Here's the Review in Brief for Crucibles of Leadership by Robert Thomas. See below for the Review in Depth and for Additional Resources.
How this book is different:
This book builds on earlier research on the importance of crucibles as leadership development experiences presented by Robert Thomas and Warren Bennis in their book, Geeks and Geezers.
Thomas has gone beyond that research and this book adds key findings to the original. There are two findings that I think tie an awful lot of research together.
First, a leader learns two kinds of lessons from a crucible experience. There are lessons about leadership and lessons about learning.
Second, leadership is a discipline where learning and practice intertwine. Leaders learn while they are practicing leadership. They practice leadership to learn. And both acts are conscious.
The big, important thing about this book is that it ties up a lot of material we already know about how individual leaders develop and how organizations can do a better job of helping them.
Strengths:
There is solid research here by a person who has spent a lifetime studying how leaders develop.
There are powerful insights into how great leaders use crucible experiences to grow and develop.
Warnings:
You will get more out of the book if you are familiar with Geeks and Geezers.
Bottom Line:
There are four key findings of Thomas' research, all well laid out in this book.
Crucibles contain two vital lessons, not just one. One lesson is about the content of the crucible and implications for leadership. The other is about how to learn and make sense of experience.
Practice can trump talent. This is a vital point in a time when raw talent is called the key to success.
Outstanding leaders devise a strategy for transforming crucibles into learning. They develop Personal Learning Strategies that guide their own development and which help them work with protégés and team members to draw learning out of crucible experiences.
Organizations can grow leaders faster and better by helping them learn from experience.
Now for the Review in Depth.
In 2002, Robert Thomas (the author of this book) and Warren Bennis discovered something important about how leaders developed. They had set out to determine the differences and similarities between young leaders (geeks) and older leaders (geezers).
But the key finding of their book, Geeks and Geezers, turned out to be the importance of the defining moments that shape leaders. Thomas and Bennis called those moments "crucibles."
Crucibles are emotionally charged situations that produce great learning and growth in some leaders. This was something a lot of us knew intuitively, but no one had ever stated or supported with research.
Once upon a time we believed that you could learn leadership from books and classes. Then, slowly, it dawned on the leadership development community that you can learn about leadership from a book or in class, but you learn leadership on the job.
Some of us call that the Apprenticeship Model. And the "academy companies" like GE, Pepsico, and P & G have taken to it with gusto. They've made developmental assignments a core part of their leadership development programs.
Robert Thomas decided to dig deeper into the phenomenon of crucibles. This book shares the results of that research. There are four key findings.
Crucibles contain two vital lessons, not just one. The second lesson is how to learn.
Practice can trump talent.
Outstanding leaders devise a strategy for transforming crucibles into learning.
Organizations can grow leaders faster by helping them learn from experience.
The book is divided into three parts. The first, Experience Matters—But Then What? includes the first four chapters. You'll learn about why some people seem to thrive and grow during a crucible experience while others wither.
There's excellent material on how to learn from a crucible experience and turn it to good. This also where you'll learn about the three types of crucibles.
In part two, Crafting a Personal Learning Strategy, Thomas gets down to the business of teaching us how to learn to be better leaders. The idea is to learn the basic lessons from an experience that you can pass on to others. There are several self-assessments for you to use.
There's another finding here that's very powerful. For leaders, as for other practitioners of a performing art, learning and doing are often one and the same. While you are doing, you are learning. And you learn by performing.
The final major section of the book, The Big Picture, lays out the lessons that organizations can learn from this research when they put together their own leadership development programs.
This is an excellent book. It brings together a number of insights that seem obvious once you've heard them, but that still make you say, "Yes!! That's exactly it!"
Buried in here is a finding that I think is a "missing link" in leadership development. It's the idea that learning and doing are often the same activity for leaders and others who practice performing arts.
If you are a leader, Crucibles of Leadership will show you how to learn from your experience and get the most value and growth from it. If you are responsible for leadership development for others, you'll learn how to use the natural way that people learn to lead as a core of your program.
Additional Resources
You'll get more from Crucibles of Leadership if you read Geeks and Geezers first.
19 Stars by Kevin Puryear will give you insight into how this all works in real life. The book outlines the careers of four senior US generals from the Second World War: George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, and George Patton.
Leaders at all Levels: Deepening Your Talent Poll to Solve the Succession Crisis by Ram Charan is the first book by a major leadership guru to discuss the development of leaders as an apprenticeship process.
To see what other folks thought of this book, or to purchase it from Amazon, click here.
