Leadership Sustainability

Abstract

Today's leaders require leadership sustainability, the ability to make personal improvements stick over the long term. Ulrich and Smallwood contend that leaders fail at the stage of implementation, even after enthusiastically embracing coaching, learning, and other performance improvement efforts. The challenge, they write, “is how to turn these events into an ongoing pattern.” Their research found seven principles driving sustainability: simplicity, time, accountability, resources, tracking, melioration (“a new term for a whole complex of actions and attitudes designed to make things better”), and emotion. They also list more than 20 crucial books on such subjects as change, influence, and self‐discipline.