Lolly Daskal
The Leadership Gap
ISBN: 978-1-101-98135-1
If you have a Twitter account, you can get some pretty interesting followers sometimes. Most of the random followers you obtain are bot accounts, doing nothing but retweeting links to junk Web sites. Occasionally, I’ve gained a random follower on Twitter who actually puts out decent content. Lolly Daskal is one of those rare random followers who was worth a follow back, and worth looking into what she does.
A couple of years ago on one of Joel Comm’s podcasts, he interviewed Daskal about her book, The Leadership Gap, and her work with CEOs and other corporate and startup leaders. It was a fascinating discussion, so I decided to add her book to my reading list. The book itself was an incredibly fast read – I managed to get through the book during the train ride between Mount Pleasant and Chicago on my way to CiderCon 2019. It’s always nice to have a few uninterrupted hours to read a book, and the few times a year where I’m not driving somewhere, I try to bring books of this length along for the ride.
The “leadership gap” refers to the space between your “leadership archetype” – the main characteristic that defines what type of leader you are in your organization – and your “shadow archetype” – the polar opposite of your leadership archetype, or the characteristic that is holding you back from being the best leader you can be. Daskal defines 7 different leadership archetypes and 7 shadow archetypes in the book, and devotes a section of the book to each. I felt like the book was trying to push the reader to pick one of the seven archetypes as their own and to disregard the rest. Personally, I don’t feel as though that should be the case – I felt as though two of the archetypes fit my leadership style well, with the other five archetypes also playing into my leadership style slightly.
The most useful part of the book were the seven shadow archetypes – warning signs that you’re falling into the “leadership gap.” The shadow archetype information was, for me, the main takeaway from the book and from Daskal’s work. It’s always a bit strange when the “what not to do” section of a book overshadows the positive information – what one would think should be the main purpose and main takeaway from a book like this. However, “what not to do” can be much more powerful than “what to do,” when framed the right way. I believe the book did frame this information correctly.
Much like a lot of other leadership and entrepreneurial books, The Leadership Gap felt a bit like an extended series of articles from the Internet, at times a bit thin on content. I understand the importance of writing a book with your work featured inside, but could this have been done better as an online article series behind a paywall, or a series of videos? Had this book been longer than it is, I probably would be using the phrase “unnecessary filler” in this review – it was truly the right length for the topic at hand. There are plenty of books in this space with unnecessary filler. The question here is whether a book was the right format for this information. For now, the information is probably yes. In the future, possibly not.
Overall, 8/10, would recommend as a way to discover your strengths and weaknesses as a leader, and to figure out ways to overcome your “shadow archetype” to lead your company or organization better.