The Techniques of Inner Leadership: Making Inner Leadership Work

Leadership is fundamentally different from management, but traditional leadership skills were based on an ill-fitting, management-oriented model. When leadership is recognized as a discrete professional specialty, new techniques and methods are needed to operationalize the new values-based theories. In addition to distinguishing leadership from management, this book distinguishes inner leadership, practiced by those in the middle ranks, from leadership as practiced by the CEO. Inner leadership is an applied complex of specialized knowledge, theory, skills, attitudes, and attributes used to make things happen in the lives and behavior of other community members.

The leader’s goal is to cause followers to accept the leader’s values-e.g., his or her standards of what are acceptable goals, behavior, and overall conduct-as their own. It is an intimate, personal, life-transforming task that resolves itself into a set of discrete techniques-sets of attitudes, actions, and intentions-that distinguish leaders from managers or other corporate workers. The special focus of the 21 leadership techniques presented here is on those unique methods of group interaction that characterize leadership activities in the middle of the corporation. These techniques represent a substantial body of inner leadership practice that differentiates leadership from all other group roles and functions.