Can the leader be less than perfect? Yes you say, but what if they have a major impediment, like a stammer. King George VI did as you’ll see (if you didn’t know already) if you see the movie The King’s Speech. Sometimes you can’t “get another job” as suggested by his speech therapist before he knew what his job actually was.
It was a thoroughly enjoyable movie and it made me think. When you look through the leadership development businesses and blogs the author is typically portrayed as healthy, positive and portraying all the characteristics one might expect of a leader. Expect? What if the first thing that was brought to your attention was a stammer, say?
Could that work? We talk about tolerance, diversity, empathy in leadership.
So could you lead up and be lead by someone you needed to help in a significant way? Maybe you do.
Are we truly tolerant of diversity? If leaders think they’re showing courage and vulnerability try being speechless with a stammer. That’s a leader to follow. If they can lead with that, what else could they do?
Stephen
Stephen Drain's Leadership Blog 
On the subject of tolerance, did you know 2011 is the 400th aniversary of the publication of the ‘Authorised’ – popularly known as the King James Version of the Bible? Having recently purchased a book written as a commemoration/historical account of this event, I thought you might be interested in the following introductory comments. Under the Foreword; “For a nation so wedded to a self-image of tolerance, England has some remarkable skeletons in its cupboard. It was the first kingdom in Europe to expel its entire Jewish population, in 1290. Little more than a century after that, it became the only European kingdom to ban the translation of the Bible into the vernacular”. ————- A century later still “the leaders of the English church went even further by making it a criminal offence to translate any passage of Scripture into the vernacular. Anyone found guilty of doing so faced the prospect of being burned to death as a heretic. England became the only European country in which translation of the Bible was actually banned” From ‘The Remarkable History of the King James Version – The People’s Bible’ by Derek Wilson, published 2010.
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