Cover and book design by Carnegie Book Production

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge my colleague Dr Hartmut Stuelten of The Leadership Practice in Frankfurt, because he really sowed the germ of the idea for writing in the form of a ‘letter to a manager’, when some while ago we did some writing together, informed by our shared perspective on organisations as ‘complex social processes’. For a variety of reasons, he was not able to continue, but he gave me permission to use and adapt the idea if I chose to.

I would also like to acknowledge the work of Professor Ralph Stacey, who, when he was Director of the Complexity and Management Centre at the University of Hertfordshire, inspired me with his rigorous research and thinking in adapting some of the ideas from the complexity sciences, and developing them into the perspective on organisations he described as ‘complex social processes’.

Dr Patricia Shaw was an Associate Director of the Centre, and with her I had some exciting and rewarding experiences of working with this perspective in a number of assignments, some of which I draw on as vignettes in this book.

Finally, my supervisor, Professor Ernesto Spinelli was tireless in his support and encouragement, and he was willing to read and comment on a number of drafts which has made a significant difference to my developing and ‘crafting’ this book.

Introduction

Who should read this book

According to one estimate there are about 15,000 books on leadership, so why write another? The simple answer is that I think I have got something to say to the many men and women who find themselves in leadership roles, not necessarily at the top of their organisation, where a lot of the attention tends to go, but nevertheless responsible for orchestrating and co-ordinating the work of people. There have been many ‘cook books’ on leadership, academic treatises, case studies of successful leaders, and so forth, but I want to tell leaders what most treatises on leadership don’t tell them; that there are no easy recipes or models which actually work. I want to say something about the messiness and unpredictability of being in charge but not actually in control. One of my colleagues read a draft of this short book and said everyone who is about to become a manager should be told to read it; he liked it obviously.

I recently read a book called Seven Brief lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli (Rovelli, 2014), which gave me an idea for the format of this book. I knew very little about physics, but the book was short, accessible, and seemed to distil the essence of the subject in a way which was profound yet simple. What I want to offer is exactly that, some foundational principles and lessons which are simple and accessible and ‘right minded’.

What I mean by ‘right minded’ is that, when you read them, I would hope that they will resonate with your experience of the messy reality of life as you find it. They will not always be ‘obvious’ because I shall be bringing some thinking and ideas about organisations and psychology which run counter to some conventional perspectives, but they will be practical and grounded in my own long experience as a Business Director of Ashridge Consulting, an organisational psychologist, a change facilitator, a leadership coach and a psychotherapist.

Most of us will have some immediate associations with the notion of leadership, either from our experience of what is lacking (and there is much talk of that as I write this book in the UK during the Covid pandemic) or from our experience of being led, attempting to lead, or from ideas about leadership which we have read or appear to have been exemplified by known figures. I am not intending to reprise the conventional ways of describing ‘styles’ of leadership (e.g. autocratic, bureaucratic, democratic and so on), but I do want to start by addressing what seem to me to be two particularly popular ways of thinking about leadership, the first being what has become something of a leadership ‘myth’, and the second being its association with power.

Myths of leadership

Leader as hero

Firstly, there is a largely mythic view of leader as hero, which is upheld in our collective imagination by stories of some iconic figures, such as Gandhi, Mandela, Lincoln, Washington, Roosevelt, Churchill, to name a few. In some ways these mythical figures, or exemplars of leadership, are not particularly helpful to the many people who find themselves in ‘ordinary’ leadership roles in business, public and third-sector organisations. They have acquired a heroic status in our imagination, which does not mean to say that they were not heroic or remarkable people in some ways, but it is not helpful or sensible to hold them up as models of leadership to