I’m on a leadership book reading kick, so what you’ll see happening in the next posts is a barrage of books that I have read, or am reading that I have yet to review. I’m going to start with a book I pulled off my Pastor’s book shelf called, “Overcoming the Dark Side of Leadership.”
The book is only 233 pages and it was an easy read. I did find myself feeling like I was in my general psychology class back in college except the class was taught by Obi-Wan Kenobi. From the multiple references to psycho-analysis and Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs to the repetitive reference to the “Dark Side” I had a hard time taking this book in the beginning seriously.
This book was intended to help encourage those in leadership to avoid the traps that led to the fall of people like Jim Bakker and such. The only problem is that the view from which they have analyzed “what went wrong” was that it was from a psychological stand point. I was amused by the 5 different types of “Dark Sided Leadership”
- The Compulsive Leader
- The Narcissistic Leader
- The Paranoid Leader
- The Codependent Leader
- The Passive-Aggressive Leader
While there were probably a lot of “practical” things this book may have for combating the “Dark Side of Leadership”, I would not recommend this book. I may be wrong, but it felt as thought this book did little to name the root cause of what causes leaders to fall. It doesn’t takes professional psycho-analysis to understand what the root cause is. It’s sin. I personally feel there are plenty of other books that deal with effective leadership and tackle the issues of sin that leaders deal with much better than this book.