Legitimate Leadership

Legitimate Leadership, by Wendy Lambourne, looks at what employer strive for but often give up on: attaining the willingness of employees at work. Lambourne was the founding shareholder in Legitimate Leadership, an organisational consultancy which works for blue-chip companies and throughout the world, but hitherto mainly in South Africa, Germany, Britain, the United States, China and India. The conclusion of the book is somewhat surprising: employees' willingness at work is not a direct "deliverable" of, for instance, improving work conditions or remuneration. Rather it is a byproduct of the personal relationship which those in command positions at work have with those who report to them. Specifically, willingness at work arises only when those in charge strive for the very best in their people, care for them sincerely, and help them to grow - with no payback agenda in mind. The seminal research supporting the methodology derives from the South African gold mining industry in the 1980s, where (contrary to expectation) trust in management in the apartheid era was not consistently low, but varied immensely, both across mines and even in different shafts on the same mine. Trust in management was not found to be a function of working/living conditions, rates of pay, trade union activity, or the sophistication of the company's human resources policies and systems. Rather, trust in management was granted or withheld on the basis of the employees' perceptions of their leadership's genuine concern for their welfare. This seminal research has since been validated repeatedly in work done by Wendy Lambourne and her colleagues in diverse contexts all over the world in the past 20 years. But the Legitimate Leadership book is not a theoretical discourse on management-employee relations. It is rather a practical guide for implementing legitimate leadership criteria, drawing on examples from a range of organisational contexts. No similar principle-based but usable advice to leaders currently exists. The book is aimed at business owners and managers who are concerned with successfully leading in organisations and transforming both others and themselves in the process.