How Leaders Happen: Why Psychology, Personality, and Character Make All the Difference

A psychiatrist puts leadership ＂on the couch,＂ with a provocative exploration of its crucial, often ignored, psychological and personal character foundations.

Elias Aboujaoude’s distinctive exploration of leadership explains how our cultlike obsession with leadership gives narcissists and sociopaths an edge and results in leadership failure everywhere we look--and how resisting the imperative to rise at all costs leaves many with an inferiority complex.

His takedown of the leadership industrial complex pokes a very sharp elbow into an industry seemingly united in a modern form of alchemy to create leadership gold--a waste of time and money, Aboujaoude vividly illustrates, since leaders emerge from a unique combination of personal, psychological, and situational factors that cannot be easily controlled or manipulated, no matter how gifted the executive coach.

This bracing take on a classic subject provides new insight into the way psychology aligns with the requirements of effective and happy leadership. The result is to empower us to understand ourselves and step up if we have what it takes to lead--or find equally rewarding, often superior, ways to achieve fulfillment if we don’t.

Elias Aboujaoude, M.D. is a Stanford University professor and psychiatrist at Stanford University Medical School, researcher, internationally recognized internet scholar. He also has an appointment at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles (second-ranked hospital in US) where his work focuses on digital and internet-related psychological health, He is the author of Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the e-Personality(aNew York Times Editor’s Choice). In addition to Stanford and Cedars-Sinai, he has held faculty appointments at UC Berkeley and UCSF, and an Honorary Professorship at the University of York. His research and writings have been widely covered, including by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Harvard Business Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Congressional Quarterly, Wired, TIME, and Newsweek, and on National Public Radio, BBC, CNN, FOX, and CBS.