We know for a fact that leadership occurs in all kinds of groups, contexts and cultures, many of which have never heard of Stephen Covey or his principles. We thus need to examine Covey’s model from both angles: descriptive and normative. It is clear that Stephen Covey’s model of leadership is a normative one: he is saying that, to be a leader, you must follow a set of principles.
The normative angle says that, to be a “great” or widely admired leader, you need to behave in accordance with agreed values or principles.
The normative slant focuses on how leadership should be shown. The former simply describes how leadership works and includes leadership shown in teenage street gangs, criminal organizations and terrorist groups. To fully understand leadership, we need to see how it is possible to lead without following principles such as Covey’s.įirst, we need to differentiate between the descriptive and the normative perspective on leadership. However, there are millions of instances of leadership that are content based, such as technological or green leadership, that are not so dependent on being a certain type of person. His view of leadership shares with most other models the idea that being a leader means being a certain kind of person.īecause character seems to matter more than anything else for Covey, we get the impression that any one who has it could lead in any context on any topic. Stephen Covey claims that you need to be a very self-aware, mature, principled person to be a leader. It is hard to disagree with the principles that Stephen Covey describes in his book Principle Centered Leadership but it is arguable that people can show leadership without following them.
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