Leadership

Most conversations about leadership get derailed early by the assumption that it's about personality. The charismatic visionary, the decisive commander, the inspirational figurehead, these are stories about leaders, not theories of leadership. The more useful question is not "what kind of person is a good leader?" but "what does leadership actually accomplish, and how?" For a project manager running a small Irish charity or a growing SME, that question is both more practical and more honest.

Why it matters

Projects do not deliver themselves. They are initiated, shaped, redirected, and closed by people, and the quality of leadership at the centre of a project team is one of the most reliable predictors of whether things go well. This is not just management opinion, it is empirically supported. Bass and Avolio's decades of research on the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire found consistent relationships between transformational leadership behaviours and outcomes including team performance, extra effort from followers, and satisfaction with leadership (Bass and Avolio, 1994). Daniel Goleman's influential Harvard Business Review study found that a leader's emotional competencies accounted for up to 90% of the difference between star performers and average ones in senior leadership roles (Goleman, 2000).

For small organisations, where a single manager might lead a team of two paid staff, six volunteers, and a board of eight trustees, good leadership is not optional, it is the thing that makes the rest of the plan credible.

Core concepts

The most important distinction in modern leadership theory is between transactional and transformational leadership, developed first by political scientist James MacGregor Burns in Leadership (1978) and extended into management by Bernard Bass in Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations (1985). Transactional leadership operates through exchange: clear tasks, clear expectations, clear rewards or consequences. It works well in stable, predictable environments where role boundaries are well understood. Transformational leadership operates differently, it engages followers' values and motivations, communicates a compelling vision, and encourages people to transcend self-interest for the good of a collective purpose (Burns, 1978; Bass, 1985). Bass was careful to note that these styles are not opposites: the most effective leaders typically deploy both depending on what the situation requires.

Simon Sinek's widely watched TED talk and his book Start With Why (2009) popularised this insight in a practical form. Sinek argues that people don't follow leaders because of what they do, or even because of how they do it, but because of why they do it, the underlying belief or purpose that animates their decisions. His "Golden Circle" model, Why, then How, then What, offers project managers a useful prompt: when explaining a project to your team or your board, start with the mission, not the method. Inspired teams are not built with Gantt charts (Sinek, 2009).

Robert Greenleaf's concept of servant leadership, introduced in his 1977 essay and book, offers a useful corrective to the idea that leadership is about top-down authority. Greenleaf argued that the leader's primary role is to serve the needs of those they lead, removing obstacles, providing resources, developing capability, so that the team can do excellent work (Greenleaf, 1977). For organisations where most of the workforce is unpaid, where volunteers require appreciation rather than instruction, and where the manager often has less technical expertise than the people doing the work, servant leadership is not idealism. It is practical necessity.

Goleman's research on emotional intelligence (EI) adds a further dimension. His 2000 HBR article identified six leadership styles (coercive, authoritative, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting, and coaching), each linked to a different cluster of emotional competencies. The most flexible leaders can shift between styles depending on what a situation requires. Rigidly pacesetting leaders, for example, consistently demoralise their teams by implying that effort is never enough, a pattern that is particularly damaging in volunteer-dependent organisations where intrinsic motivation is the primary fuel (Goleman, 2000).

The Irish context

Irish organisations, particularly charities and small businesses, face a leadership structure that few frameworks were designed for. The leader is often also the founder, the chief fundraiser, the key client relationship holder, and one of only two or three full-time staff. The emotional weight of this concentration of roles is well documented: Volunteer Ireland and the Wheel have both published guidance on avoiding burnout among organisation leaders, particularly in the community and voluntary sector (The Wheel, 2024). When the leader burns out, the organisation frequently stalls regardless of how good the plan was.

