Selecting Leaders: Making the Most of Previous Experience

Abstract

We have been doing leadership research together for 17 years. Fred Fiedler has been thinking about leadership for a lot longer than that. Earl Potter was a Coast Guard officer for over 24 years and spent much of that time putting leadership theory into practice. One of the most persistent troubles confronting both our theory and our practice has been the repeated observation that bright leaders with a record of previous successes sometimes fail in a new assignment when all the evidence suggested that they were the right ones for the job. This article will briefly summarize the research which seeks to explain why this happens and then do what we don't often get the chance to do in writing--give some pointed advice on how to avoid wasting the potential that it takes so much time to develop.

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