There is an episode (“A Game of Pool” from 1961) of the original Twilight Zone that has stuck with me for decades. The plot, poetic. Core message, timeless.
A pool player is obsessed with proving himself as the greatest player who ever played the game. The only hurdle is that a pool expert who passed away years before is the one person he wanted to play against, win and prove himself against.
One night, the champion appears. Through poignant dialogue, life lessons are shared. One of the most elegant ideas expressed is that champions and trailblazers are not meant to be exemplars forever. The best of anything is not meant to carry the title forever. They are a challenge for the torch to be passed to others to take things further, do better, and go further.
This episode, more than 50 years old, invoked thoughts about leaders, leadership, and succession.
In 2024, David Day published Developing Leaders and Leadership: Principles, Practices and Processes. While the book is research-heavy, dense and direct, its message is strong: leadership is not simply a defining attribute or an individual’s character. Rather, it is built from both the creation of other leaders and the building of a stronger capacity for leadership throughout an organization, institute or workplace.
The internal architecture of Day’s book is as follows:
- While leader development focuses on the individual, leadership development is about building relationships and collective capacity where leadership can emerge.
- It is through leadership development that collaboration, trust, shared purpose, networks, communication, and collective problem-solving can occur.
- Leadership is something that needs to be cultivated and developed rather than something someone is born with.
- Experience is an engine of leadership development through the sharing of progressively harder leadership problems to solve.
- Self-awareness (about one’s motivations, reactions under pressure, strengths, blind spots, how others experience a leader) is foundational to begin building leaders and leadership development where it can be put into practice.
- Development of leadership identity is key as opposed to learning new techniques.
- Relationships are always central because leadership doesn’t occur in isolation.
- Leadership development needs leadership capacity more than it needs star leaders.
- Intentional, systematic and steady development is ideal.
As clear and understandable as these points may be, I think that many of our societies struggle with many of these implications and with how to get there. Perhaps civic culture has been on a steady road for an untold amount of time that focuses on leadership as individuals. In essence, the forward motion of initiatives and goals can falter if a star were to leave the trajectory. It seems to me that the approach should be less Bobby Rayburn (from The Fan) and more Herb Brooks’s 1980 Olympic hockey team with a dash of Murderers’ Row from the 1927 New York Yankees.
Rather than overreliance on an all-star or individual talents, each is placed within a system where the gifts and potential of upcoming leaders can reinforce one another. A rising tide can lift all boats.
In the evenings following my reading of Day’s book, I was left with a lingering feeling that perhaps the reason leaders can seem rare in our day is that the architecture and environment where multiple leaders can be built, developed and refined through an ecosystem that perpetuates such growth is stifled, as many play the game of either-or.
While I agree with many points of Day’s writing, I think both the roster of the boots on the ground (as well as the individual) must be grown. This can lead to natural gifts, talents, and accrued experience. Both are not only needed but crucial. Rather than an either-or, all blazing stars must orbit one another.
That demonstrates potential, promise, and many what-ifs with nothing but opportunity to row.
Perhaps the correct response to the question “Should we build and develop the team or the individual?”—one that can pull the horizon to our foreground—is simply “Yes.”
Palgrave Macmillan, 246 pp., $291.95
