To be able to officially declare that leadership is taking leaps forward, one must be able to measure the success of leadership. This in itself is a whole world of discussion. Successful leadership means booming companies, but companies can nethertheless do well ‘despite’ leaders rather than ‘due to’ good leadership, meaning the stock index is not a measure of leadership success.

It would seem that qualitative measures must be used – i.e. the accounts of leaders  throughout history as a comparison to modern leaders. But this is also a difficult area, as historic accounts of leaders were written during a different period of culture, and therefore the same characteristics of leaders may be perceived, evaluated and documented differently to today. Indeed, changes in leadership may amount to little more than culture change than an abrupt improvement in the quality of leadership itself.

One could perhaps measure leadership by identifying how many leaders per year were in the public eye, creating positive change. But then factors such as the pervasiveness of media coverage, as well as political interference would upset this analysis. As you can probably tell, the task of measuring leadership is a lot harder than it might first have seemed.

One could look at the change in popular leadership theories over a period of time, but the question is raised as to whether current leadership theories are actually absorbed by managers in any significant way – or rather, their managements styles may be more affected by the past experiences and bosses than any abstract paper by a management academic or leadership author.

A final idea for measuring leadership styles is to ask leaders themselves – are leaders today better than leaders 10, 20, 30 years ago? But this may be affected by their personal biases – all those asked would have been at a much more junior level 30 years ago, and therefore would have looked up at leaders (for better or for worse) through a different lense indeed.

There is presently a big debate in the wider world of management surrounding the legitimacy and credibility of leaders sticking to the old ‘autocratic’ approach of the Fordism era.

Autocratic leaders are commonly known for not consulting their subordinates in the decision making process, and being a general ‘top-down’ leader whom merely tells people what to do, rather than giving any warning, feedback or chance to lobby them on the course of action.

Naturally, in army, hospital and other situations – an autocratic leader is needed in times of high stress and short deadlines, otherwise action could be uncoordinated and ineffective. However in the remaining bulk of commercial organizational situations, you can see that the autocratic style loses merit and would create more resentment in employees than it would save money operationally. In short, overall the autocratic style could damage the organisation, in morale and financially.

Well what other options are there? The following comments may help you understand:

Comment 1 talks about the approaches needed in organizations, whilst comment 2 forms a shocking rebute. This comment doesn’t credit the correct author but this comment brings up several interesting points.

I think the overall arena for debate is quite disjointed – you have leadership authors or several leadership books who put forward their opinion in a detailed and well laid-out manner. But at the same time you have business leaders who give  the odd sound bite or quote to the press and academia which forms more of a contradictory and patchwork quilt of leadership advice.

It seems clear from above that leadership books are the answer, but they tend to be long winded and take a long time to make a simple point. They’re hardly efficient and will use up much of your precious time. Do you really have the free time to spend reading a large library of leadership material? That sounds like quite a big job to me.