In an exclusive interview with Training Journal's editor, Martin Delahoussaye, in December of 1999 Stephen Covey talked about his forthcoming book on leadership and explained how trainers can use the underlying principles to exert a greater influence on corporate strategy. You are presently engaged in writing your latest book, The Four Roles of Leadership. Well, the focus is in developing leaders as distinguished from managers.
Management is a function of position, but leadership isn t.
It deals with a different mindset and a different skill set. This skill set has become increasingly important in today s world because of what technology has done and what the global marketplace is doing. In the book, I stress the need to have more empowerment of people so that we can produce better quality at lower cost in order to compete. The kind of empowerment that I advocate requires strong relationships built on trust. So the first role of leadership is modelling trustworthiness.