Johannesburg — IN HIS best-selling book, What Got You Here Won't Get You There, Marshall Goldsmith argues that successful leaders reinvent themselves to respond to new challenges. To do so they need to disabuse themselves of know-it-all notions. In the past, leaders barked instruction.

Today's leaders should know how to ask. It is about cultivating the habit to ask "people for input, listening, apologising for previous sins, involving everyone around you in getting better, following up, and practising feed-forward. It's prescription for how to change your behaviour."

But successful people are reluctant to change. Goldsmith argues that human beings, like animals, tend to repeat behaviour that is followed by positive reinforcement. Two problems arise. The first when we confuse and correlate specific behaviours with success. Success may come about "because of" or "in spite of" specific behaviours. Consider a case in Goldsmith's study involving a brilliant and dedicated individual whose creativity took his company to greater heights.

Despite enjoying everyone's respect, the individual was a world-class aggressive nonlistener. The individual linked his success to his nonlistening trait. He argued that he owed his success to avoiding polluting his beautiful mind with substandard ideas from his colleagues.

Such individuals abound in society. They consider their icy remoteness, inscrutable silences and distance as part of a deliberate and calculated tactic to force people to think for themselves. They fool themselves into believing that their success is attributable to such conduct, and see no reason to alter their behaviour.

The second problem is the failure to realise that success exposes one to a different set of challenges. New conditions require one to reinvent oneself.

The seeds of one's success may become the very source of failure. A challenge of leading the African National Congress (ANC) requires a different set of competencies to that of being at the helm of state power. Being a president of a country may need the acquisition of new competencies and approaches. Put differently, the very source of one's success can easily become the seeds of one's downfall.

Barack Obama's thoughtfulness, oratorical brilliance and inspiring speeches earned him the US presidency. But these same qualities and his growing international popularity are fast proving to be his undoing. Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times succinctly captures the increasing right-wing assault on Obama thus: "Obama, the president who apologises for America; Obama, the man who is more loved abroad than at home; Obama, the man who never gets anything done; Obama the weak".

Former President Thabo Mbeki 's enviable attributes are responsible for his rise and fall from grace. His philosophical and intellectual bent were assets before laying the foundation for his undoing. Surrounding himself with sycophants nurtured a culture where he was told what he wanted to hear. His calamitous miscalculation on the HIV/AIDS pandemic, disregarding wise counsel, and abuse of state power to deal harshly with comrades and critics served to fuel the growing resentment against him. It would seem from his infrequent public appearances the former president is trying to reinvent himself.

Could former president Kgalema Motlanthe have suffered the same fate? By all accounts, he is a delightful and reflective person, and not given to cheap populism. His ascendancy to the presidency was greeted with much fanfare and a great sense of relief. Seven months into his presidency his approval rating had dropped to 20% among whites, coloureds, and Indians compared with 58% among Africans.

President Jacob Zuma owes his ascendancy to his skilful deployment of leadership capabilities. This includes, a power of persuasion, building strong alliances, maintaining contact with the masses, empathy, willingness to listen, accommodating adversaries, focusing on tasks at hand, ensuring legitimacy by winning formal support within the structures of the ANC, delegating effectively and a reluctance to be the first to draw blood. These may have worked. But will they be sufficient?

Seepe is a higher education and strategy consultant.