A second distinctively Irish challenge is the board-executive relationship in charities and cooperatives. In theory, the board governs and the executive leads operationally. In practice, the boundary is often blurry, and the quality of leadership depends heavily on whether board members and executive staff have negotiated shared clarity about who decides what. The Charities Governance Code's fifth principle, Working Effectively, requires charities to have trustees with the right mix of skills and a functioning board structure (Charities Regulator, 2018). But having the right governance structure does not automatically produce good leadership. That requires the more difficult work of developing trust, building shared purpose, and maintaining honest communication.

Enterprise Ireland's leadership development programmes, and the suite of supports offered through Local Enterprise Offices, reflect a recognised gap in the Irish SME ecosystem: technically capable founders and managers who need structured support in developing leadership skills to scale (Enterprise Ireland, 2024). This is not a uniquely Irish problem, but it is one the Irish support infrastructure has taken seriously.

Common pitfalls

Three failure modes appear repeatedly. The first is confusing leadership with authority. A project manager who relies on positional power, "I'm the PM, so this is what we're doing", will be obeyed, for a while. But compliance and commitment are different things, and it is commitment that a lean project, running on limited resources, cannot do without. The second is inconsistent communication. Transformational leadership requires an ongoing narrative: why this project matters, how progress is going, what has changed and why. Leaders who communicate at launch and then go quiet lose the trust of their teams faster than they realise. The third is ignoring the emotional climate. Goleman's research is unambiguous: how a leader makes people feel about their work predicts performance more reliably than any technical or structural variable. The project manager who never thanks people, who escalates problems without first acknowledging effort, and who treats the plan as more important than the team will eventually have neither.

Watch / Listen / Read

Watch, How great leaders inspire action by Simon Sinek (TEDxPugetSound, September 2009, 18 min). The Golden Circle model, Why, How, What, explained with examples from Apple and Martin Luther King Jr. One of the most-watched TED talks of all time. Available at https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.

Listen, Dare to Lead by Brené Brown is a real and widely accessible audio series, available through all major podcast platforms, exploring courage, vulnerability, and trust in leadership, qualities that map directly onto the challenges of leading lean, relationship-dependent Irish organisations.

Read, Goleman, D. (2000) 'Leadership That Gets Results', Harvard Business Review, 78(2), pp. 78–90. The clearest and most practically useful summary of how different leadership styles work, when to deploy each, and what emotional intelligence has to do with all of it.

Quick quiz

1. What term did Burns (1978) use for leadership that engages followers' values and motivates them beyond self-interest?
2. In Sinek's Golden Circle model, which element should a leader communicate first?
3. Who coined the concept of "servant leadership" and in what year?
4. According to Goleman's (2000) HBR study, what did emotional competencies account for in differentiating star senior leaders from average ones?
5. Which principle of the Charities Governance Code addresses the skill mix and effectiveness of the board?

Answers: (1) Transformational (or "transforming") leadership. (2) Why. (3) Robert Greenleaf, 1977. (4) Up to 90% of the difference. (5) Principle 5, Working Effectively.

References

Bass, B.M. (1985) Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations. New York: Free Press.

Bass, B.M. and Avolio, B.J. (eds) (1994) Improving Organizational Effectiveness through Transformational Leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Burns, J.M. (1978) Leadership. New York: Harper & Row.

Charities Regulator (2018) Charities Governance Code. Dublin: Charities Regulator. Available at: https://www.charitiesregulator.ie/en/information-for-charities/charities-governance-code (Accessed: 27 April 2026).

Enterprise Ireland (2024) Leadership development programmes. Available at: https://www.enterprise-ireland.com/en/management-business-growth/ (Accessed: 27 April 2026).

Goleman, D. (2000) 'Leadership That Gets Results', Harvard Business Review, 78(2), pp. 78–90.

Greenleaf, R.K. (1977) Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness. New York: Paulist Press.

Sinek, S. (2009) Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. New York: Portfolio.

The Wheel (2024) Wellbeing and burnout resources for charity staff and leaders. Available at: https://www.wheel.ie (Accessed: 27 April 2026).