Dual leadership

Great leaders gain lots of attention, as academics and journalists want to understand their success. In trying to understand success, the style of individual leaders such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are extensively being described. Interestingly, the focus on individual leaders only partly captures the secret of their success. Steve Jobs built up his company in the early years together with Steve Wozniack and in more recent years with Tim Cook, while the young Bill Gates co-developed Microsoft with the experienced Jon Shirley. This suggests that researchers from the individual-oriented West may have a bias towards the individualist leader, while this captures only part of the leadership learnings at best. It may well be categorized as a level of analysis problem, which would lead to wrong conclusions. This is a key message of the author of the book ‘’Working Together’’, Michael Eisner who had been the CEO of Disney for over a decade. Eisner wrote this book to tell the world (including scientists and journalists) that his success as a company leader was the result of cooperating with COO Frank Wells. He was not brilliant, he argues, the dual leadership of Eisner and Wells had led to outstanding success. The consequence of Eisner’s statement is that the preoccupation of academics and journalists on the individual leader has led to wrong conclusions on the secret of leadership success in articles on Michael Eisner for sure, and likely also in other articles on great leaders. We know very little on dual leadership, and what we think to know about individual leaders and leadership teams is incomplete and maybe even plain wrong…