Leaders in Transition

Leaders in Transition brings a new perspective on why some leaders succeed more than others when taking charge of an organisation. Based on in-depth case studies, when four new leaders and their teams in large and complex international organisations were tracked for over a year, this book uncovers that success in managing transition is directly related to leaders' ability to balance tensions, appropriately to the context. The reasons for each leader's effectiveness are explored and analysed, allowing the authors then to extrapolate some general conclusions about the ways in which these tensions reveal themselves during all leadership transitions. Evidently, the success or failure of a new leader is the result of the way multiple actors (the new leader, his or her boss, his organisation and its stakeholders) behave, before and during the taking charge. These multiple interactions are revealed and discussed.The reader will find in the book a rich description of the main elements which he or she can learn to combine and balance in ways which are appropriate for the context and which will enable greater mastery of the transitional phase of leadership.

Gilles Amado, Ph.D., Professor of Organizational Psychosociology at the HEC School of Management, Paris, is known as an expert of transition through two books he co-edited, 'The Transitional Approach to Change', with A. Ambrose and 'The Transitional Approach in Action', with L. Vansina, published in 2001 and 2005 by Karnac and which are indebted to the close work he had been undertaking for more than thirty years with Harold Bridger, a founding member of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. He is a founder member of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organisations, an associate member of the Bayswater Institute and is particularly involved in action-research and consultancy in Europe and Latin America in the fields of industry, health, education, music and sport. Richard Elsner is a specialist consultant in leadership and transitions, and is the Managing Director of the leadership development consultancy, The Turning Point, which supports leaders to take on demanding new roles. The Turning Point is based in the UK and has partner companies in Frankfurt and Paris. Before setting up The Turning Point, Richard was a Principal or Partner with DIA.logos, KPMG and Kinsley Lord. He is a former managing director of Pearl & Dean, and adviser to the chairman of a British plc. Richard obtained his MBA from IMD in 1985 after devoting ten years of early career to Africa, first as head of rural development programmes for a consortium of British charities for the Sahel region, and then as Researcher for the West and Central Africa region for Amnesty International, based in London.